Futures Finally Refute Keynes

Keynesian economists , such as Lord Kaldor, have argued that the development of futures markets, exchanges based on anticipated prices deflect investment from the capital markets and stunt economic growth. Robert Miller, a Consultant to the London International Financial Futures Exchange, argues that Professor Ludwig Lachmann discovered a fundamental flaw in Keynesian economics which has been confirmed by the development of trading in financial futures.     

Press freedom and jumps in stock prices

Press freedom varies substantially across countries. In a free environment, any news immediately becomes public knowledge through mediums including various electronic media and published materials. However, in an unfree environment, (economic) agents would have more discretionary powers to disclose good news immediately, while hiding bad news or releasing bad news slowly. We argue that this discretion affects stock prices and that stock markets in countries with a free press should be better processors of economic information. Using an equilibrium asset-pricing model in an economy under jump diffusion, we decompose the moments of the returns of international stock markets into a diffusive risk and a jump risk part. Using stock market data for a balanced panel of 50 countries, our results suggest that in countries with a free press, the better processing of bad news leads to more frequent negative jumps in stock prices. As a result, stock markets in those countries are characterized by higher volatility, driven by higher jump risk and more negative return asymmetry. The results are robust to the inclusion of various controls for governance and other country- or market-specific characteristics. We interpret these as good stock market characteristics because a free press improves welfare and increases economic growth.     

Keeping a weather eye on prediction markets: The influence of environmental conditions on forecasting accuracy

Increasingly, prediction markets are being embraced as a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating dispersed information and providing a means of deriving probabilistic forecasts of future uncertain events. The efficient market hypothesis postulates that prediction market prices should incorporate all information that is relevant to the performances of the contracts traded. This paper shows that such may not be the case in relation to information regarding environmental factors such as the weather and atmospheric conditions. In the context of horserace betting markets, we demonstrate that even after the effects of these factors on the contestants (horses and jockeys) have been discounted, the accuracy of the probabilities derived from market prices is affected systematically by the prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions. We show that significantly better forecasts can be derived from prediction markets if we correct for this phenomenon, and that these improvements have substantial economic value.     

New insights into the role of global factors in BRICS stock markets: A quantile cointegration approach

Because of the acceleration in marketization and globalization, stock markets in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries are affected by various global factors, for example, oil prices, gold prices, global stock market volatility, global economic policy uncertainty, financial stress, and investor sentiment. This paper offers new insights into the short- and long-run linkages between global factors and BRICS stock markets by applying the quantile autoregressive distributed lags (QARDL) approach. This novel methodology enables us to test short- and long-run linkages accounting for distributional asymmetry. That is, the nonlinear dynamic relationship between the global factors and BRICS stock prices depends on market conditions. Our empirical results show that the effects of gold prices and global stock market volatility on BRICS stock prices are more significant in the long run than in the short run. A decrease in global stock market volatility is associated with higher stock prices, while gold prices demonstrate upward co-movement in dynamic correlations with stock markets. Irrational factors, such as economic policy uncertainty, financial stress, and investor sentiment, play a critical role in the short term, and negative interdependence is dominant. Finally, the rolling-window estimation technique is used to examine time-varying patterns between major global factors and BRICS stock markets.     

Exchange rate pass-through at the individual product level: Implications for financial market integration

Global and regional integration of financial markets with enhanced international monetary transactions between economic agents increases the exchange rate risk. As this obstacle is growing at speed, market integration should be developed with a view to avoid this risk. In this study, we investigate exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to examine who takes this risk. Specifically, we estimate the degree of ERPT for individual products by using primary auction price data of used/second-hand construction machinery purchased in Japan and then exported to Thailand for resale. Our empirical analysis of these data at the individual product level enables us to avoid bias in estimating ERPT caused by the use of aggregated data. We find that ERPT is asymmetric and changes in exchange rates are reflected in baht-denominated resale prices only when the baht appreciates against the yen. This indicates that raising resale prices in the destination market is more difficult for the exporters than lowering them, meaning that they can suffer significantly from the exchange rate risk. This paper serves as a reference for a safer financial market by learning how market players are influenced by the exchange rate in a trade market with a unique dataset.     

