The provision of long-term credit and firm growth in developing countries

Do small and young firms benefit from an increase in the provision of long-term loans? By combining firm-level data from 62 countries (over the period 2006–2016) with a new database on short-term and long-term credit provided to the private sector, this article shows a higher provision of long-term credit does not stimulate growth of small and young firms. On the contrary, an increase in the availability of short-term credit spurs firm growth. The main explanation of this (counter-intuitive) result is the differential impact of short-term and long-term credit provision on small and young firms’ access to credit. Young and small firms are able to take advantage of an increase of short-term loans, which allow them to switch from informal finance to bank loans. However, a higher level of long-term credit does not alleviate credit constraints faced by opaque firms because these funds are allocated towards transparent borrowers.     

Which types of commodity price information are more useful for predicting US stock market volatility?

This study aims to investigate which types of commodity price information are more useful for predicting US stock market realized volatility (RV) in a data-rich word. The standard predictive regression framework and monthly RV data are used to explore the RV predictability of commodity futures for the next-month RV on S&P 500 spot index. We utilize principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA) to extract the common factors for each type and all types of commodity futures. Our results indicate that the futures volatility information of grains and softs has a significant predictive ability in forecasting the RV of the S&P 500. In addition, the FA method can yield better forecasts than the PCA and average methods in most cases. Further analysis shows that the volatility information of grains and softs exhibits higher informativeness during recessions and pre-crises. Finally, the forecasts of the five combination methods and different out-of-sample periods confirm our results are robust.     

Momentum crash,credit risk and optionality effects in bear markets and crisis periods: evidence from the US stock market

This study explores whether the credit risk anomaly exhibits option-like behaviour similar to the momentum anomaly. It finds that the inverted credit risk spread indeed displays option-like behaviour in bear market states. Unlike a momentum portfolio, which is effectively a short call option on the market, an inverted credit risk portfolio appears to be a long call option on the market.     

Financial reform and the efficiency of credit allocation in Korea

This study analyzes some of the structural problems associated with the Korean financial sector, and investigates the efficiency of credit allocation by the financial system over the period from 1970 to 1996. Using data at the level of 32 industrial branches, we find no evidence that credit flows were directed sectors that were more profitable, either before or after financial reforms were initiated in the 1980s. We also find that the financial support did not contribute to improve the performance of the favored industries over time.     

Housing and credit market shocks: Exploring the role of rule-based Basel III counter-cyclical capital requirements

This paper examines the extent to which the Basel III bank capital regulation attenuates fluctuations in housing and credit markets and fosters financial and macroeconomic stability. We use a positive housing demand shock to mimic a housing market boom and a negative financial shock for credit squeeze and economic meltdown. The results show that the rule-based Basel III counter-cyclical capital requirement effectively attenuates fluctuations in housing and credit markets and prevents bubbles. In the case of a negative financial shock, it significantly reduces the magnitude of economic meltdown. Our analysis of the transition from Basel II to Basel III suggests that it is the counter-cyclical capital buffer that effectively mitigates the pro-cyclicality of its predecessor, while the impact of the conservative buffer is marginal. In contrast to the credit-to-GDP ratio, the optimal policy analysis suggests that the regulatory authority should adjust the capital requirement to changes in credit and output when implementing the counter-cyclical buffer. Future research could extend the study by comparing the effectiveness of the rule-based Basel III with other macroprudential tools in achieving financial and macroeconomic stability.     

Sectoral differences in the use of information technology and matching efficiency in the US labour market

The present study examines how the heterogeneity of use of information technology in production affects the probability that an unemployed worker will be matched with a vacancy. Using US time series from 1967 to 2007, I construct measures of dispersion of the stocks of software and hardware per worker across 13 industries. The measures exhibit three waves whose timing roughly corresponds to the diffusion of mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s, personal computers in the 1980s and the Internet in the late 1990s. After controlling for other influences, I find that the probability of transitioning from unemployment to employment responds negatively to an increase in either measure. The results imply that by enhancing technical heterogeneity, the diffusion of a new technology may suppress the job finding rate.     

