Electoral fraud and voter turnout: An experimental study

In this paper we experimentally investigate the consequences of electoral fraud on voter turnout. The experiment is based on a strategic binary voting model where voters decide whether to cast a costly vote in favour of their preferred candidate or to abstain. The electoral process is illicitly influenced by applying ballot-box stuffing. In the experiment we implement two different framings: we compare voter turnout in a neutral environment and with framed instructions to explicitly replicate elections. This approach enables us to both test the model's predictions and to estimate the framing effects of voting and fraud. Comparison of experimental results with theoretical predictions reveals over-voting, which is exacerbated when fraud occurs. Turnout increases as predicted with a moderate level of fraud while, with higher levels of electoral fraud, voters fail to recognize that the existence of a relatively larger number of “agents” voting with certainty considerably decreases the benefits of voting. Importantly, framing matters, as revealed by the higher turnout of those in the majority group, against which the fraud is applied.     

Debt and Punishment: Market Discipline in the Eurozone

This article challenges the conventional wisdom of weak market discipline in Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In so doing, we empirically analyse the dynamics of market discipline for all 27 EU member states between 1992 and 2007. The existing literature tends to assert that markets discipline governments, without measuring whether the interest punishment markets impose actually has the purported effect on government policy. To better grasp the dynamics of market discipline it is essential to consider both sides. Market discipline is thus understood as a two-sided phenomenon. On the one hand, financial investors react to policy developments. On the other hand, policy-makers react to market signals. We find strong evidence that although the impact of fiscal policy developments on market punishment slightly decreases with monetary integration, government responsiveness to market punishment increases. This runs counter to the conventional narrative of policy-makers banking on bailout from fellow EMU members.     

Realized EquiCorrelation: a bird’s-eye view of financial stress on equity markets

This article addresses the issue of measuring the level of aggregate financial stress on stock markets, which is a central issue for investors and policy-makers. To this end, Realized EquiCorrelation (REC) is obtained by plugging realized volatility as an input into the Dynamic EquiCorrelation (DECO) model where both the continuous and jump components of realized volatility are considered. An application is provided for the 20 major stock markets over January 2000–May 2014 using intra-day data. The results remarkably pick up financial stress periods.     

Including vulnerable groups in financial services: insights from consumer satisfaction

The crisis brought into relief problems within the financial sector which seriously affected consumer trust. This paper provides new evidence on the experiences of two socio-economic groups associated with potential vulnerability – the less educated and the elderly – with financial service markets across Europe. We find that the less educated and the elderly are less satisfied and experience greater difficulties than other consumers as regards complaining, comparing offers, or switching, in the mortgage, and investment product and bank account markets, respectively. This evidence is of use to policy-makers seeking ways of improving financial regulation from a consumer perspective.     

全球金融危机前后境内外股票市场联动性实证分析

在梳理国际主要股票市场间联动性研究成果的基础上,本文采用1991-2011年数据,通过对各个时间区间的分析尤其是次贷危机引发的全球金融危机的前后比照,按照由表及里、由特征属性到变化趋势与影响机制的系统与动态分析的思想方法,对国内A股与美国、英国、德国、日本、香港股市之间的联动性进行了实证检验。结论表明：（1）2000年特别是2007年次贷危机以来,境内外主要股市联动性显著增强;（2）境内外股市相互冲击效果不断增大,传导速度加快;（3）在股市资金联动性不断加强的同时,波动幅度也随之扩大;（4）这种市场联动性内在机制是宏观经济（宏观）、资本市场政策和机制（中观）、行为金融情绪（微观）三位一体的互动。本文最后提出了相关政策建议和投资策略建议。     

Estimating fundamental and affordable housing price trends: a study based on Singapore

Policy-makers often impose some cooling measures on the housing market when housing prices rise fast. Such policies yield limited success if housing prices are driven up by fundamentals. Estimating a fundamental price trend from observed price data is a challenge. We present an empirical methodology to separate housing price trends into fundamental and affordable components. Deviating from the common practice, we replace current income by a long-run income measure constructed from household incomes at different quantiles. This income measure provides a more suitable basis for constructing affordable house price levels. It also serves as a better fundamental variable, especially for segmented housing markets like that of Singapore. These price trends provide policy-makers with useful information to intervene into property markets to achieve desirable outcomes. Analysing Singapore data using this methodology shows the magnitudes of the price gaps between actual and fundamental prices and how housing affordability fluctuates over price cycles.     

