Hospital performance standards and medical pricing: The impact of information disclosure in cardiac care

A policy concern is that the initiation of Hospital Compare (HC) reporting in Medicare provided leverage to insurers in price negotiations for lowering private sector prices without regard to hospital performance. Using the sequential Nash bargaining framework we provide economic intuition to the contrary: while average hospital prices decline under quality disclosures, hospitals with above‐average quality are able to exert a stronger bargaining position, consequently capturing prices above the market rate. To explore this issue empirically we estimate variants of difference‐in‐difference models, examining the effects of the three main scores (heart attack, heart failure, and combined mortalities) on transaction prices of related hospital procedures. States which had similar mandated reporting systems in place before the initiation of HC form the control group. Analyzing claims data of privately insured patients, we find that HC exerted downward pressure on prices. However, hospitals rated “above‐average” captured higher prices, thereby offsetting the overall policy effect fully or partially. Leads and lags analysis lends further support for our difference‐in‐difference approach. We find that highly ranked hospitals received a quality premium of 8–14%, comparable to price effects found in other health care markets. We conclude that HC was effective at constraining prices without penalizing high performers.     

Residential investment and house prices in a multi-sector monetary business cycle model

This paper develops a three-sector quantitative dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to account for some of the salient business cycle properties concerning residential investment and house prices. We depart from the traditional Real Business Cycle setup by incorporating monetary frictions and credit market activities into the model economy. The model generates the high volatility of residential investment and hours worked in the house investment goods producing sector, as well as the procyclicality of house prices. The lead-lag pattern of house investment also roughly conforms with the data. We find that monetary policy and nominal interest rates play a special role in the determination of house prices. Money shocks generate remarkably volatile residential investment and house prices.     

Modeling the unintended consequences of short selling for innovation investment

We develop an innovation investment decision model for firms facing a short selling threat. We find that an endogenous agency problem may arise as an unintended consequence of short selling under the prevailing compensation structure. Specifically, the manager has strong incentives to seek better compensation at the expense of decreasing firm value by reducing long-term innovation investment to save cash reserves to protect the short-term price because the manager’s compensation is closely tied to this value. Finally, our model predicts that both the lending supply and short selling will induce the manager to underinvest and have a negative effect on firm value and the manager’s private benefit because they exacerbate agency conflicts.     

The impact of rising EU Allowance prices on core inflation in the Eurozone

This article examines the impact of EU Allowance (EUA) prices on core inflation in the Eurozone between 2005 and 2022. The empirical results suggest that a positive shock to the EUA price led to higher long-run inflation expectations and core inflation. This implies that the rise in EUA prices can be passed on to consumers and enterprises, leading to an increase in production costs and consumer prices. And, while a positive shock to EUA prices may promote investment in renewable energy in the short term, the impact is not statistically significant and does not last long. The results suggest considerable potential for European policymakers to re-examine policy mechanisms to accelerate renewable energy investment and maintain price stability in the medium term.     

货币政策房地产市场传导机制研究--基于SVAR模型的实证分析

基于2000-2013年房地产市场相关月度时间序列数据,构建货币政策房地产市场传导机制的理论框架,建立8个变量的结构向量自回归模型（SVAR）分析货币政策、房地产供给需求和消费投资等实体经济变量的相互关系,研究表明货币政策尤其是利率政策能显著影响房地产供给需求,但房地产需求对消费的正向冲击影响十分有限,对投资反而产生负向冲击。由此提出,利率政策应当关注房地产价格波动,避免房地产价格非理性上涨对宏观经济的负面影响。     

Investment and financing choices by time-inconsistent managers

This paper provides an analytically tractable continuous-time model in which a time-inconsistent manager can divert part of the firm’s cash flows as private benefits at the expense of outside shareholders. We endogenously determine the investment scale, investment threshold, optimal coupon and default threshold under managerial discretion. We demonstrate that time-inconsistent managers each have a trade-off between the timing and scale of investment.Among a number of important implications, by exploring agency costs of equity as deviations from the investment and financing policies that maximize equity value, our analysis reveals that a certain degree of time inconsistency in managerial preferences decreases the agency costs of equity. We also find that a naive manager more severely distorts the investment and financing policies than does a sophisticated manager, which leads to higher agency costs of equity. Finally, we document that the impacts of corporate governance variables, such as the managers’ property parameter and/or the level of managers’ ownership, depend on the managers’ beliefs regarding their future time-inconsistent behavior; this prediction provides novel empirical tests.     

An optimal-incentive contract for managers with exponential utility

This paper examines the manager–investor relationship in the case of exponential utility when the manager of investments in real or financial assets has an endowment which can be invested in the risky assets for which he has private information. We obtain a relationship showing trade-offs or hedging behavior among the investments the manager can choose for himself and the principal. Even with the hedging ability of the manager, the well-known first-best solution with ‘no moral hazard’ risk-sharing is obtained among these possible solutions to the manager's problem by specifying a ‘no conflict of interest’, zero investment by the manager of his own endowment in those risky assets for which he has private information. Thus, the agent imputes no disutility to the assignment of the principal's investments and the investor is assured of an investment strategy that he would make if he had access to the manager's private information.     

