Ramsey equilibrium with liberal borrowing

This paper considers a multi-agent one-sector Ramsey equilibrium growth model with borrowing constraints. The extreme borrowing constraint used in the classical version of the model, surveyed in Becker (2006), and the limited form of borrowing constraint examined in Borissov and Dubey (2015) are relaxed to allow more liberal borrowing by the households. A perfect foresight equilibrium is shown to exist in this economy. We describe the steady state equilibria for the liberal borrowing regime and show that as the borrowing regime is progressively liberalized, the steady state wealth inequality increases. Unlike the case of a limited borrowing regime, an equilibrium path need not converge in the case of liberal borrowing regime. We show through an example that a two period cyclic equilibrium exists when agents are allowed to borrow against their two period future wage income. This result is similar to the possibility of non-convergent equilibrium capital stock sequences in the model with no borrowing.     

Savings, Personal Wealth and Risk

In this Briefing Paper we examine the underlying determinants of personal savings behaviour to substantiate our view that the recent fall in savings rates does not imply that it must in future bounce back to some more normal level. On the contrary there are good reasons for believing that savings are more likely to go on falling than to rise.
We argue that consumer behaviour should be related explicitly to personal wealth as well as to disposable income. Personal wealth has risen substantially since 1982: the fall in inflation and long-term interest rates has pushed up gilts' prices; the recovery of profits has sparked off a stock market boom; and the value of the housing stock, which is by far the most important asset held by the personal sector, has started to rise again in real terms. This rise in asset values means that, despite a rise in consumption financed by borrowing, the personal sector balance sheet still in a healthy state, particularly when account is taken of the personal savings now held indirectly via pension funds. These have risen rapidly recently, reducing the need for other long-term savings.
The rise in total wealth has increased savers' tolerance of a fall in net liquid assets (bank and building society deposits etc less borrowing). The willingness to hold a smaller (precautionary) stock of net liquid assets may also reflect a perceived reduction in risk. Financial markets have been much more stable over the period since 1975 than over the preceding eight years, and may now be signalling that the period of adjustment to the shocks and disturbances of the 1970s is drawing to an end. The fall in savings is a worldwide phenomenon. As in the UK it is linked to the fall in inflation and may also be connected with the recovery of the world's major stock markets.     

中国矿产资源行业并购对股东财富的影响研究

随着我国股票市场的日趋成熟,并购在资本市场中扮演越来越重要的角色。同全球并购的缓慢复苏相比,2011年中国却并购掀起了新一轮的高潮。2011年中国能源及矿产行业完成的并购交易数量为153起,占并购总量的13.2%;并购交易金额高达219.83亿美元,占并购总额的32.8%。本文运用事件法,从股东财富的角度分析了2005-2011年间中国矿产资源类上市公司的短期并购绩效。通过对并购事件发生的窗口期[-5,5]内上市公司的超额收益率的研究发现并购公司在并购窗口期内的股东财富仅仅在宣告日前后两天有少量的增加,此后一直呈现下降的趋势。说明并购事件并未对股东财富形成积极的影响。本文试图从股票市场本身做出进一步的阐释,意在说明我国的股票市场中存在短期投机性。     

An agent-based model of the observed distribution of wealth in the United States

Pareto cautiously asserted that the wealth and income distributions which bear his name are universal, basing his argument on observations of this distribution in many different types of economies. In this paper, we present an agent based model (and a scalable approximation of it) in a closely related spirit. The central feature of this model is that wealth enables an individual to secure more wealth. Specifically, the important and novel feature of this model is its ability to simultaneously produce both the Pareto distribution observed in empirical data for the top 10% of the population and the exponential distribution observed for the lower 90%. We show that the model produces these distributions of wealth when initialized with an equitable distribution. Then, using historical data, we initialize the model with US wealth shares in 1988 and show that the model tracks wealth share changes from 1988 to 2012. Simulations to 2088 project that the top 0.01% of the population will possess more than 70% of the total wealth in the economy.     