The role of the world’s major steel markets in price spillover networks: an analysis based on complex network motifs

In recent years, the international steel market has shown increasingly strong cross-regional correlation. To better understand the price trends of various markets, it is necessary to identify their inherent price spillovers. This paper combines a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity Baba–Engle–Kraft–Kroner (GARCH-BEKK) model and complex network motifs to explore the price fluctuations among international steel markets. The study selects steel markets in 12 countries and regions and uses daily data on import and export prices from January 2009 to September 2017 to analyze eight steel products. The results show that spillovers are associated with geographical location, market development, product type and status. Spillovers mostly occur between buyer’s markets; additionally, the Asian market, especially the East Asian market, is in most cases the recipient of spillover, whereas the European Union (EU) market is in most cases the sender of spillover effects. Developed markets have clear spillover effects on emerging markets, sheet steel products have clear spillover effects on profile steel products, and the prices of midstream and downstream products in the industrial chain are the most influenced. This paper examines international steel market relationships from the perspective of price transmission, and the results can help manage and prevent large-scale economic risks.

     

Enriching Exchange

A bstract AS economic sociologists have been arguing for some time, markets are not to be abstractly opposed to other social relations but rather to be understood as embedded in them, and indeed subject to the same kinds of analysis as other social relations. However, many accounts of embeddedness explain it in structural terms and still operate with an impoverished notion of culture. On the other hand, relatively few cultural sociologists have considered cultural dimensions of economic action. I first argue that there is a rich agenda for cultural investigation which has yet to be fully exploited in economic sociology, and fascinating work on economic embeddedness which could be enriched with more culturally oriented analysis and research. I go on to distinguish three issues on this agenda which are more often collapsed, arguing that the meaning of markets should be investigated in terms of the cultural construction of objects of market exchange, the cultural construction of parties to market exchange, and the cultural construction of norms of exchange. Distinguishing these three dimensions of market culture is productive because it links apparently disparate types of investigation and allows more precisely specified questions about their relations. Finally, I suggest that norms of market exchange are drawn from a richer symbolic repertoire than is usually imagined: reciprocity and redistribution, as well as market norms, are likely to be important as norms of mundane market action.     

The transmission of US economic policy uncertainty shocks to Asian and global financial markets

This paper proposes a novel approach to investigating the spillover effects of US economic policy uncertainty shocks on the global financial markets. Employing a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR), we model US economic policy uncertainty jointly with the latent factors extracted from equity prices, exchange rates, and commodity prices. We find that US economic policy uncertainty affects these factors significantly. A country-level analysis shows heterogeneous responses to an increase in US economic policy uncertainty. With regard to equities, US economic policy uncertainty adversely affects equity prices. However, its impact on the Chinese equity market is relatively small. As for foreign exchange markets, while many currencies depreciate in response to an increase in US economic policy uncertainty, the US dollar and the Japanese yen appreciate, reflecting their safe-haven status. The Chinese yuan, whose nominal exchange rate is closely linked to the US dollar, also appreciates in response to uncertainty shocks.     

Price effects of steel commodities on worldwide stock market returns

We analyze the price effects of steel commodities on stock market returns in emerging and developed economies. These commodities have recently attained increased media exposure due to the rise in the U.S. steel import tariffs, which pose the threat of reducing global demand for steel products and, consequently, lowering prices abroad. However, little has been investigated on the impact of steel commodity prices on worldwide stock market returns. By performing structural VAR and GARCH techniques on a weekly-frequency time series from 2002 to 2015, we find positive and statistically significant effects of linear and non-linear steel commodity price shocks on real stock returns in the commodity markets. In the highly diversified financial markets such as U.S. and Germany, real stock returns do not significantly respond to steel commodity price shocks, although we find highly significant positive responses from developed economies such as Australia, Japan and South Korea. Results are robust to different model specifications. Our evidence suggests that higher tariffs on steel imports represent a larger disadvantage to commodity markets which are more largely impacted by steel commodity prices. We provide economic policy implications based on recent literature.     

