The impact of oil prices and the financial market on cost efficiency in the insurance and Takaful sectors: Evidence from a stochastic frontier analysis

The Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) insurance industry, including conventional insurance and Takaful, has witnessed remarkable growth during the last decade. However, the economies of this region rely on oil as the primary stream of revenue and lack development in financial markets. This could affect the insurance industry. For this reason, this paper examines the impact of oil prices and the financial market on the cost efficiency of the insurance and Takaful sectors in GCC countries using a stochastic frontier cost function with data from 2009–2016. The results show that the relationship between oil prices and efficiency changes from positive to negative when the prices increase, whereas the relationship between the financial market and efficiency is negative. No clear evidence of the impact of oil prices on efficiency arises from the differences between conventional insurance and Takaful. However, there are differences regarding the financial market, with a negative impact on conventional insurance and a positive one on the Takaful business. The results of this study have implications for regulators and management. The Takaful industry is rapidly growing compared to conventional insurance in the GCC and, therefore, the financial market may have added benefits for the GCC region. However, caution is required in relation to the impact of the financial market on conventional insurance. Furthermore, management may require the development of strategies to deal with the nature of GCC economies to avoid shocks to oil prices.     

Quality Competition, Insurance, and Consumer Choice in Health Care Markets

In this model, insurance offering a choice of hospitals is valued because consumers are uncertain which hospital they will prefer ex post. A competitive insurance market facilitates tacit price collusion between hospitals; high margins induce hospitals to compete for customers through overinvestment in quality. Incentives may exist to lock in market share via managed-care plans with less choice and lower prices. As technology becomes more expensive, the market increasingly offers too little choice. A pure managed care market may emerge, with underinvestment in quality. Relative to a pure insurance regime, however, all consumers are better off under managed care.     

Independent component analysis for realized volatility: Analysis of the stock market crash of 2008

This paper investigates the factors that drove the U.S. equity market returns from 2007 to early 2010. The period was highlighted by volatile energy and commodity prices, the collapse of insurance and banking firms, extreme implied volatility and a subsequent rally in the overall market. To extract the driving factors, we decompose the returns of the S&P500 sector ETFs into statistically independent signals using independent component analysis. We find that the generated factors have interesting financial interpretations and are consistent with the major economic themes of the period. We find that there are two sets of general market betas during the period along with a dominant factor for energy and materials sector. In addition, we find that the EGARCH model which accommodates asymmetric responses between returns and volatility can plausibly fit the high levels of variance during the crash. Finally, estimated correlations dropped when commodity prices moved higher, but then spiked when the S&P500 crashed in late 2008.     

A model for dual health care market with congestion differentiation

The French market for specialist physician care has a dual legal structure: physicians must exclusively work in sector 1 and charge regulated fees or in sector 2, where they can freely set their fees. Patient out-of-pocket payments in sector 2 are partially covered by private insurance. The primary differentiating factor between both sectors is the number of patients per specialist, which in turn directly affects the overall quality of the service provided. We built an equilibrium model to analyze both specialists' decisions about which sector to work in, and patients' choice of physician and therefore sector. More specifically, the model allowed us to study the effect of changes in prices and economy-wide patient-to-specialist ratios on profits and patients' utility associated with the services provided in each sector.     

Multibrand pricing as a strategy for consumer search obfuscation in online markets

This paper argues that a firm with multiple brands can obfuscate consumer search by excluding the brands of other firms from a consumer's consideration set. This is examined empirically by regressing price data for a leading U.K. motor insurance price comparison site (or “shopbot”). It finds that multibrand firms own three‐quarters of brands in this market, and that allowing for other brand strategies, they post significantly lower and clustered prices relative to other firms. The firms also conceal their brand ownership, consistent with search obfuscation. The results are not otherwise explained and they have implications for market competitiveness.     

Comparative empirical study of binomial call-option pricing methods using S&P 500 index data

In this paper, several binomial models are tested empirically on S&P500 Index on the levels of tradability, proximity to market (RMS) prices and profitability, especially close to expiration day. These comparisons will be carried out for many different business environments, including different market trends and moneyness levels traded. Among the models under analysis we assess the quality of the SH model, developed by the authors in previous work, in relation to other models. The option price in the SH model is affected by the players’ assessments about the behavior of the prices of the underlying asset up to the expiration day and by their “eagerness” levels (i.e., players’ readiness to respond to a given bid proposed by their opponent). We found that for all models, the higher the moneyness, the greater the proximity of models prices to actual market prices and that, eagerness parameters have a decisive effect on tradability. We also found that there was no correlation between the degree of proximity of modeled prices to actual prices and the expected profit gained by players that act according to a given model and that the SH model traded relatively small number of options. The expected profit is highest for the SH model in the ITM and ATM for days that are far from the expiration day.     

