What happens to land price when a rural construction land market legally opens in China? A spatiotemporal analysis of Nanhai district from 2010 to 2015

Urban and rural construction land markets in China, the two formerly separated markets, are beginning to be unified in some pilot areas. So far, but little is known about the associated land market development patterns and what factors influence land market price. In order to examine the impact of urban developers' access to legal rural construction land market on land price, we analyzed the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of price trends for the rural-urban land market in Nanhai district, Guangdong Province, between 2010 and 2015. We collected 2285 land transaction data during that span and mapped price contour lines for the rural-urban development land market in the whole district by using spatial interpolation techniques. Four hedonic price models, on rural and urban construction land respectively, were developed to measure the marginal effects of land attributes on price. Results from the analysis suggest that, temporally, the prices of rural-urban development land grew rapidly between 2010 and 2015. Spatially, prices spread along a gradient from east to west, and the prices in North Nanhai district were significantly higher than those in the south. The hedonic models also suggest that land use type, lot size, and various spatial characteristics impact rural and urban land prices. Overall, this research presented here contributes our understanding of the complex nature of establishing a unified land market in China.     

Assessing the price dynamics of onshore and offshore RMB markets: An ITS model approach

This paper investigates how the price dynamics of both onshore and offshore RMB markets are affected by fundamental determinants, market liquidity, global risk aversion and policies by using daily data from August 2010 to February 2016. The interval time series (ITS) modelling is applied to study the RMB price mechanism by capturing prices of the two markets as one self-formed interval data. An interval-based Wald test is constructed to examine the differences between the coefficients and an interval-based Mallows criterion is proposed for choosing appropriate explanatory variables. We find that both the price level and the price differences of onshore and offshore RMB markets are greatly affected by economic fundamentals indicated by different returns on stock indexes and market liquidity indicated by bid-ask prices of offshore market price. In addition, it is suggested that the interest rate spread between China and the US and the global risk appetite do not significantly affect the RMB price for both onshore and offshore markets. Finally, the results imply that “811 reform” of the RMB exchange rate regime does not change the fundamental price dynamics of RMB markets, but significantly changes how economic fundamentals affect the price mechanism of RMB exchange rate.     

The international political economy of early modern copper mercantilism: Rent seeking and copper money in Sweden 1624–1776

In 1624–1776 Sweden minted intrinsic value copper coins, alongside silver coins. One purpose behind introducing the copper standard was to use its monopoly position at the European markets to manipulate the international copper prices, implementing a kind of copper mercantilism. This paper presents a model of an early modern copper monopolist that could price discriminate between two different uses for copper: copper for export and copper for minting. The paper concludes that authorities did not completely conform to this rent-seeking model, since there were also other considerations behind minting policy, such as providing a stable monetary system. The model shows that under profit-maximisation minting should have been even higher and the price of copper money lower, but at periods minting and prices approached the optimal state. In the 17th century, the market for copper money was probably too small relative the huge copper production, but by the 1720s and 1730s, when copper production had declined, the copper standard functioned more smoothly.     

The emergence of agricultural commodity markets in China

By conscious design, reformers in China only gradually focused their efforts on expanding the role of markets for the allocation of goods and services in the economy. As a result, markets—especially in the agricultural sector—developed slowly. Throughout the 1990s there was a heated debate about the degree to which markets had emerged. The main goal in this paper is to bring together a number of simple and revealing facts on the emergence of China's markets. To do so we examine several sets of price data and analyze spatial patterns of market prices contours over time and text the extent to which market prices are integrated among China's regions. According to our analysis, we find that to a remarkable degree, agricultural commodity markets have emerged; price patterns look much like those in market economies in the rest of the world and prices are highly integrated across space.     