Two new mean–variance enhanced index tracking models based on uncertainty theory

The enhanced index tracking (EIT) problem is concerned with selecting a tracking portfolio that achieves an excess return over a given benchmark with a minimum tracking error. This paper explores the EIT problem by providing two new mean–variance EIT models based on uncertainty theory where stock returns are treated as uncertain variables instead of random variables and stock return distributions are estimated by experts instead of from historical data. First, this paper formulates an uncertain enhanced index tracking (UEIT) model and analyzes the characteristic of the UEIT frontier. Then to reduce the tracking portfolio’s risk, this paper adds a risk index (RI) constraint to the UEIT model and proposes a UEIT-RI model. Next, by comparing the UEIT and UEIT-RI models this paper gives the advantages of the two models. Investors can choose the model according to their preferences. Finally, this paper conducts numerical examples to illustrate the application of the two models and the analysis results.     

Predictability of stock returns and asset allocation under structural breaks

This paper adopts a new approach that accounts for breaks to the parameters of return prediction models both in the historical estimation period and at future points. Empirically, we find evidence of multiple breaks in return prediction models based on the dividend yield or a short interest rate. Our analysis suggests that model instability is a very important source of investment risk for buy-and-hold investors with long horizons and that breaks can lead to a negative slope in the relationship between the investment horizon and the proportion of wealth that investors allocate to stocks. Once past and future breaks are considered, an investor with medium risk aversion reduces the allocation to stocks from close to 100% at short horizons to 10% at the five-year horizon. Welfare losses from ignoring breaks can amount to several hundred basis points per year for investors with long horizons.     

Wealth spurt unlikely to offer much aid to the consumer

• ? UK households are wealthier than ever, thanks to continued growth in house prices and a buoyant stock market. However, the nature and distribution of that wealth means that support for consumer spending from a ‘wealth effect’ is likely to be both small and less than in the past.
• ? In Q4 2016, households' holdings of owner‐occupied property and net holdings of financial assets amounted to £9.2tr, almost 8% up on the level a year earlier. This was equivalent to 719% of annual household gross disposable income, a near‐record high.
• ? A long‐established feature of economics is the concept of a ‘wealth effect’ – the premise that faced with rising wealth levels, households feel more comfortable and economically secure and hence spend more. But the economic literature differs on how large this effect is.
• ? Our own Global Model suggests that the wealth effect is modest, with a 10% rise in wealth boosting consumer spending by only around 0.2%. One reason is that about half of financial wealth consists of highly illiquid assets in pension funds. But this component has recently been the biggest source of growth in wealth.
• ? Given differences in the propensity to consume out of income and wealth, the concentration of financial and housing assets among better‐off households will also act to neuter the size of any wealth effect. The wealthiest one percent of households hold around 20% of household wealth. But the bottom quartile owns only 1.5%.
• ? Meanwhile, the housing market has created an ever‐greater concentration of wealth. The share of households owning their own property fell from 71% to 63% in the decade to 2015. But the share of private renters more than doubled in the same period, from 9% to just over 19%. And the pre‐crisis appetite to finance consumption by borrowing against the value of property shows no sign of returning.

     

Return interval,dependence structure,and multivariate normality

We focus on changes in the multivariate distribution of index returns stemming purely from varying the return interval, assuming daily to quarterly returns. Whereas long-tailedness is present in daily returns, we find that, in agreement with a well-established idea, univariate return distributions converge to normality as the return interval is lengthened. Such convergence does not occur, however, for multivariate distributions. Using a new method to parametrically model the dependence structure of stock index returns, we show that the persistence of a dependence structure implying negative asymptotic dependence in return series is the reason for the rejection of multivariate normality for low return frequencies.     

The role of the seller’s stock performance in the market reaction to divestiture announcements

Divestitures have the potential to create shareholder value. However, the extent of the market reaction should depend on the likelihood of finding more valuable uses for the divested assets or the ability on the part of the seller to eliminate negative synergies. We hypothesize that strong performers have less scope to achieve substantial improvements compared to poorly performing firms. Using the seller’s stock return in excess of the market return in the 1-year and 2-year periods preceding the divestiture announcement to expose the divesting firm’s inefficient use of its assets, we show that the market reaction to divestiture announcements is significantly higher for underperforming firms. The difference in abnormal returns can be as high as 4 %. In contrast, none of the accounting-based variables that have been used in previous studies are found to be significantly related to the announcement returns. These results suggest that the firm’s stock performance is a more useful indicator of the wealth effect associated with divestitures.     