List price and sales prices of residential properties during booms and busts

This paper investigates the relationship between the list and sale price of residential properties over the housing cycle. In down or normal markets the list price generally exceeds the sales price; however, when the housing market is strong, homes sell for more than their list price. This observation is not consistent with the assumptions made in the standard model of home sellers’ search behavior. We consider alternative models. In one, sellers set list prices based on their expectations of future changes in sales prices and the arrival rate of buyers; however, demand shocks occur. This model partially explains our data from the Belfast, U.K. housing market, but it fails to predict the list to sales price ratio during a sustained housing boom. We next describe a model where sellers’ endogenously select their search mechanism depending on the strength of the housing market. We find support for the conjecture that sellers switch to an auction-like model during housing booms. There also is evidence that during a downturn in the market, sellers’ list prices are sticky.     

Modeling regional electric power markets and market power

This paper develops a nonlinear, mathematical programming model for estimating production decisions in an open access, regional power market. Our approach allows one to estimate competitive power market equilibrium prices, which in turn offers empirical conclusions about marginal generation facilities, transmission interconnection congestion, and most importantly, load pockets and market power. Sensitivity analyses are conducted by subjecting the model to changes in production costs, peak hour demand, power imports, and transmission interconnection price assumptions. We then consider the issue of a firm's ability to exercise market power and the implications it may have on regional equilibrium power prices. The Louisiana power market is used as a case study for our work. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prices,wages, and import prices in Israel: 1970–1983

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the dynamics of prices, wages and import prices in a small open economy using data for Israel in the accelerating inflationary period of 1970–1983. The appropriateness of the specification of a price equation as a function of import prices and wages is critically reviewed using Sims's methodology. The main finding is that the only significant lags in the representation of the rate of change in prices, wages and import prices are the lags of the rate of change in prices (the rate of inflation). Other factors in the representation are attributed to market forces influencing real wages and the real exchange rate. Testing the correlation of the estimated VAR residuals leads to the conclusion that a short-term inflation equation specified as a function of present and past wages is not acceptable. A further decomposition of the VAR residuals presents evidence in favour the hypothesis that price shocks contribute to the explanation of the inflationary process in Israel. A rational expectation interpretation of the results is proposed, followed by some policy implications.     

Household search and health insurance coverage

Health insurance in the United States is typically acquired through an employer-sponsored program. Often employees offered employer-provided health insurance have the option to extend coverage to their spouse and dependents. We investigate the implications of the “publicness” of health insurance coverage for the labor market careers of spouses. The theoretical innovations in the paper are to extend the standard partial–partial equilibrium labor market search model to a multiple searcher setting with the inclusion of multi-attribute job offers, with some of the attributes treated as public goods within the household. The model is estimated using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) using a Method of Simulated Moments (MSM) estimator. We demonstrate how previous estimates of the marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for health insurance based on cross-sectional linear regression estimators may be seriously biased due to the presence of dynamic selection effects and misspecification of the decision-making unit.     

Technological change in health care: Why are opinions so divided?

This paper purports to explain the widespread scepticism towards technological change in health care in general and pharmaceutical innovation in particular in the face of very high estimated rates of social return. These estimates are based on observable market prices and quantities, which are used for measuring the additional consumer surplus induced by an innovation. They grossly overstate true surplus due to the effect of insurance, however. For true demand for health care services and hence true surplus depends on the net price a patient is willing to pay, which is a rather small fraction of observed market price. The paper also outlines the conditions under which a health insurer would welcome a pharmaceutical innovation.     

Monetary Policy and Asset Prices: A Markov‐Switching DSGE Approach

This paper estimates a Markov‐switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model by incorporating stock prices in monetary policy rules in order to identify the Federal Reserve's stance toward them. Based on the data from 1984:Q1 to 2009:Q2, I find that historical evidence of the policy reaction toward stock prices is weak except for the stock market bubble of the 1990s. A counterfactual exercise shows that the rapid growth in stock prices during that period would have been significantly higher if monetary policy had been independent of the stock market. However, unconditional macroeconomic volatility increases with the degree of policy responsiveness toward stock prices. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

钢材期货价格发现功能研究——基于印度市场信息共享模型的分析

本文借助Johansen协整检验、Granger因果检验、信息共享模型、方差分解等方法进行多层次实证研究,定量地刻画出期货市场在价格发现中作用的大小。研究结果显示：印度板材期货价格和现货价格之间存在长期均衡关系,在价格引导上仅存在现货对期货价格的单向引导关系,期货对现货没有引导关系;通过方差分解发现,现货市场在价格发现功能中处于主导地位,说明印度钢材期货市场效率有待提高,板材期货没有实现其应有的价格发现功能。     

Subprime mortgage default

This paper constructs a reduced-form credit risk model of mortgage default. The data used is of privately-securitized subprime ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages), originated between 1997 and 2008, and observed between 2000 and 2009. The period studied thus encompasses the beginning of the subprime crisis. Given the estimated model, contractual properties of the loans are then used to infer the market price of default risk for the various quarters of origination. It is empirically determined that a change in the inherent nature of borrowers led to a deterioration in their default performance, a change which can be first detected in late 2004. On the other hand, the evidence also indicates that the secondary mortgage market became aware of this change at about this same time. The large rise in defaults in 2007 cannot, therefore, be attributed to any surprise other than the unexpectedly large fall in housing prices.     