Mobilizing moral boundaries: the politics of derivatives reform in the US

This paper explains the reform of derivatives markets in the US by stressing the influence of moral distinctions on financial market regulation. The results show that business and consumer groups outside finance activate boundaries between legitimate risk management and illegitimate speculative practices. This categorical distinction delegitimised certain practices within the financial industry and affected both the relative power of interest groups and the political agenda. First, the mobilisation of moral boundaries strengthened the position of legitimate groups and weakened that of the financial industry in negotiations. This forced the latter to alter its lobbying strategies. Second, by highlighting inappropriate speculative practices, groups outside the financial sector changed policy-makers’ perception of problems. Policy-makers adopted a position which is congruent with broader moral understandings. The study is based on data from Congressional hearings, interviews, media articles, letters and interest group publications. The process tracing analysis advances our understanding of the social mechanisms linking moral perceptions and institutional change in financial markets.     

Foreign direct investment in Turkey: regional determinants

The uneven regional distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Turkey poses an interesting question from the perspective of multinational firms (MNFs) and policy-makers alike. This paper focuses on the factors governing the location decisions of MNFs within Turkey with specific reference to policy implications. Using a conditional logit model, it is found that agglomeration, depth of local financial markets, human capital, and coastal access dominate location decisions for the aggregate sample of foreign investors in Turkey. This study reveals no evidence that public investment is successful in attracting MNFs to particular regions. Also importantly, the location determinants vary dramatically by broad industrial category, investment composition, and origin-country characteristics, including income category and region.     

The Confidence Trap: Japan’s Past Bubble and China’s Recent Bubble

This paper explores the origin of China’s recent credit and asset boom by comparing it with the Japanese bubble economy in the late 1980s by focusing on the asymmetric pattern of financial liberalisation under high savings. It argues that (1) both cases show a ‘confidence trap’ in that policy-makers of the government shared a complacent mindset that they can achieve the optimal mix of market liberalisation and repression, while believing that their political economic system is fundamentally different from others; (2) Such complacent confidence precipitated the supply-side driven financial reforms, in which both governments tried to diversify the credit channels of bank deposits by promoting non-bank financial intermediaries; (3) Exogenous shocks played a pivotal role in enforcing the government to take aggressive monetary easing and fiscal expansionary measures. But the Chinese case is different from the Japanese case in that (1) local politics has promoted a ‘too secure to fail’ situation in which rent-seeking activities are difficult to be detected, thus aggravating the hidden systemic risks; (2) China needs to liberalise its capital account with the more strengthened macroprudential regulatory governance, as the global foreign exchange markets have drastically changed from the period of the 1980s.     

Framing and Misperception in Public Good Experiments

Earlier studies have found that framing has a substantial impact on the degree of cooperation observed in public good experiments. We show that the way the public good game is framed affects misperceptions about the incentives of the game. Moreover, we show that such framing‐induced differences in misperceptions are linked to the framing effect on subjects' cooperation behavior. When we do not control for the different levels of misperceptions between frames, we observe a significant framing effect on subjects' cooperation preferences. However, this framing effect becomes insignificant once we remove subjects who misperceive.     

