Belief aggregation for representative agent models

Representative agent models pin down equilibrium asset prices of an underlying heterogeneous agents economy through the utility maximization problem of a representative agent evaluated at aggregate endowment levels. This paper considers a complete markets asset exchange economy in which all economic agents are expected utility maximizers who share the same risk preferences but may have heterogeneous endowments and beliefs. For arbitrary well-behaved Bernoulli utility functions we derive belief aggregation formulas that characterize the beliefs of an expected utility maximizing representative agent.     

Great crashes in history: have they lessons for today?

Crashes in asset markets have been common throughout history,while financial crises, defined as crises in the banking system,have in some countries and periods been as common, and in othersmuch more rare. This article examines historical attitudes tothose events, and looks at some of the events themselves. Itis concluded first, that crashes need not inevitably be followedby crises; second, that crashes without crises do not have seriouseffects on the economy; and third, that there is a policy instrument,the lender of last resort, to prevent financial crises fromoccurring even should there be a substantial preceding fallin asset markets. These lessons from history, so it is argued,hold for recent events in South-east Asia and, indeed, applygenerally to any economy. The present can still learn from thepast.     

Collateral or utility penalties?

In a two-period economy with incomplete markets and possibility of default we consider the two classical ways of enforcing the honoring of financial commitments: by using utility penalties and by using collateral requirements that borrowers have to fulfill. First, we prove that any equilibrium in an economy with collateral requirements is also an equilibrium in a non-collateralized economy where each agent is penalized in their utility if his or her delivery rate is lower than the payment rate of the financial market. Second, we prove the converse: any equilibrium in an economy with utility penalties is also an equilibrium in a collateralized economy. For this to be true, the payoff function and initial endowments of the agents must be modified in a quite natural way. Finally, we prove that the equilibrium in the economy with collateral requirements attains the same welfare as in the new economy with utility penalties.     

Asset market hangovers and economic growth: the OECD during 1984-93

Asses prices and investment were unusually weak throughout theindustrial world during the early 1990s. This paper highlightsthis stylized fact, and connects it with another: in most ofthe industrial world, asset markets boomed for several yearsbefore collapsing around 1989. The paper suggests that assetmarket bubbles during the late 1980s may have left the industrialworld with an 'asset market hangover' in the early 1990s, inthe form of sluggish asset markets and investment. Empiricalsupport for this hypothesis is provided based on cross-countrydata for equity and real estate markets in most industrial countries.We suggest that financial market developments not justifiedby fundamentals can substantially affect real activity.     

Determinants of bond market development in Asia

One of the major reasons behind the Asian financial crisis in 1997 was the excessive dependence of the Asian economies on commercial banks for domestic financing. The region failed to diversify its sources of corporate financing as it relied mainly on banks since its other types of financing, namely bond markets, were still underdeveloped and their sizes were quite small. On the other hand, the 2008 global financial crisis and the ongoing European debt crisis have led to constraints in acquiring local currency and foreign currency liquidity in the corporate sector in Asia as foreign banks withdrew investments from Asia. Furthermore, Asia needs large long term capital (US$ 750 billion per year for 2010–2020) for developing infrastructure connectivity within and across its economies. Local and regional capital can be channeled for long-term infrastructure projects and other productive investment through bond markets. Having a well-developed local currency bond markets can enhance the resilience of domestic financial sector to external shocks and it can facilitate better intermediation of savings into productive investments in Asia. To enhance corporate bond financing, it is important to examine factors that affect the effective development of bond markets in Asia. The study attempts to identify the determinants of bond market development in Asian economies through examining the relationship of bond issuance with selected key financial and economic factors. It also intends to provide policy recommendations for the further development of the Asian bond market. Major determinants for bond market development in Asia include the size of an economy, the stage of economic development, the openness of an economy, the exchange rate variability, the size of the banking system, and interest rate variability.     

