Housing market volatility connectedness among G7 countries

This study investigates international linkages among housing markets in the G7 countries, using the connectedness methodology developed in Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2015). We find that volatility connectedness varies over the business cycle, with a surge during the global financial crisis. We also show that the United States and Italy were major net transmitters of housing market volatility shocks to other countries during the global financial crisis and the European debt crisis, respectively.     

The business cycle and the equity risk premium in real time

Building on the stochastic discount factor model, we estimated a multivariate exponential GARCH-in-mean model to analyze the link between the business cycle and the equity risk premium in the United States. In order to measure the business cycle, we used revised and real-time monthly data on industrial production for the period from 1965 to 2008. The main result of our empirical analysis is that estimates of the equity risk premium based on real-time macroeconomic data may significantly differ from estimates of the equity risk premium based on revised macroeconomic data.     

The time-varying characteristics of the Chinese financial cycle and impact from the United States

ABSTRACT

Although there have been many empirical studies about the financial cycle since the financial crisis of 2008, few have analysed the structural changes in the Chinese financial cycle over time. The Chinese financial development process is short, and it is difficult to obtain accurate results on the measurement of the financial cycle. Based on wavelet analysis, this paper analyzes the time-varying characteristics of the Chinese financial cycle and the relationship between the financial and business cycles. In addition, we measure the impact from the United States. This paper draws three conclusions. Firstly, in terms of the characteristics of cycles, the existence of Chinese business cycle and financial cycle is proved, while the credit cycle, leverage cycle, stock market cycle and property cycle are quite different. Specifically, China has a 5.8-year credit cycle, an 8-year stock market cycle, 3.4-year and 12-year business cycles and a 15-year leverage cycle. Secondly, the financial cycles can serve as leading indicators of the business cycle, though the relationships between them are change overtime. Finally, the United States has a significant impact on the Chinese financial cycle with a ‘decoupling-recoupling’ effect, which is mainly reflected in the leverage cycle and the stock market cycle.     

Yield spreads,currency movements,and recession predictability for southern border economies in the United States

Prior research establishes that the spread between long- and short-term bond yields often provides valuable information for predicting business cycle downturns. This study examines the predictive capacity of the yield spread for the United States metropolitan economies situated along the border with Mexico. Because of the location of these urban economies and various economic ties linking them with twin cities across the border, the Mexico yield spread, and the real dollar/peso exchange rate are also employed as potential recession predictors. Results suggest that a flattening of the yield curve for either country tends to increase the probability of recessions in border economies. Furthermore, declines in the real value of the peso, which are typically associated with greater cross-border manufacturing activity, are found to reduce recession likelihoods in the metropolitan economies examined on the north side of the international boundary.     

External Influences on Business Cycle Synchronization in the Euro Area

Most studies of business cycle synchronization in the EMU identify a core set of counties with high synchronization and a periphery set of countries with low synchronization. Using a structural VAR with model uncertainty, we identify spillover effects from shocks that originate in the United States, the EMU, and the rest of the world to test whether external influences can explain the existence of the core and periphery. Most countries typically found in the core respond to external spillovers in similar ways, leading to more synchronized business cycles. The response to external influences in the countries traditionally found in the periphery, on the other hand, help explain their exclusion from the core.     

Financial market participation and the developing country business cycle

I explore the implications of limited participation in financial markets on a standard small open economy business cycle model. Despite its parsimony, the limited participation model developed in this paper improves over the standard model in terms of explaining two important features of business cycle facts of developing countries: high volatility of consumption, and high negative correlation between the trade balance and output. Limited participation model is then used to inspect the effects of financial development and integration on macroeconomic volatility. Under a standard calibration, limited participation model leads to the conclusion that financial development and integration are associated with higher investment and output volatility. Effect of more participation on consumption volatility is dependent on the specification of the risk premium function.     

Labour Relations and Asset Returns

This paper proposes a dynamic GE model with standard business cycle properties that also achieves a satisfactory replication of the major financial stylized facts. We ride on two major ideas. First, we show that operating leverage, originating in the priority status of wage claims given the observed business cycle characteristics of the latter, magnifies the risk properties of the residual payments to firm owners and justifies a substantial risk premium. Further we build on the observation that the low frequency variations in income shares constitute a significant source of risk, one that is unlikely to be insurable. When we price this risk in an incomplete market framework, we obtain a GE model with return volatilities close to observations and a sizable equity premium. This is accomplished in a world of low risk aversion and standard utility function but with agent heterogeneity. Workers with restricted access to financial markets are insured by firms and the consumption and preferences of firm owners solely determine the pricing kernel.     