我国黄金市场期货价格与现货价格的实证研究

选取近10年的黄金期货价格数据和现货价格数据进行分析。对两组时间序列数据进行单位根检验、协整性检验以此分析期货和现货之间的关系,并建立误差修正模型分析期货价格对现货价格的影响程度,通过格兰杰因果检验分析两者之间的效应。结果表明,近十年黄金的期货和现货价格之间确实存在协整关系,两者之间相互影响,影响效果显著性不强。期货价格对现货价格的指导作用效果不强,表明我国期货市场的价格发现作用没有完全发挥。     

Commodity option pricing efficiency before Black,Scholes, and Merton

It is often thought that the arrival of the Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) model of option pricing in the early 1970s allowed traders to understand how to price and value options with greater precision. However, our study suggests that interwar commodity options traders may have been able to intuit ‘fair’ value and to adjust their prices to changes in the market environment well before the advent of this innovative model. A scarcity of historical price data has limited empirical tests of option price efficiency well before BSM to studies of stock options in the 1870s and the early twentieth century which revealed contrasting findings. This study deals with option pricing in a different market—commodities—during the interwar period. We conclude that option prices were closer to their BSM theoretical values than prior studies suggest. Institutional differences between interwar commodity options markets and stock options markets in the 1870s and the early twentieth century may partly account for this result. Furthermore, we find that interwar option prices were no more mispriced than in modern times, and were as sensitive to changes in volatility—the key valuation parameter in the BSM model.     

Libéralisation du commerce et intégration spatiale des marchés: Le cas du maïs au Togo

Abstract: The cereal market of Togo was liberalized in 1987. This policy aims to improve markets' spatial integration through the development of arbitrage. The paper assesses the extent of maize market spatial integration in order to understand how it has been affected by price liberalization. The monthly retail maize prices collected on 13 markets for the period from 1980 to 2001 are considered. The results show that the impact of price liberalization on markets integration is moderate. The liberalization has not significantly improved the extent of long‐run and short‐run integration of maize markets. The speed of price adjustment is relatively weak for most of the markets. In order to improve market efficiency, it is suggested that the government should create a market information service (SIM) which will be entrusted in collecting and disseminating weekly cereal prices all over the country.     

Mechanical Refrigeration and the Integration of Perishable Commodity Markets

In this paper, we provide a history of the economic impact of mechanical refrigeration in the United States. We also examine spatial and temporal aspects of market integration. Specifically, we examine seasonal fluctuations in prices and analyze regional integration of markets for butter. We test the null hypothesis of no integration before and after the advent and adoption of refrigerated shipping and warehousing using 31 years of monthly data. We find strong evidence of spatially integrated markets after adoption. Our results indicate that the adoption of mechanical refrigeration brought about a significant dampening of seasonal fluctuations of butter prices and a tightening of spatial price linkages. We conclude that the adoption of mechanical refrigeration had a significant impact on both temporal and spatial butter price relationships.     

The Efficiency of the Chinese Commodity Futures Markets： Development and Empirical Evidence

I. Introduction In the early 1980s China set about transforming its moribund economy by adopting, in stages, various elements of the market-based systems. Among the reforms were thederegulation of prices and the introduction of financial markets for assets. The first stock market was set up in Shanghai in 1991 and in the same year the first commodities market opened in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. Since then, both the stock market and the commodities futures markets have expanded substantiall…     

Asset Price Bubbles: Existence,Persistence and Migration

Econometric tests are performed for the detection and migration of asset‐price bubbles in the housing, currency and stock markets of seven countries. This set of countries includes both developed and emerging economies that have good historical data on housing prices. Our empirical results suggest that this type of exuberant behaviour in prices occurs more frequently in the housing market than in the currency and stock markets. Additionally, we find significant evidence of bubble migration across markets within some of the studied countries.     

Spatial Equilibrium of Wheat Markets in Ethiopia

Abstract: Knowledge about the extent to which spatial markets are integrated is useful to assess the impact of liberalization policies on the performance of agricultural markets in the developing countries. In turn, this would help to guide subsequent interventions aimed at improving the performance of markets. Cointegration techniques provide an analytical framework to know whether markets are integrated, by making it possible to investigate the existence and magnitude of price transmission between spatial markets. This study tries to analyze the spatial equilibrium of wheat markets in Ethiopia by employing an autoregressive distributed‐lag modeling approach to cointegration analysis on wheat prices observed during the post‐liberalization period for the central wholesale market (Addis Ababa) and for a local market (Ambo). The major finding of a stable equilibrium relationship between the price series considered provides evidence of market integration. Since intervention in local markets is generally costly and less effective, the result suggests the possibility of targeting intervention at the central wholesale market level with the objective of influencing price dynamics in the local markets.     