Investment Incentives and Electricity Spot Market Competition

In this paper we analyze investment decisions of strategic firms that anticipate competition on many consecutive spot markets with fluctuating (and possibly uncertain) demand. We study how the degree of spot market competition affects investment incentives and welfare and provide an application of the model to electricity market data. We show that more competitive spot market prices strictly decrease investment incentives of strategic firms. The effect can be severe enough to even offset the beneficial impact of more competitive spot markets on social welfare. Our results obtain with and without free entry. The analysis demonstrates that investment incentives necessarily have to be taken into account for a serious assessment of electricity spot market design.     

Speculative behavior and the dynamics of interacting stock markets

We develop a simple agent-based financial market model in which heterogeneous speculators apply technical and fundamental analysis to trade in two different stock markets. Speculators׳ strategy/market selections are repeated at each time step and depend on predisposition effects, herding behavior and market circumstances. Simulations reveal that our model is able to explain a number of nontrivial statistical properties of and between international stock markets, including bubbles and crashes, fat-tailed return distributions, volatility clustering, persistent trading volume, coevolving stock prices and cross-correlated volatilities. Against this background, our model may be deemed to have been validated.     

Technology and market structure in the analysis of exchange

Economists treat the ‘market’ as a black box in which prices rise and fall to equate supplies with demands. Obviously, however, markets are usually collections of institutions. Using conventional methods of economic analysis, it is argued that certain physical characteristics of commodities, the technologies of their production and use, and buyer and seller concentration lead to the development of particular institutional arrangements composing markets. These institutional arrangements are efficient in the sense that they require the least use of resources in effecting transactions.     

THE FUTURE OF MARKETS

In the 2009 Wincott Lecture, the author argues that in their approach to markets, economic researchers and policy-makers have focused too much on the role of prices as signals to guide resource allocation, at the expense of two possibly more important elements – markets as a process of discovery and markets as a mechanism for the diffusion of political and economic power. Government policies should support the market rather than particular industries, promote competition not concentration, and facilitate entry, not confer advantages on existing firms.     

Inflation, output, and stock prices: Evidence from two major emerging markets

Research in economics and finance documents a puzzling negative relationship between stock returns and inflation rates in markets of industrialized economies. The present study investigates this relationship for Korea and Mexico. We show that the negative relationship between the real stock returns and unexpected inflation persists after purging inflation of the effects of the real economic activity. Johansen and Juselius cointegration tests verify that the long-run equilibrium between stock prices and general price levels is weak. However, in both economies, stock prices and general price levels seem to show a strong long-run equilibrium with the real economic activity. This paper benefited from the constructive suggestions of an anonymous referee. The remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility. Financial support from the Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr., School of Business Administration, University of Portland, is greatly appreciated.     

Are the stock and real estate markets integrated in China?

This paper examines the dynamic short-run and long-run co-movement between the real estate and stock markets in China by employing a continuous wavelet method. We use gross domestic product and M2 (broad money supply) as control variables to eliminate the common factors of the two markets and to identify the real nexus between them. The empirical results show that the co-movement between real estate and stock prices is weak in the short run, except during the financial crisis period. Since the stock market is highly volatile, while real estate prices are relatively stable, the two markets are less correlated in the short run. The results also show that real estate prices affect stock prices in the long run, which supports the existence of a credit-price effect in China. Real estate prices remained very high in most time periods. Enterprises and individuals can obtain funds from bank loans to invest in the stock market, thus raising stock prices. These findings indicate that the two markets are generally segmented in the short run but are integrated in the long run. The stabilization of the real estate market is critical for stability in the stock market, but not vice versa. Additionally, investments in the two markets may not provide a high level of risk dispersion in the long run in China.