股市“财富效应”对我国货币政策的影响

伴随着中国证券市场的长足发展 ,股市的“财富效应”也日益显著。本文从分析股市“财富效应”及“财富负效应”影响货币政策的机制入手 ,进而探讨了其对我国现行货币政策的冲击 ,并相应提出了几点政策建议。     

Selection into and across credit contracts: Theory and field research

Lenders may choose to encourage borrower side contracting using group, or co-signed, loans or discourage it using individual loans, so as to make relative performance comparisons. In this context wealth of the agents relative to outsiders, and wealth inequality among potential joint liability partners, are important factors determining the choice among loan contracts. In a related model of whether to borrow, higher covariance of returns mitigates an adverse selection effect. We test these models using relatively rich data gathered in field research in Thailand. The prevalence of joint liability contracts relative to individual contracts exhibits a U-shaped relationship with the wealth of the borrowing household and increases with the wealth dispersion. The likelihood of joint-liability borrowing increases the lower is the probability of project success, a direct affirmation of adverse selection. Higher correlation across projects makes joint liability borrowing more likely relative to all other alternatives. Strikingly, most of the results disappear if we do not condition the sample according to the dictates of the models, with selection into and across credit contracts.     

中国股市的最大值效应

本文证实我国股市的投资者们长期存在对股票历史业绩的反应过度现象。我们发现历史上拥有最高收益率的股票在之后业绩都表现不佳。其主要原因是我国股市的投资者们在做投资选择时都遵循一条简单的规则:即在其他条件都相同的情况下,选择拥有最高的历史收益率的股票进行投资。集中投资使拥有最高的历史收益率的股票被过高评价,导致其后来的业绩表现要比那些拥有较低历史收益率的股票差。我们称之为"最大值效应"。通过使用Fama and Macbeth(1973)横断面回归分析方法,我们确认了"最大值效应"要比CAPM理论,Blitz and Pim van Vliet(2007)发现的"波动性效应"等更为有效地解释我国股市横断面股票收益率。     

中国股市财富效应静态和动态实证分析

本文利用2002—2008年的月度数据,利用协整分析、误差修正模型等现代计量经济方法和状态空间模型研究了中国股市财富效应问题。研究结果认为:从长期均衡关系看,我国股市财富效应是显著存在;从短期动态关系看,我国股市财富波动对全社会消费支出波动具有负影响但不显著;从股市财富的边际消费倾向的动态过程看,我国股市财富效应始终存在,但挤出效应同样显著。     

RISE OF THE FIDUCIARY STATE: A SURVEY OF SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND RESEARCH

We survey the literature documenting the rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), which, with assets under management of over $5.4 trillion at year‐end 2014, are a major force in global finance. Research papers have analyzed the evolution of SWFs from stabilization funds to stand‐alone wealth management funds; we both survey this research and show that more than 25 countries have launched or proposed new SWFs since January 2008. The most salient and controversial feature of SWFs is that they are state‐owned; we survey the existing literature on state ownership and discuss what this predicts about the efficiency and beneficence of government control of SWF assets. We discuss the documented importance of SWF funding sources (oil sales revenues versus excess reserves from export earnings) and survey the normative literature describing how SWFs should allocate funds. We then summarize the empirical literature studying how SWFs actually do allocate funds—across asset classes, geographically, and across industries. We document that most SWF equity investments in publicly traded firms involve cross‐border purchases of sizeable minority stakes (median around 20%) in target firms, with a strong preference for investments in the financial sector. Next, we assess empirical studies examining the impact of SWF stock investments on target firm financial and operating performance, and find universal support for a positive announcement period stock price increase of 1–3%. This, however, is significantly lower than the 5% abnormal return documented for stock purchases by comparable privately owned financial investors in recent studies, indicating a “sovereign wealth fund discount.” We conclude by summarizing the lessons of SWF research and pointing out unresolved issues.     