Market reaction to uniform capital adequacy guidelines in the banking industry

In this paper the authors assess the stock market reaction to information on uniform capital requirements that was disseminated on four different dates: September 29, 1987; December 7, 1987; December 10, 1987; and July 11, 1988. The share prices of U.S. money center banks were adversely affected by the December 7, 1987, announcement regarding proposals to make regulatory standards more uniform. The share prices of U.S. superregional banks were not affected by this announcement. The difference in degree of response is attributed to disparate capital positions between the two groups of banks. In order to meet the new guidelines, U.S. money center banks may need to implement policies (such as issuing new stock) that are viewed unfavorably by the market.     

Optimal speculative trade among large traders

A collection of large traders holds heterogeneous prior beliefs regarding market fundamentals. This gives them a motive to engage in speculative trade with respect to market prices. Rather than assuming a particular institution or market for speculative trade, we take a mechanism-design approach by attempting to characterize the mechanism that maximizes the traders’ gains from speculative trade, subject to the incentive constraints that result from the traders’ ability to manipulate market prices. Within a stylized market model, we show that this mechanism affects price volatility without destroying ex-post efficient allocations. We also characterize the implementability of optimal speculative trade when the traders’ prior beliefs are private information. Financial support from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Grant No. 2002298 is gratefully acknowledged.     

Measuring housing affordability: Looking beyond the median

We draw a distinction between the concepts of purchase affordability (whether a household is able to borrow enough funds to purchase a house) and repayment affordability (the burden imposed on a household of repaying the mortgage). We operationalize this distinction in the context of a new methodology for constructing affordability measures that draws on the value-at-risk concept and takes account of the whole distribution of household income and house prices rather than just the median. Empirically we find that the distinction between purchase and repayment affordability can be pronounced. In the Sydney prime mortgage market over the period 1996–2006, repayment affordability deteriorated very significantly while purchase affordability remained quite stable. This difference can be attributed to the loosening of credit constraints in the mortgage market which it seems has carried through primarily into higher house prices rather than an improvement in purchase affordability. We also show how median house-price-to-income ratio measures of affordability can be extended to take account of the whole distribution of income and house prices, and how as a result of differential skewness in the house price and income distributions the housing affordability problem may be significantly worse for lower income households than suggested by standard median measures.     

Tradability,closeness to market prices,and expected profit: their measurement for a binomial model of options pricing in a heterogeneous market

A reliable method of options pricing in real time would help various players, including hedgers and speculators, to make informed decisions. In this study, we develop an extensive simulation with multiple business environments, which includes the use of real data from the S&P 500 Index between the years 2010–2017 for the 30 days prior to expiration of the options. Forecasted tradability is computed based on the SH model: a theoretical model of real-time options pricing that takes into account players’ heterogeneity with regard to their willingness to accept offers proposed by the opposing player. The quality of the model is examined for the scenario in which the model players are speculators who act against the real market prices. We show that the equilibrium prices predicted by the SH model are close to the market prices (a deviation of up to approx. 3%) in an In-The-Money environment. Additionally, the tougher the players (i.e., the greater their level of unwillingness to accept a bid from the opposing player), the higher the average tradability. We also find that the level of willingness of the players has a greater effect on tradability than does option moneyness or the market trend.

     

土地政策和城市住房发展

本文首先分析了北京的住房市场 ,然后对住房价格的构成及其变化进行了分析 ,结合微观经济学理论 ,总结出北京市房价高的原因 ,即 ,(1)房地产开发过程中没有不变成本 ,因而没有规模经济 ;(2 )根据基准地价系统 ,容积率决定地价 ,这一方面与西方城市经济学理论相悖 ,另一方面使房地产商没有经济利益驱动 ,资源没有得到合理强度地利用。最后 ,本文提出了进一步改革的建议和对策。     

Divergence in Reservation Prices and Its Impact on Housing Market Liquidity: A Theoretical Analysis

In this paper, we build a two-period English auction model to study the relative movements between buyers’ and sellers’ reservation prices in the housing market. We show that changes in sellers’ reservation prices are jointly determined by changes in buyers’ reservation prices, probability of buyers offering a high or low price, and the arrival rate of buyers. When the divergence between the buyers’ and sellers’ reservation prices widens, the probability of sale increases in the upward market and decreases in the downward market, contributing to the increases or decreases in market liquidity.