     

The role of property rights in the positive theory of monopoly

The traditional approach to monopoly posits a dead-weight loss, a classic inefficiency, wherever market power is discovered. Critics such as Joseph Schumpeter argue that such dead-weight losses are inconsequential in a dynamic setting, where long-run trade-offs are said to dominate them with postive sum gains, which are also claimed to flow from market power. Yet further examination reveals that even the static monopoly argument showing Pareto inefficiency is not due to a positive analysis but is an outcome determined by the normative interpretation of the monopolist's property rights. The costs which a firm possessing market power has in expanding its output are not considered as legitimate for inclusion in our analysis. (In other markets, traders are sometimes allowed to collect such rents without being labeled as inefficient—for instance, in the labor market.) The interesting questions become: Why have economists adopted this particular normative view of property rights? Is public policy thereby well served?     

Dependence structures between Chinese stock markets and the international financial market: Evidence from a wavelet-based quantile regression approach

In this study, we investigate the dependence structures between six Chinese stock markets and the international financial market including possible safe haven assets and global economic factors under different market conditions and investment horizons. The research is conducted by combining a quantile regression approach with a wavelet decomposition analysis. Although we find little or insignificant dependence under short investment horizons, we detect the strong asymmetric dependence of oil prices and the US dollar index on the six Chinese stock markets in the medium and long terms. Moreover, not only is crude oil not a safe haven, it may damage Chinese stock markets as it increases over the long term, even in bull markets. Meanwhile, appreciation of the US dollar (depreciation of RMB) damages (boosts) Chinese stock markets during bull (bear) market conditions under long investment horizons. Moreover, we find that VIX (volatility index)-related derivatives may serve as good risk management tools under any market condition, while gold is a safe haven asset only during crisis periods.     

When are prediction market prices most informative?

Prediction markets are a popular platform for the elicitation of incentivised crowd predictions. This paper examines the variation in the information contained in prediction market prices by studying Intrade prices on U.S. elections around the release of opinion polls. We find that poll releases stimulate an immediate uptick in trading activity. However, much of this activity involves relatively inexperienced traders, meaning that the price efficiency declines in the immediate aftermath of a poll release, and does not recover until more experienced traders enter the market in the following hours. More generally, this suggests that information releases do not necessarily improve prediction market forecasts, but instead may attract noise traders who temporarily reduce the price efficiency.     

Relative pricing of binary options in live soccer betting markets

Live soccer betting markets differ from other binary options markets in that all fundamental information is observable, the options mature in less than two hours and the markets are highly liquid. This study presents a new method for the identification of hidden information in market prices. The method is based on two independent Poisson distributions and on a numerical algorithm for the aggregation of all market price information into one rational number. The method is applied to an empirical dataset of real time market prices in 29,413 soccer games. The results indicate that the method selects the most profitable markets and allows for a significant improvement in average investment returns.     

Commodity market reform in Africa: some recent experience

Since the early 1980s, dramatic changes in export commodity markets, shocks associated with resulting price declines and changing views on the role of the state have ushered in widespread reforms to agricultural commodity markets in Africa. The reforms significantly reduced government participation in the marketing and pricing of commodities. This paper examines the background, causes, process and consequences of these reforms and derives lessons for successful reforms from experiences in markets for four commodities important to Africa—cocoa, coffee, cotton, and sugar. The commodity focus of the paper highlights the special features associated with these markets that affect the reform process. The paper complements the current literature on market reforms in Africa, where grain market studies are more common. We suggest that the types of market interventions prior to reform are more easily classified by crop than by country. Consequently, there are significant commodity-specific differences in the initial conditions and in the outcomes of reforms related to these markets. However, there are general lessons as well. We find that the key consequences of reform have been significant changes in or emergence of marketing institutions, and a significant shift of political and economic power from public to private sector. In cases where interventions were greatest and reforms most complete, producers have benefited from receiving a larger share of export prices. Additionally, we conclude that the adjustment costs of reform can be reduced in most cases by better understanding the detailed and idiosyncratic relationships between the commodity subsector, private markets, and public services. Finally, while there are significant costs to market-dependent reforms, experiences suggest that they are a necessary step toward a dynamic commodity sector based on private initiative. Indeed, this is particularly true in countries and sectors where interventions were greatest and market-supporting institutions the weakest.