Some Unintended Consequences of Parallel Trade in Pharmaceuticals

It is widely argued that international arbitrage, or parallel trade (PT), in patented drugs may increase consumer surplus in the relevant countries but at the expense of R&D investment. We show how the effects of PT depend on the vertical contract (linear pricing or dual pricing) between the manufacturer and the foreign licensee or distributor and on whether and how drug prices are regulated and reimbursed. We find that, contrary to what policy makers generally predict, we should be more concerned with the impact of PT on aggregate consumer surplus than on R&D investment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

凯恩斯假设下AD-AS模型的比较静态分析

在凯恩斯假设下的AD-AS模型是一个静态分析模型,文章在假设下,讨论了财政政策和货币政策对产出和价格、利率和投资的影响,分析结果表明:财政政策和货币政策对产出水平和劳动力市场的失业率具有直接的影响,结果同的假设下的分析结果相同,不过变动幅度同以上不同。     

Monetary policy transmission in a model with animal spirits and house price booms and busts

Can monetary policy trigger pronounced boom-bust cycles in house prices and create persistent business cycles? We address this question by building heuristics into an otherwise standard DSGE model. As a result, monetary policy sets off waves of optimism and pessimism (“animal spirits”) that drive house prices, that, in turn, have strong repercussions on the business cycle. We compare our findings to a standard model with rational expectations by means of impulse responses. We suggest that a standard Taylor rule is not well-suited to maintain macroeconomic stability. Instead, an augmented rule that incorporates house prices is shown to be superior.     

Building Permit Policy and Land Price Distortions: Empirical Evidence

This study examines the impacts of building permit policy on suburban land prices. The central premise of this study is that building permit policy may be a binding constraint and may lead to price distortions in land markets. We use a database of 354 suburban land sales to examine the impact of permit policy on land prices in 26 municipalities in a suburban county of Philadelphia. Our study offers evidence of price distortions. We find that land prices go up with planned increases in residential building permits. We also find that a progrowth building permit policy causes land prices to rise more in municipalities where developable land is scarce and vice versa.     

Residential investment and recession predictability

We assess the importance of residential investment for the prediction of economic recessions for an unbalanced panel of 12 OECD countries over the period 1960Q1–2014Q4. Our approach is to estimate various probit models with different leading indicators and evaluate their relative prediction accuracies using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve as our forecasting performance metric. We document that residential investment contains information that is useful for predicting recessions both in-sample and out-of-sample. This result is robust to adding typical leading indicators, such as the term spread, stock prices, consumer confidence surveys and oil prices. It is shown that residential investment is particularly useful for the prediction of recessions for countries with high home-ownership rates. Finally, in a separate exercise for the US, we show that the predictive ability of residential investment is — in a broad sense — robust to employing real-time data.     

Aggregate Investment in South Africa: A Model with Implications for Political Reform

A small macroeconomic model is used as the basis for estimating the determinants of investment in South Africa within a simultaneous equations framework. Investment is highly sensitive to interest rates, relative prices and political instability. The policy implications of such sensitivity are outlined.     

Prices and investment with collateral and default

This paper uses the framework of an OLG economy with three-period lived agents in which a durable good serves as collateral for loans, to study the effect of an unanticipated income shock when the economy is in a steady state equilibrium. We focus on the consequence of default on loans when the value of the collateral falls below the value of the debt it secures. We analyze the impulse response functions of the price and production of the durable good and show that there is an asymmetry between the response of the price and investment of the durable good to a positive and a negative income shock arising from default on the collateralized loans. We show that this asymmetry can be seen in the data on housing prices and construction and is attributable to the default on mortgages in periods of decreasing prices which acts as a turbo mechanism magnifying the decline in investment.     

Housing prices and macroprudential policies: Evidence from microdata

This paper examines the efficacy of macroprudential policies in addressing housing prices in a developing country like India, utilizing two novel databases on city-level house prices in India. Though the empirical models provide evidence of a sizable effect of the fundamental factors in influencing house price dynamics, they also reveal strong countercyclical properties of macroprudential tools i.e., loan-to-value (LTV) limit, risk weights, and provisioning requirements, in influencing housing price movements. Among the macroprudential policy tools, the LTV limit emerges as the most potent one in influencing the price dynamics. A granular investigation of the effectiveness of macroprudential tools suggests that the countercyclical effect of the regulatory ratios for large-sized mortgages is much stronger as compared with those for the small-sized mortgages, attributed mainly to investment motives associated with the large-sized loans. We also find the presence of asymmetry in the impact of loosening versus the tightening of the LTV limit, which can be attributed to the procyclical behavior of the house prices.     

环保产业政策支持与企业环境治理动机——基于重污染上市公司的经验证据

以2006-2015年沪深A股重污染上市公司为研究样本，实证考察环保产业政策支持企业参与环境治理的动机。研究表明，环保产业政策支持企业的环境治理行为兼具价值创造动机与高管自利动机，且主要体现在非国有企业或高融资约束企业方面。进一步分析发现，环保产业政策支持企业的环境治理投资整体有利于企业价值创造，但具有时滞性。具体而言，基于价值创造动机的环境治理投资可提升企业价值，而高管自利动机下的环境治理投资不利于企业价值创造。这一研究丰富了环保产业政策的分析视角以及企业环境治理投资的相关研究，为政府从高管动机层面优化环境治理政策以实现高质量可持续发展提供经验证据。     

Managerial overconfidence,overinvestment, and R&D spillover

This paper examines whether a firm will select an overoptimistic manager when a cost‐reduction investment has a spillover effect. We consider a Cournot competition model where R&D investment ex ante occurs before the process of product market competition. Our analysis reveals that there exists a unique and symmetric equilibrium for firms to delegate overoptimistic managers. We show that only when the spillover effect is sufficiently high do firms benefit from delegation. Furthermore, the equilibrium confidence level and investment decision first decrease and then increase as the spillover parameter changes. As the initial production cost increases, the equilibrium performance becomes worse.     

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.