Fundamentals and the volatility of real estate prices in China: A sequential modelling strategy

In a similar way to the stock market, the housing market in China has often been portrayed as highly speculative, giving rise to “bubble” concerns. Over the last decade, residential prices increased every year on average by double digits in Beijing or Shanghai. However many observers and researchers argue that fundamentals of the housing sector, both sector-specific and macroeconomic, may have been the driving force behind housing price volatility. While existing empirical work exclusively relies on the government housing prices which may suffer from the well-documented downward bias, this paper uses original high frequency unit price as well as transaction series for the residential resale housing markets of Beijing and Shanghai between January 2005 and December 2010 to test alternative hypotheses about housing prices volatility.We propose a sequential strategy in five steps integrating several techniques previously developed in a piecemeal and scattered way. First, we construct daily hedonic prices. Second, in order to search for the possible presence of bubbles on such high-frequency data, we propose using recently developed tests of an explosive root as an alternative to the unit root hypothesis. The third step is generated by the necessity of handling microstructure noise present at a daily frequency, thus filtering the raw data to extract a random walk component. The fourth step extracts a slowly changing monthly volatility component from the filtered daily hedonic real estate data. Finally, in so far as the presence of bubbles does not seem to characterize the residential housing market in major Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, in a fifth step we show that fundamentals are able to explain slowly changing volatility, as well as transaction volumes in these first‐tier cities.     

Price competition under universal service obligations

In industries like telecom, postal services or energy provision, universal service obligations (uniform price and universal coverage) are often imposed on one market participant. Universal service obligations are likely to alter firms' strategic behavior in such competitive markets. In the present paper, we show that, depending on the entrant's market coverage and the degree of product differentiation, the Nash equilibrium in prices involves either pure or mixed strategies. We show that the pure strategy market sharing equilibrium, as identified by Valletti, Hoernig, and Barros (2002), defines a lower bound on the level of equilibrium prices.     

Contrarian Investment in the Dutch Stock Market

The efficient markets hypothesis states that at any times security prices fully reflect all available information. Contrarian investment strategies do not recognize the efficiency of capital markets. They call for buying undervalued stocks, i.e. stocks with a low price relative to their fundamentals. The idea behind such a strategy is to take advantage of the extrapolation behaviour of naive investors. Using a fresh and extensive data set from the Dutch stock market, we found that these strategies yield an outperformance without a higher risk. Our results make it hard to maintain the efficient market hypothesis.     

Positive Feedback Trading Under Stress: Evidence from the US Treasury Securities Market

Abstract

A vector autoregression (VAR) is estimated on tick-by-tick data for quote-changes and signed trades of 2-year, 5-year and 10-year on-the-run US Treasury notes. Confirming the results found by Hasbrouck and others for the stock market, signed order flow tends to exert a strong effect on prices. More interestingly, however, there is often a strong effect in the opposite direction, particularly at times of volatile trading. Price declines elicit sales and price increases elicit purchases. An examination of tick-by-tick trading on an especially volatile day confirms this finding. At least in the US Treasury market, trades and price movements appear likely to exhibit positive feedback at short horizons, particularly during periods of market stress. This suggests that the standard analytical approach to the microstructure of financial markets, which focuses on the ways in which the information possessed by informed traders becomes incorporated into market prices through order flow, should be complemented by an account of how price changes affect trading decisions.     