Asymmetric information in a competitive market game: Reexamining the implications of rational expectations

Summary. We examine price formation in a simple static model with asymmetric information, an infinite number of risk neutral traders and no noise traders. Here we re-examine four results associated with rational expectations models relating to the existence of fully revealing equilibrium prices, the advantage of becoming informed, the costly acquisition of information, and the impossibility of having equilibrium prices with higher volatility than the underlying fundamentals. Received: August 27, 1997; revised version: February 11, 1998     

Market structure and credit procyclicality: Lessons from loan markets in the European Union banking sectors

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the market structure has an impact on procyclicality in the European Union bank loan markets. The cyclical responses of three types of bank loans (residential mortgage loans, consumer loans, and corporate loans) are quantified separately using the interacted panel vector autoregression model at the country level and the single-equation panel regression model at the bank level. Using a sample of 26 European Union countries, we find that the procyclical responses of residential mortgage loans and consumer loans are significantly stronger and prolonged when the banking sector is more concentrated or dominated by foreign banks. However, we find that there are nonlinear relationships between the market structure and credit procyclicality based on bank-level data. We also find some heterogeneities between advanced and transitioning European Union banking sectors. Finally, our findings confirm the leading role of residential mortgages in intensifying credit fluctuations.     

EDGAR on the internet: The welfare effects of wider information distribution in an experimental market for risky assets

Policies such as the SEC’s Fair Disclosure Rule, and technologies such as SEC EDGAR, aim to disseminate corporate disclosures to a wider audience of investors in risky assets. In this study, we adopt an experimental approach to measure whether this wider disclosure is beneficial to these investors. Price-clearing equilibrium models based on utility maximization and non-revealing and fully-revealing prices predict that in a pure exchange economy, an arbitrary trader would prefer that no investors are informed rather than all are informed; non-revealing theory further predicts that an arbitrary trader would prefer a situation in which all traders are informed rather than half the traders are informed. These predictions can be summarized as “None > All > Half”. A laboratory study was conducted to test these predictions. Where previous studies have largely focused on information dissemination and its effects on equilibrium price and insider profits, we focus instead on traders’ expected utility, as measured by their preferences for markets in which none, half, or all traders are informed. Our experimental result contradicts the prediction and indicates “Half > None > All”, i.e. subjects favor a situation where a random half is informed. The implication is that in addition to testing predictions of price equilibrium, experiments should also be used to verify analytical welfare predictions of expected utility under different policy choices. JEL Classification D82, D53, G14, L86 This work was largely completed while this author was at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.     

Incentives in market games with asymmetric information: the core

Summary. This paper examines the ex ante core of a pure exchange economy with asymmetric information in which state-dependent allocations are required to satisfy incentive compatibility. This restriction on players' strategies in the cooperative game can be interpreted as incomplete contracts or partial commitment. An example is provided in which the incentive compatible core with nontransferable utility is empty; the game fails to be balanced because convex combinations of incentive compatible net trades can violate incentive compatibility. However, randomization of such strategies leads to ex post allocations which satisfy incentive compatibility and are feasible on average. Hence, convexity is preserved in such a model and the resulting cooperative games are balanced. In this framework, an incentive compatible core concept is defined for NTU games derived from economies with asymmetric information. The main result is nonemptiness of the incentive compatible core. Received: December 26, 2001; revised version: June 11, 2002 RID="*" ID"*" This work was financed, in part, by contract No 26 of the programme “P?le d'attraction interuniversitaire” of the Belgian government, and, in part, by research grant SBR93-09854 from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Much of my thinking about this topic was developed during a wonderful visit to CORE for the 1991–1992 academic year (on sabbatical from the University of Pennsylvania). This paper was originally circulated in December 1991 as CARESS Working Paper #91-38, Center for Analytic Research in Economics and the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and in February 1992 as CORE Discussion Paper 9221, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. RID="*" ID="*" At the very start of my research, Jean-Fran?ois Mertens was almost a co-author. Fran?ois Forges provided detailed comments at a later stage, during my visit to THEMA, Université Cergy-Pontoise, in Spring 1997. They are entitled to the customary disclaimer.     