Energy dependence,oil prices and exchange rates: the Dominican economy since 1990

This paper studies the impact that oil prices have had on the floating exchange rate (ER) of the Dominican peso during the 1990–2008 period. The existing empirical literature has documented a link between these two variables for large developed economies and oil-producing countries, always including the 1970s oil crises in their sample periods. Few authors analyze the case of small open economies dependent on oil imports. Since the acceleration of economic growth in the Dominican Republic during the last decade has greatly increased its degree of external energy dependence, this country’s experience presents an ideal case study. We estimate the influence that changes in international gasoline prices have on the real exchange rate between the Dominican peso and the United States dollar. The cointegrated nature of the gasoline price and ER time series are tested and a vector error correction model is developed. Our results indicate that a 10% rise in the price of gas coincides with a 1.2% depreciation of the peso in the long run and that the causality runs from gas prices to the peso.     

The role of agriculture in aggregate business cycles

There are substantial differences in business cycle fluctuations across countries. These differences are systematically related to the share of agriculture in the economy: Countries with a high share of employment in agriculture feature high fluctuations in aggregate output, low relative volatility of aggregate employment, and low correlation of aggregate output and employment. In addition, agriculture has certain distinctive features over the business cycle: Output and employment in agriculture are more volatile than and not positively correlated with output and employment in the rest of the economy and output and employment are less correlated in agriculture than in non-agriculture. Because of these features, agriculture may play a role in accounting for aggregate business cycles across countries. We calibrate an otherwise standard two-sector indivisible-labor business cycle model with agriculture and non-agriculture to aggregate and sectoral data for the United States. We find that an increase in the employment to population ratio in agriculture from 2 to 30 percent in our model increases fluctuations in aggregate output by almost 40 percent. This is about 2/3 of the difference in aggregate fluctuations between countries such as Turkey and the United States.     

金融危机背景下银行类股票β值及其稳定性的实证检验

在金融研究中,风险和收益、个股与整个股市的波动一直是人们最为关注的问题。特别是在2007年8月美国次贷危机迅速蔓延后,各个公司更加重视股市波动的研究,以求最大限度地规避风险、获得最大收益。在金融研究中,人们通常用期望值表示收益,用方差和标准差来衡量风险。而在两者的关系研究中,资本资产定价模型反映了均衡状态下单个证券的预期回报与其相对市场风险值之间的关系,也描述了证券的风险溢价与市场组合风险溢价之间的关系。选择金融危机迅速传播后的2007年8月到2011年10月21日为研究时间段,选择上海证券交易所A股市场的浦发银行（600000）等14只银行类股票为研究对象,确定它们的值,研究银行类股票与整个股市波动的相关性,说明它们的风险溢价与市场组合风险溢价之间的变动关系。考虑到在所选时间段中,2010年3月开展的融资融券业务可能会对股票值的稳定性有所影响,因此,在求出这些股票的值后,还对这些股票值的稳定性进行了Chow检验。     

COMMON FACTORS OF THE EXCHANGE RISK PREMIUM IN EMERGING EUROPEAN MARKETS

Existing empirical evidence suggests that the Uncovered Interest Rate Parity condition may not hold due to an exchange risk premium. For a panel dataset of eleven emerging European economies we decompose this exchange risk premium into an idiosyncratic (country‐specific) element and a common factor using a principal components approach. We present evidence of stationary idiosyncratic and common factors. This result leads to the conclusion of a stationary risk premium for these countries, which is consistent with previous studies often documenting a stationary premium in advanced countries. Furthermore, we report that the variation in the premium is largely attributable to a common factor influenced by economic developments in the United States.     

AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS CYCLE FACTS*

This paper documents the post-war business cycle facts for Australia. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is used to remove the trend component from quarterly macroeconomic series. The business cycle facts we report are the volatilities of the cyclical (detrended) series and their cross correlations with cyclical real output. These facts are consistent with the business cycle facts reported for the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand with one exception. For most of the period since 1974, the real wage in Australia is strongly counter-cyclical whereas for these countries it is procyclical.     

The equity price channel in a New-Keynesian DSGE model with financial frictions and banking

This paper studies the role of the equity price channel in business cycle fluctuations, and highlights the equity price channel as a different aspect to general equilibrium models with financial frictions and, as a result, emphasizes the systemic influence of financial markets on the real economy. We develop a canonical dynamic general equilibrium model with a tractable role for the equity market in banking, entrepreneur and household economic activities. The model is estimated with Bayesian techniques using U.S. data over the sample period 1982Q01–2015Q01. We show that a dynamic general equilibrium model with an equity price channel well mimics the U.S. business cycle. The model reproduces the strong procyclicality of the equity price. The equity price channel significantly exacerbates business cycle fluctuations through both financial accelerator and bank capital channels. Our results support the increasing emphasis on common equity capital in Basel III regulations. This is beneficial in terms of financial stability, but amplifies and propagates shocks to the real economy.     