Factor mobility and fiscal policy in the EU: policy issues and analytical approaches

Increased integration of labour and capital markets creates significant challenges for the welfare states of modern Europe. Taxation of capital and labour that finances extensive programmes of cash and in-kind redistribution creates incentives for capital owners and workers to locate in regions where they obtain favourable fiscal treatment. Competition among countries for mobile resources constrains their ability to alter the distribution of income and may lead to reductions in the size and scope of redistributive policies. Mobility of labour and capital is imperfect, however. Recent trends indicate that labour and capital are neither perfectly mobile nor perfectly immobile, but rather adjust gradually to market conditions and economic policies. This paper presents an explicitly dynamic analysis showing that governments can achieve some redistribution when it is costly for factors of production to relocate. As the costs of factor mobility fall, however, the effectiveness of redistributive policies is more limited, and governments have weaker incentives to pursue them. Liberalized immigration policies, EU enlargement, and other steps that promote integration of the factors markets of Western Europe with those of surrounding regions thus present a challenge to policy-makers if they also wish to maintain fiscal systems with extensive redistribution.     

Estimating the optimal hedge ratio in the presence of potential unknown structural breaks

We propose a new approach in the estimation of the optimal hedge ratio that allows the hedge ratio to vary over time but without the necessity of frequently rebalancing the portfolio. We apply this in the context of the US and UK equity markets using weekly spot share prices and future share prices during the period 5 January 1999 to 29 September 2009. Our method is to test for cointegration in the presence of two potentially unknown structural breaks by determining the timing of each via the underlying data. The empirical findings reveal that the spot and future prices are strongly cointegrated in each market. The estimated parameters disclose that the optimal hedge ratio is not constant in case of the US and the UK. We find one negative and one positive shift in the optimal hedge ratio in the US. However, we find only one significant and positive shift in the optimal hedge ratio in the UK. The implication of these findings from the perspective of both investors as well as policy-makers is elaborated on in the main text.     

From Big Bang to Big Crash: The Early Origins of the UK’s Finance-led Growth Model and the Persistence of Bad Policy Ideas

Using newly declassified documents from the British Public Records Office, we argue that the finance-dependent growth regime that typified the UK economy in the period up to the Great Crash of 2008 has much deeper roots than is commonly realised. We use these documents to demonstrate that the growth of finance was integral to the Thatcher revolution, tying together mortgage markets, household debt, and boom-bust cycles as early as the mid-1980s. We also show how policy-makers in this period were aware of all the weaknesses of this growth model, to the point that they effectively diagnosed what would happened in 2008, back in 1987. We argue that selecting for a finance-led growth model as the preferred growth model so early effectively rendered other possible growth models for the UK unattainable. The result was the shift from an economy characterised by ‘stop-go’ cycles in the post-war period to an economy characterised by recurrent ‘boom-slump-austerity-reset’ cycles in the Thatcher and post Thatcher periods. The 2008 crisis did not change this highly unstable mode of accumulation.     

房地产税、市场结构与房价

本文在住房流量模型的基础上,构建了一个购房者和开发商的住房市场局部均衡模型,考察了完全垄断和完全竞争情形下房地产税与房价之间的关系。结果表明,无论何种市场结构,提高房地产税均导致房价下降;住房市场垄断性越强,房价越高,房地产税对房价影响越大。笔者对1996-2008年中国33个大中城市数据的检验发现,市场结构对房价影响大于房地产税。房地产税增长率每增加1%,房价增长率将减少0.03%;勒纳指数每增加1%,房价增长率将增加0.16%。房地产税与市场结构相互作用将使房价上涨,但影响微不足道。因此,对住宅开征房地产税,将对房价上涨有一定限制作用,但不能有效抑制房价上涨,而增强住宅市场竞争性、降低开发商垄断具有显著效果。     

OUTPUT CONTINGENT SECURITIES AND EFFICIENT INVESTMENT BY FIRMS

We analyze competitive economies with risky investments. Unlike the classic Arrow–Debreu framing, firms and agents cannot contract upon the exogenous states underlying production risks. They can trade equities and any security written on the endogenous aggregate output. This financial structure is rich enough to promote efficient risk sharing among consumers. However, markets are incomplete from the production perspective, and the absence of prices for each primitive state of nature raises the question about the objective of firms. We show that output‐contingent asset prices convey sufficient information to compute the competitive shareholder value that leads to efficient investment by firms.     