An economic rationale for a system of loglinear asset demand functions

Summary In this paper we derived a system of asset demand functions from an expected utility maximization model, in which the utility function satisfies both the decreasing absolute risk aversion as well as the increasing relative risk aversion criteria. The rates of return are assumed to be distributed as a multivariate log-normal distribution. It is shown that a system of log-linear asset demand functions follows from the exact model as an approximation and performs better than similar types of linear asset demand functions which follow from a negative exponential utility function.I am grateful to Professor A. R. Bergstrom and Mr. R. E. Bailey for their comments on an earlier draft. Comments from the referee of this journal helped me to improve my presentation. I am also grateful to Professor R. Bandyopadhyay for his comments. I am solely responsible for any errors.     

The Stock Market,Monetary Policy,and Economic Development

In this article, we examine the impact of financial market development on the level of economic development. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where individuals face idiosyncratic risk. Incomplete information also provides a transaction role for money so that monetary policy can be studied. While an active banking sector promotes risk sharing, we incorporate a market for equity by allowing individuals to trade capital across generations. In this manner, each asset and financial market in our model fulfills a distinct economic function. Consistent with recent empirical work, we find that the impact of access to a stock market may be indeterminate—the economy may respond with significant gains in capital accumulation and risk sharing, or there may be relatively little impact. We also show that the effects of monetary policy vary across the level of financial development. In economies with small stock markets, increasing the amount of liquidity will cause capital accumulation to decline. By comparison, in advanced economies, capital accumulation improves.     

Empirical study on intra-regional bond investment: an application to East Asia

Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, bond market development has been one of the central pillars of financial cooperation in East Asia, with concerted efforts made by the East Asian economies to integrate regional bond markets. As a result, aggregate intra-regional bond investment expanded from US$49.56 billion in 2003 to US$352.18 billion in 2017. This paper examines the pattern and determinants of intra-regional bond investment in East Asia. We analyse regional foreign holdings of long-term and short-term bonds in eight East Asian economies. Bond market size turns out to be the main concern of regional foreign investors participating in East Asian long-term bond markets. This analysis also highlights the importance of bond issuance and bond yield volatility in attracting regional foreign short-term bond investment. Therefore, initiatives to improve regional bond market development may be crucial to stimulating intra-regional bond investment and in turn enhance East Asian financial stability.     

Integration between the London and New York Stock Exchanges, 1825–1925

In this article the integration between the London and New York Stock Exchanges is analysed during the era when they were still developing as asset markets. The domestic securities on both exchanges showed little sustained integration, even when controlling for the different characteristics of stocks, which implies that the pricing of securities in the US and UK was still being driven by local factors. These results place a limit on the view that the pre‐First World War period was the first era of globalization in terms of capital markets. However, there was considerable integration between New York and those listings on London that operated internationally. This suggests that the listing of foreign securities may be one of the primary mechanisms driving asset market integration.     

A Market-Clearing Classroom Experiment

This paper describes a classroom experiment demonstrating the price mechanism and the clearing of markets in an endowment economy. Participants receive random endowments of two goods they may trade in order to maximize a given utility function. A market-clearing price is reached when no mutually beneficial trades are possible. The outcome is truly endogenous, with no reservation prices or willingness to trade imposed on the participants. A problem set allows the participants to study the equilibrium outcome analytically. The experiment can be used in intermediate micro- and macroeconomic courses.     

Equity,Bonds, Institutional Debt and Economic Growth: Evidence from South Africa

We examine the finance‐growth nexus in South Africa accounting for the role of bond markets, stock markets, and bank and non‐bank financial intermediaries using a vector autoregressive technique. Extant empirical literature has largely accounted for only banks and stock markets, ignoring bond market and non‐bank financial intermediaries. We find that bond market development affects economic growth in South Africa, and no similar effect is observed for the bank and non‐bank financial intermediaries and the stock market. Our finding shows that examination of individual elements of the financial system is important in understanding the unique effect of each on growth. The observation that the bond market rather than stock market, bank and non‐bank institutions promote economic growth in South Africa induces an intriguing question as to what unique roles bond markets play that the intermediaries and equity market are unable to play.     