THE EFFECTS OF THE 1996 U.S.‐CANADA SOFTWOOD LUMBER AGREEMENT ON THE INDUSTRIAL USERS OF LUMBER: AN EVENT STUDY

In this article, we analyze whether the Softwood Lumber Agreement between the United States and Canada imposed significant economic costs on industries that use softwood lumber in the United States. To ascertain this impact, we use an event study. Our event study analyzes variations in the stock prices of lumber‐using firms listed at the major stock markets in the United States. We find that the news of events leading to the Softwood Lumber Agreement had significant negative impacts on the stock prices of industries using softwood lumber. The average reduction of stock prices for our sample of firms was approximately 5.42% over all the events considered. (JEL F13, F23)     

Synchronization and diversity in business cycles: a network analysis of the European Union

In this article, we use a correlation matrix and its internal networks to analyse business cycle synchronization across Europe since 2000. This methodology allows us to summarize individual country interactions and co-movements while also capturing the existing heterogeneity of connectivity within the European economic system. Our results indicate that synchronization of the euro zone countries remained stable from 1999 until the current financial crisis, after which co-movements increased sharply and synchronization rose to the highest in the time sample. By endogenously identifying clusters of countries with close connections in their business cycle, we also refute the commonly accepted notion of identifiable core and peripheral euro zone countries.     

Trade Integration and Business Cycle Convergence: Is the Relation Robust across Time and Space?*

In this paper we investigate the relationship between trade intensity and the business cycle correlation using a panel data set taken from 24 countries over the period 1959–2003. Most previous studies did not account for the possibility that the business cycle correlation may be influenced by unobservable country‐pair specific effects. Our estimates, using both fixed‐ and random‐effects methodologies, suggest that trade intensity and the business cycle correlation are positively related to one another. However, detailed investigation shows that this relationship exists mainly for the European countries.     

DISCOUNT SHOCK,PRICE–RENT DYNAMICS,AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE

The price-rent ratio in commercial real estate is highly volatile and its variation comoves with the business cycle. To account for these facts, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that introduces a rental market and incorporates the liquidity constraint on an individual firm's production as a key ingredient. Our estimation identifies the discount shock as the most important factor in driving price-rent dynamics and linking the dynamics in the real estate market to those in the real economy. We illustrate the importance of the liquidity premium and endogenous TFP in the nexus of the financial and real sectors.     

Portfolio choice of financial investors and European business cycle convergence: a panel analysis for EU countries

We investigate the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 EU countries. We construct an index of similarity of financial portfolios which we then put into context with the view that “the financial world” has an impact on business cycles and contributes to business cycle convergence via the consumption-wealth linkage. The model which guides our analysis is the International Asset Pricing Model (IAPM). Portfolios of the 18 EU countries investigated by us turn out to become more similar over time. According to our fixed effects GMM TSLS estimations, similar portfolios contribute to a convergence of business cycles—via a convergence of consumption cycles. This turns out to be especially true for country-pairs that include euro area non-member countries and, thus, have quite different income and wealth structures.     

Modelling the housing market in OECD countries

Recent episodes of housing bubbles, which occurred in several economies after the burst of the United States housing market, suggest studying the evolution of housing prices from a global perspective. We utilise a theoretical model for the purposes of this contribution, which identifies the main drivers of housing price appreciation, such as, for example, income, residential investment, financial elements, fiscal policy and demographics. In a second stage of our analysis, we test our theoretical hypothesis by means of a sample of 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 2011. We employ the vector error correction econometric technique in terms of our empirical analysis, which permits us to model the long-run equilibrium relationship and the short-run dynamics, which also helps to account for endogeneity and reverse causality problems.     

International Trends in Economics Degrees During the 1990s

Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States experienced a substantial decline in undergraduate degrees in economics from 1992 through 1996, followed immediately by a modest recovery. This cycle does not conform to overall degree trends, shifts in the gender composition of undergraduate populations, or changing interests of female students in any of the four countries. There is no evidence that changes in the “price” of a degree to students, tightened marking standards or degree requirements, or changes in pedagogical methods caused the cycle.

Jobs for economics graduates declined in the United States between 1988 and 1990 and thereafter recovered. With a two-year recognition lag, the pattern of employment prospects fits the U.S. slump in economics degrees perfectly. Unfortunately, employment patterns in the other three countries are inconsistent with the degree cycle. The explanation that fits the economic degree pattern best is interest in business education.