Comprehension in risk elicitation experiments

Economic experiments are increasingly conducted with field populations for whom comprehension of instructions may be more difficult to achieve. We investigate how framing experimental instructions in a familiar context and incentivizing the experimental task may affect comprehension. Based on an experiment with 146 German farmers, we compare four different versions of a Holt-and-Laury multiple price list. We find that incentives have a small positive effect on comprehension, as measured by the probability of making inconsistent choices and subjects’ self-assessment. In the absence of incentives, framing negatively affects comprehension. Comprehension is enhanced for farmers who score high on a numeracy test. We conclude that contextual framing might confuse subjects, whereas incentives can help to facilitate comprehension of experimental instructions.     

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Role of Computable General Equilibrium Modelling: An Exercise in ‘Managing Fictional Expectations’

Negotiations between the world's two largest trading partners, the European Union (EU) and the USA, on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have been ongoing since July 2013. Anticipating the controversy the agreement has sparked, EU trade policy-makers in the European Commission have put considerable effort into discursively framing the agreement on their terms. Drawing on computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the agreement's likely impact, the central claim has been that the TTIP promises to deliver much-needed ‘growth and jobs’ without stretching the public purse at a time of austerity. Our main argument in this article, drawing on the insights of the economic sociologist Jens Beckert, is that these CGE models – and the figures they have produced – represent an important exercise in ‘managing of fictional expectations’. The models make overly optimistic predictions about the ability of the EU and the USA to eliminate regulatory barriers to trade – which are unlikely to be realised in the face of considerable political opposition – and also downplay the potential deregulatory impact of an agreement. Rather than act as a reliable guide to future outcomes, we thus show that these models serve the pro-liberalisation agenda of the European Commission and other advocates of the TTIP.     

Does international integration matter for financial development in Africa?

This article analyses the links between international financial and trade integration and financial development in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. It is based on a panel data set using methods that tackle slope heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence and nonstationarity. The results do not point to a general direct robust link between trade and financial integration and financial development in SSA, once we control for other factors such as GDP per capita and inflation. The findings may be due to a number of factors including distortions in domestic financial markets, relatively weak institutions and/or poor financial sector supervision. We find some indication that financial integration is more important for financial development in countries with better institutional quality. Stronger scores in some measures of the quality of banking regulation and supervision are also linked to a positive association between integration and financial development in some of our results. Thus, African policy-makers should be cautious about expectations regarding immediate gains for financial development from greater international integration. Such gains are more likely to occur slowly and through indirect channels.     

Market power and risk of Central and Eastern European banks: Does more powerful mean safer?

As understanding the market power–risk relationship in CEE banking systems is of the utmost importance to policy-makers in these countries, we investigate whether CEE banks must have greater market power to be safer. Our results suggest that more market power reduces the fragility of banking institutions, on one hand, and that banking market concentration tends to make these banks riskier, on the other. Our findings are robust to whatever form of market power-risk relationship and whatever market-power measures we use. More precisely, financial markets perceive CEE banks with more market power as less fragile, while the latter are also better capitalised with respect to the distribution of their returns. Moreover, they are even (much) better capitalised when they hold less-diversified and less-liquid assets and when they operate within a stricter banking regulatory environment, which suggests a risk-stabilising role for diversification, liquidity and the bank regulatory environment in these countries.     

Insurance development,banking activities,and regional output: evidence from China

This paper applies panel cointegration tests and panel vector error correction models to investigate the interrelationship among the banking sector, insurance market, and regional output based on the samples from 25 Chinese provinces. We first find that there is a fairly strong long-run cointegrating relationship among real GDP, banking credit, and real insurance premiums. Second, both insurance markets (life and non-life) and the banking sector have a positive effect on real output. Third, we determine that banking activities and economic growth exhibit long-run and short-run bidirectional causalities. Fourth, there is fairly strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis for the long-run bidirectional causal relationships between insurance premiums and economic growth, taking into account the critical channel of the banking sector. Finally, we provide some beneficial suggestions for investors and policy-makers.