Money and banking in a mature Walrasian economy

All financial transactions in the original Walrasian economy, as written in the édition définitive of the éléments, occur in the markets for short-term money services (the short-term bond market) and commodity E (the equity market). However, introduction of the long-term bond and the deposit markets requires only minor surgery to the original and they are now supplied, inspiring the name mature Walrasian economy. Transactions in numeraire then entail all institutions of the banking system and provide completely for money and credit. Into this economy the condition of inconvertibility, a discretionary numeraire with reserve requirements, and a central bank are introduced and clarified. Finally, multiple monetary subsystems in the same global economy are recognized and reconciled, thus establishing a global economy with a single numeraire commodity.     

Systemic Risks Spillovers and Interdependence among Stock Markets: International Evidence with Covar‐Copulas

Empirical studies have provided ample evidence on the potential benefits of international diversification with portfolios that consist of both domestic and foreign assets. This coupled with sudden and periodic crashes in global and developed equity markets have stimulated the interest of investors to diversify across markets that have the potential to provide decorrelation with global markets during turbulent periods. At the same time, international diversification may intensify cross‐border listing of stocks with its antecedent implication of shocks transmission. The above have engendered renewed interest among researchers to explore the dependence levels and spillover effects of shocks among emerging and developed equity markets. This paper examines tail dependence structure and (extreme) systemic risks spillover effects among international equity markets using advanced econometric techniques that underpin the modelling of asset returns. We find evidence of low positive significant dependencies between all African markets and their developed counterparts, except for Egypt. Although no evidence of spillover effects to the markets in Africa was found, both unidirectional and bi‐directional causality between some African and developed equity markets is found, albeit with differences. We are unable to ascribe the dynamics in the causality structure to level of market integration. It is inferred that the degree of individual local markets interdependence with developed counterparts may reflect the relative size, liquidity and degree of foreign investors' participation.     

基于在岸金融市场视角的日元国际化进程与启示

最近几年,日元国际化程度不见提高,反而不断被边缘化,成为国际经济活动中的非主流货币。为此,文章从微观角度研究日本国内金融市场对日元国际化进程的支持力度。研究发现,受国内经济长期衰退影响,日本股票市场表现不及其他发达市场;其债券市场发展不平衡,国债市场独大,公司债券市场萎靡,并且资本项目开放不完全限制了债券市场发展;其衍生品市场也缺乏国际竞争力。换言之,日本在岸金融市场发展直接制约了日元国际化进程。     

Evidence that Prices Do Not Fully Reflect the Implications of Current Earnings for Future Earnings: An Experimental Markets Approach*

Abstract. Analysts have been found to underweight the innovation in the most recent quarterly earnings when forecasting next-quarter earnings, and these expectations have been posited as an explanation for post-earnings-announcement drift. This study uses an experimental asset market to examine whether similar errors in forecasting quarterly earnings are made by student-subjects. We examine two aspects of their behavior: (1) do subjects underestimate the autocorrelation in quarterly earnings when forming earnings expectations? and (2) are asset prices consistent with a subject's underestimation of the autocorrelation in quarterly earnings? We observe subject errors in forecasts that underweight extreme innovations in the most recent quarterly earnings by approximately 40 percent. The prices in the experimental markets also fail to reflect fully the most recent innovation in quarterly earnings. We are able to predict the sign of the incorrect pricing, from the mean initial earnings predictions of the subjects, in 74 percent of the 135 markets. These forecast errors observed in this study are consistent with forecast errors observed for analysts, and this consistency suggests that errors in analysts' forecasts may be at least partially attributable to the use of judgmental heuristics.     