Time-varying comovement and changes of comovement structure in the Chinese stock market: A causal network method

The driving force for the comovement in stock returns is a long-standing debate between classical asset pricing theory and behavioral finance theory. It has become critically important recently for understanding systemic risk and risk contagion in the market. In this study, we propose complex networks enabled new methods to measure the causal comovement of individual stocks and the comovement structure of the market, which facilitate the examination of all kinds of hypotheses of comovement theories in a unified framework. Using a sample of the Chinese stock market from Jan. 1, 2006 to Dec. 31, 2016, we find that the degree of comovement generally intensifies over time, with a drastic increase from 2011 to 2015, while the comovement structure of the market changes with different market situations. Most importantly, our study reveals the driving force of causal comovement among individual stocks; that is, sentiment-based factors related to the market index indeed induce excess causal comovement in returns beyond that can be justified by fundamental factors including beta coefficient, book-to-market ratio, liquidity, profitability and volatility. Our study also reveals the determinants of comovement structure, which are attributable to the change of investors' behaviors in different periods. It turns out that investors in the Chinese stock market care about risk-return relationship in normal periods, while they seem to care only about risk in crisis periods.     

The heterogeneous volume-volatility relations in the exchange-traded fund market: Evidence from China

We decompose the trading volume of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) into specific components according to different triggers of trades: (i) private information, (ii) disagreement among investors due to their different opinions on public information or having different information, and (iii) investor impatience. Then we examine the particular impact of each type of ETF trade on the market volatility of the tracked index. Focusing on the three ETFs tracking the CSI 300, we show that ETF trades stemming from investor disagreement are a key determinant of CSI 300 volatility, dominating other factors considered. Liquidity ETF trades can partially explain CSI 300 volatility. However, little evidence supports a significant correlation between privately informed trades of ETFs and CSI 300 volatility.     

Technology adoption in response to changes in market conditions: Evidence from the US petroleum refining industry

This paper analyzes the determinants of the levels and rates of technology adoption for petroleum refineries that survived the period 1980–1989, during which the conditions of product demand and crude oil supply changed significantly. Regression models are specified to investigate the growth of technology-related capacity, the growth of technology complexity, and the rates of adoption estimated from a diffuse model of technology use. Both levels and rates of adoption are hypothesized to be affected by refinery size, regulatory status, elements of local markets, and geographical factors. Empirical results generally suggest that compared with the supply-side factors of crude oil sources and regulatory subsidies, refinery size and demand-side factors, such as total consumption, consumption growth and fluctuation, and changes of the consumption mix, are responsible for the most part of the determination of technology adoption for refineries surviving the 1980s.     

Rural development in the digital age: Does information and communication technology adoption contribute to credit access and income growth in rural China?

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in rural livelihoods and household well-being. Therefore, this study examines the impact of ICT adoption on farmers' decisions to access credit and the joint effects of ICT adoption and access to credit on household income using 2016 China Labour-force Dynamics Survey data. Both recursive bivariate probit model and a selectivity-corrected ordinary least square regression model are employed for the analysis. The results show that ICT adoption increases the probability of access to credit by 12.8% in rural China and empowers rural women and farm households in relatively less-developed regions to access credit. ICT adoption and access to credit affect household income differently. ICT adoption significantly increases household income, while access to credit significantly reduces it, primarily because farmers do not use the acquired credit to invest in income-generating farm and off-farm business activities. ICT adoption has the largest positive impact on household income at the highest 90th quantile. Our findings suggest that improving rural ICT infrastructure to enhance farmers' ICT adoption and developing ICT-based financial products to enable households to access sufficient funds can improve rural household welfare.     

Cancer survivors in the labor market: Evidence from recent US micro-panel data

Rising cancer survival rates and retiring at older ages improve the probability of labor market presence for cancer survivors. Yet, insufficient evidence exists on the labor market effects of male- and female- specific cancers. Therefore, using a theoretical construct of labor supply and health capital, this study exploits a nationally representative dataset, the 2008–2015 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), for estimating the correlated random effects (CRE) and over-dispersion empirical models to capture the job market effects for cancer survivors. After addressing the potential endogeneity of cancer and controlling for the number of years after cancer diagnoses, the estimated CRE model detect substantial male-female differences in the labor market outcomes for the survivors. Male and female cancer types adversely affect short- and long- run employment prospects, and male-specific cancers increase weekly hours of work and decrease short- and long- run annual labor incomes. Moreover, gender-specific cancers increasingly limit long run family incomes and raise total health expenditures in the short- and intermediate- runs but not in the long-run. Additionally, while the cancers increase the likelihood of missing a work day for both genders in the short-run the effect is larger for females. Finally, the total annual cost of workplace absenteeism for the employed male- and female- cancer survivors range from $0.58bn to $3.1 bn.