Price and Volume Reactions to Public Information Releases: An Experimental Approach Incorporating Traders' Subjective Beliefs*

This paper examines how market prices, volume, and traders' dividend expectations respond to public information releases in laboratory markets for a long-lived financial asset. The objective is to study deviations from the symmetric information risk-neutral rational expectations (RE) benchmark, which predicts no trade in such settings. The results of a series of double-auction and call markets are reported in which traders manage a portfolio of cash and asset shares over 15 rounds of trading. A public signal regarding the value of the liquidating dividend is released every third round, and traders' subjective expectations of the liquidating dividend are elicited each round as cash-motivated forecasts. We find that, despite the public dividend signal, traders' dividend forecasts are heterogeneous. Forecasts and prices both underreact to the public signals, with prices under-reacting more than forecasts. In general, price changes are not closely associated with public signals, and there is greater excess price volatility in double auctions than in call markets. Forty-three percent of trades are inconsistent with the trader's forecasts, and inconsistent trades occur more frequently in the double-auction markets. On average, approximately 10 percent of the outstanding shares are traded in each round, and trading volume is increasing in the mean absolute forecast revision and decreasing in the contemporaneous dispersion in forecasts. These results suggest that differential processing of the public signal and/or speculative trading for short-term gain may help to explain why symmetric information RE predictions are often not supported in empirical and experimental settings. They also suggest that market reactions to public information releases may be influenced by market microstructure.     

Entry deterrence when the potential entrant is your competitor in a different market

In this article, we present a two‐period model in which one firm operates in two markets: a monopoly and a duopoly. Assuming that this firm has private information on the cross‐price elasticity of demand between the products sold in both markets, it limits its quantity supplied in the monopoly market in order to make its rival in the other market believe that entry into the monopolized market is unprofitable. As a result of this strategy, the average prices observed in both markets increase. This result suggests that the detrimental effects of entry deterrence on consumers' welfare are stronger than those predicted by previous literature.     

中美农产品市场整合及其价格传导机制研究——以大豆市场为例

本文在对中国和美国大豆价格进行格兰杰因果关系检验的基础上,运用VAR模型分析中美两国大豆市场动态的相互影响关系,并探索当面临由外部冲击所导致的上涨压力时,两个大豆市场分担上涨压力的贡献情况;之后运用VECH和TARCH模型分析中美大豆价格波动的传导机制和对称性问题。主要结论如下:首先,中美大豆市场相互影响,互为因果,但美国大豆市场对中国大豆市场的冲击要强于中国大豆市场对美国大豆市场的影响,且美国大豆市场应对外部冲击的能力要强于中国。其次,美国大豆价格的波动主要依靠上期自身波动的传导,而中国大豆价格波动更易受外部冲击的影响;美国大豆价格波动趋于收敛,而中国大豆价格波动趋于发散。再次,中美大豆市场的联合波动也主要受外部冲击影响,两个市场的整合机制较为脆弱。最后,中美大豆价格波动均体现出非对称的特征。     

Stock Prices, Output and the Monetary Regime

Should monetary policy react to stock prices? The answer depends on whether stock prices are good predictors of future economic activity. Using long annual time-series data for the G-7 countries, data going back over 150 years for some countries, we find that stock prices do not systematically predict output growth regardless of the monetary regime in effect. We also find no evidence of a nonlinear relationship between stock prices and output except during the gold standard, when stock price booms and busts had some predictive power for output growth volatility.     

Stock prices and the efficient market hypothesis: Evidence from a panel stationary test with structural breaks

This paper investigates whether the efficient market hypothesis holds in stock markets under different economic development levels over the period January 1999 to May 2007. We employ a state-of-the-art panel data stationarity test which incorporates multiple structural breaks. Evidence indicates that when accommodating general forms of cross-sectional dependence as well as controlling for finite-sample bias, the real stock price series appear to be stationary in 32 developed and 26 developing countries, respectively, which is in sharp contrast to the findings in the existing literature. Thus, real stock price indices are stationary processes that are inconsistent with the efficient market hypothesis. This shows the presence of profitable arbitrage opportunities among stock markets. According to these estimated structural breakpoints, we are also able to discover the reason for why there has been a huge impact from past stock prices.