石油化工企业债券融资探讨

作为资本密集型的国民经济基础行业,石化行业的资金约束是制约其经营发展和战略升级的主要因素之一。随着我国市场经济的发展和资本市场的不断完善,企业债券融资作为一种重要的直接融资方式,正以其广泛的资金来源、较低的融资成本等优势愈来愈受到各方重视。本文以1996～2011年间发债石化企业数据为基础,对石化企业融资结构和债券发行情况进行分析,对石化企业通过债券融资的优势进行阐述,同时结合现有法律法规及市场条件对石化企业债券发行及定价问题进行探讨。     

Experience and Confidence in an Internet‐Based Asset Market Experiment

The experience effect in asset markets is one that was thought to be settled. As subjects gained experience with the interface and each other, they typically exhibit fewer instances of mispricing and at lower magnitudes. But questions regarding trading experience are not easy to address in the lab with the typical subject pool since the kind of experience one can typically generate in the lab is experience with the experimental environment itself—not with external environments. However, in virtual worlds asset markets are highly evolved, providing a subject pool with skilled and experienced traders that can be accessed via the Internet. This study compares experimental asset markets with participants recruited from virtual world trading groups to experimental markets with participants recruited from the virtual world at large. I further examine trader performance and trading behavior within markets. The findings indicate that asset markets with virtual world participants recruited from trading groups are more prone to exhibit bubbles than are markets with virtual world participants recruited at large. Within condition, experienced traders are less likely to follow fundamentals and more likely to engage in strategies that result in loss of earnings. Excess confidence is rejected as an explanation for this pattern, as confidence is found to be related to higher earnings and fundamental value trading strategies.     

中国资产价格膨胀与日本泡沫经济的比较与启示

近年来,中国资产价格上涨已经引起了国内外广泛关注,这与日本泡沫经济前期的情况如出一辙。_良好的经济基本面、宽松的资金面和市场信心是推动中日两国资产价格上涨的共同因素。而中日两国长期实行出口导向型经济发展战略,依靠间接融资的金融体制,成为导致两国资产价格膨胀的深层次原因。与日本相比,中国资产价格膨胀可以在较大程度上化解,不会重蹈日本资产泡沫破灭的覆辙。但短时间内资产价格过快上涨,成为经济增长和金融稳定的潜在风险,为此,中国应该积极总结日本泡沫经济时期的经验教训,从日本政府的应对政策中得出重要的启示。     

A Quantitative Assessment of the Role of Incomplete Asset Markets on the Dynamics of the Real Exchange Rate

I develop a two-country New Keynesian model with capital accumulation and incomplete international asset markets that provides novel insights on the effect that imperfect international risk-sharing has on international business cycles and RER dynamics. I find that business cycles appear similar whether international asset markets are complete or not when driven by a combination of non-persistent monetary shocks and persistent productivity (TFP) shocks. In turn, international asset market incompleteness has sizeable effects if (persistent) investment-specific technology (IST) shocks are a main driver of business cycles. I also show that the model with incomplete international asset markets can approximate the RER volatility and persistence observed in the data, for instance, if IST shocks are near-unit-root. Hence, I conclude that the nature of shocks, the extent of financial integration across countries and the existing limitations on asset trading are central to understand the dynamics of the real exchange rate and the endogenous international transmission over the business cycles.     

Municipal bonds as alternatives to PPPs: Facilitating direct municipal access to private capital

The advantages of using municipal bonds to finance urban infrastructure are becoming increasingly evident to policy makers in emerging economies, many of whom are making efforts to accelerate the development of municipal bond markets in their countries. Municipal bonds are sometimes viewed as a less expensive way of financing infrastructure than by public‐private partnerships (PPPs), or methods that maintain greater public control over projects and service provision. The objective of this article is to place current efforts by the South African government to promote municipal bond market development in an international context. This is done by briefly reviewing the advantages local governments experience by issuing municipal bonds to finance infrastructure; discussing some experiences of other countries in trying to accelerate the development of municipal bond markets; and reviewing the need and prospects for an active municipal debt market in South Africa. The article also examines the extent to which municipal bonds should be thought of as alternatives to PPPs in an emerging economy context.