Optimal growth under model uncertainty

The optimal growth of a wealth process toward a goal is studied under ambiguous markets with first- and second-order moment uncertainties relating to stock returns. Optimal strategies and value functions are solved explicitly. A verification theorem is proved to show that the results solve the original stochastic control problem. Quantitative analyses of the investment strategies indicate that a rational individual with ambiguity aversion reduces market participation when return and volatility are uncorrelated, while there is an exception for synchronous return and volatility. The welfare of shorting a discounted reward is computed, which demonstrates that in an ambiguous pricing economy, investors can generate a positive premium via appropriate asset allocations.     

An information diffusion model for momentum effect based on investor wealth

We propose a private information diffusion model to explain the momentum, which considers different amounts of investor wealth and uses the proportion of informed investors’ wealth to measure information diffusion speed. Different distributions of investor wealth can lead to different information diffusion processes, and the speed of information diffusion is positively correlated with the concentration of investor wealth. Our empirical results reveal the relationship between momentum return and information diffusion speed by the S&P 500 stocks in two periods of the upmarket. The results show that stocks with faster information diffusion speed gain higher time-series momentum returns, especially under short holding period strategies. These results provide new evidence for the correlation between information diffusion and the momentum effect.     

The impact of reshoring decisions on shareholder wealth

Interest in reshoring, defined as the return of manufacturing and service operations from previously offshored locations to the U.S., has gained momentum recently. Yet, there is no academic evidence on the shareholder value implications of reshoring decisions. This paper analyzes the shareholder wealth effects of 37 reshoring decisions announced by U.S. firms during 2006–2015. Our results indicate that reshoring announcements result in positive abnormal stock returns. Mean (median) abnormal stock returns on reshoring announcements are 0.45% (0.29%), corresponding with a mean (median) market value change of $322.57 million ($31.60 million). Our findings imply that the benefits associated with the reshoring tend to outweigh the costs. This finding is relevant for firms faced with the decision of whether to move business activities from offshore to domestic locations. It is also of interest to policy makers who may seek to further stimulate the reshoring phenomenon.     

Rates of return to public agricultural research in 48 US states

The internal rate of return to public investment in agricultural R&D is estimated for each of the continental US states. Theoretically, our contribution provides a way of obtaining the returns to a local public good using Rothbart’s concept of virtual prices. Empirically, a stochastic cost function that includes own knowledge capital stock as well as spillover capital stock variables is estimated. Stochastic spatial dependency among states generated by knowledge spillovers is used to define the ‘appropriate’ jurisdictions. We estimate an average own-state rate of 17% and a social rate of 29% that compare well to the 9 and 12% average returns of the S&P500 and NASDAQ composite indexes during the same period.     

Liquidity, Its Origins and Effects

A bstract . Accumulation of wealth claims—financial assets —gives the owner the option of present or future consumption and serves as a fund for it or as a reserve "against unforeseen contingencies" (Katona). In the latter case it reflects income uncertainties and the difficulties of borrowing in any time of personal emergency, or corporate special need. The borrowing rate must always be less than the lending rate to offset transaction costs; this gives rise to a spectrum of interest rates as economies of scale operate in capital raising and capital investing to overcome costs of achieving and improving liquidity. Uncertainty is a psychosocial factor in financial markets which makes traditional static two-period models of limited value and requires dynamic multiperiod models for more comprehensive analyses.     

Profit opportunities with the American put-call parity when dividends are not expected

The objective of this research is to study borrowing and lending profit opportunities with the put-call parity of American options when dividends on the stock are not expected. Studying profit opportunities embedded in the put-call parity is intriguing because of their relative simplicity. The only assumptions necessary for the parity to hold are that option markets are frictionless and generate efficient prices of puts and calls around the underlying stock price. For this reason alone (parsimony of postulates) the put-call parity is a tempting vehicle for studying option market efficiency. In this work it is shown that both synthetic lending and borrowing parities (before and after transaction costs), on average and ex post, have negative expected profits (i.e. put-call parity implied rates are inferior to the observed riskless rate). When certain trading rules are established, however, empirical evidence of substantial profit opportunities with both lending and borrowing with the American parity (even after considering transaction costs) is observed. It is also shown that these opportunities are greater for some stocks than for others. The existence of these disparities might be an indication that the pricing mechanism of the respective options is not always in sync. The duration of disequilibrium between the options market and the stock market suggests that such occurrences are not just random bursts.