Overdeterminacy and Endogenous Cycles: Trygve Haavelmo's Business Cycle Model

The econometrician Trygve Haavelmo pursued a research programme in macroeconomic theory that was highly original for its time. We present his macro model for an economy with deregulated financial markets and a policy determined interest rate path. Disequilibria arise in the interface between asset markets and the real economy. A mismatch between the marginal return to capital and investors' required rate generates endogenous switching between recession and full employment regimes. Haavelmo regarded the ‘switching mechanism’ as a substitute for liquidity constraints, and together with his ideas of price dynamics, there is a clear Keynesian and Wicksellian influence on his macroeconomic theorizing.     

Betting the house

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to demonstrate that loose monetary conditions lead to booms in real estate lending and house prices' bubbles; these, in turn, materially heighten the risk of financial crises. Both effects have become stronger in the postwar era.     

Real and Financial Sector Interaction Under Liberalization in an Open Developing Economy

A short‐run model incorporates instantaneous portfolio equilibrium with macroeconomic flows to clarify the structure of real–financial sector interactions. If equity and foreign exchange markets are introduced in structuralist theories of asset markets in developing countries, the key result that a fall in money supply raises the rate of inflation now holds only under special conditions on partial derivatives. But there is a tendency for interest rates to rise and for fluctuations in asset prices. Fuller integration of asset markets moderates these fluctuations. Outcomes are stable in spite of the generalized complementarity distinguishing equity markets from loan markets. Expectations play a major role. Implications for policy are to link domestic interest rates to foreign, remove artificial barriers to market integration, and stimulate demand as well as supply.     

Assessing the asymmetric volatility linkages of energy and agricultural commodity futures during low and high volatility regimes

This study investigated the volatility linkages between energy and agricultural futures, including possible causes for these comovements, such as external macroeconomic and financial shocks during low and high volatility regimes. A combination of Markov-switching regressions and quadrivariate VAR–DCC–GARCH and VAR–BEKK–GARCH modeling revealed that external shocks have an asymmetric effect on the relationship of these assets with higher cross-correlations reported during high volatility regimes. This comovement effect outweighs the substitution effect between energy and agricultural products. Furthermore, the quadrivariate VAR–BEKK–GARCH model provides strong evidence of a bidirectional price volatility spillover between the agricultural and energy markets during periods of high volatility. Overall, the results suggest that energy futures can be effectively used for hedging in a portfolio comprising agricultural futures (and vice versa), while a combination of macroeconomic and financial index futures can serve as an effective hedging tool in investment portfolios comprising both energy and agricultural commodities.     

资产价格波动与金融稳定研究述评

资产价格波动与金融稳定的关系,一直是学术界研究的热点问题。近年来的研究认为资产价格波动与银行信贷的相互作用加强,进而日趋影响金融稳定;资产价格波动直接影响银行资本金和金融机构经营环境从而影响金融稳定;理论研究日益强调信息不对称以及“委托一代理”问题在资产价格波动影响金融稳定过程中的重要性。同时,大部份的实证研究都支持了资产价格波动对金融稳定具有重要影响的观点。一些学者就如何应对资产价格波动从而保持金融稳定的问题提出了针对性的建议。     

流动性视角下的非流通股定价策略分析

金融市场上的流动性对金融资产定价有重要作用。在Longstaff模型的基础上对“卖掉持有股票的权利”进行定价,可得出股票的流动性价格,进而得到非流通股的价格。通过分析可知非流通股的价格是禁售期的减函数,是流通股的增函数;股票的价格波动率越大,贷款利率与无风险利率的差越大,非流通股的价格是就越低;反之,非流通股的价格就越高。以我国股票市场的相关指数进行验证,上述结论依然成立。     

How do business and financial cycles interact?

This paper analyzes the interactions between business and financial cycles using an extensive database covering 44 countries for the period 1960:1–2010:4. Our analysis shows that there are strong linkages between the different phases of business and financial cycles. In particular, recessions associated with financial disruptions, notably house and equity price busts, tend to be longer and deeper than other recessions. Conversely, while recoveries following asset price busts tend to be weaker, recoveries associated with rapid growth in credit and house prices are often stronger. These findings emphasize the importance of financial market developments for the real economy.     

Retrospective on the Bubble Period and its Relationship to Developments in the 1990s

In reviewing what happened in the 1980s in Japan and how the bursting of the bubble created problems in the early 1990s, the following conclusions are obtained. (1) In order to limit damage to the economy from a bubble and its bursting, it is important to build a resilient financial system through strict supervision policy, so that asset‐price fluctuations would not weaken financial institutions. Supervision policy would include regulatory measures limiting lending concentration and exposure to real‐estate‐related sectors. (2) Monetary policy should pay attention to asset‐price movements. But it may be difficult and inappropriate to raise the interest rate sharply when inflation is low (below one per cent like in Japan), even though asset prices are increasing at 30–40 per cent. (3) The official discount rate could have been raised in the summer of 1988 in Japan, when the Federal Reserve and Bundesbank raised interest rates. This would have slowed down the rise of stock and land prices, but the bubble was already large by then. (4) The bubble in the second half of the 1980s was only partially responsible for the lost decade of the 1990s in Japan. A series of policy errors made a small problem of the burst bubble much bigger than necessary.     

银行信贷和资产价格泡沫的联动性——基于动态贷款价值比的分析

投资者借贷投资是现代金融市场的常态。信息不对称及其带来的风险收益不对称和风险转移问题,会造成资产价格泡沫。文章引入贷款价值比进一步扩展了Allen-Gale模型,并用贷款价值比的动态变化来说明资产价格泡沫生成的内在机理及其所产生的影响;通过对贷款价值比动态调整的模拟得出:贷款价值比越大,资产价格泡沫越大。因此,降低贷款价值比是遏制资产价格泡沫膨胀的关键。     

Early warning indicators of asset price boom/bust cycles in emerging markets

We apply recently developed early warning indicator systems to a cross-section of emerging markets. We find that, with little or no modification, models designed to predict asset price booms/busts in advanced countries may be useful for emerging markets. The concept of monitoring a set of asset prices, real activity and financial indicators is generally found to be efficacious. We also find that, in addition to this set of variables, early warning indicator systems for emerging countries may be augmented with capital flow indicators.     

China and Global Macroeconomic Interdependence

China is transitioning towards more inward‐focussed growth, causing adverse changes in the product and financial terms of trade in the advanced economies. At the same time, international financial markets tussle between tightening forces associated with the US recovery on the one hand and unconventional monetary expansion in Europe and Japan on the other. The way these shocks interact is examined in this paper using a global macromodel with national portfolio rebalancing and asset differentiation and a representation of unconventional monetary policy. Results are found to be sensitive to the contributions of productivity and capital accumulation to China's growth. When these are offered in realistic combination, the effects are deflationary in the United States and China, militating against contractionary US monetary policy. Monetary responses in the United States and China then combine with price targeting regimes in the EU and Japan to expand liquidity globally, amplifying impacts on financial markets and the global distribution of real investment.     

Are the dynamic linkages between the macroeconomy and asset prices time-varying?

We estimate a number of multivariate regime switching VAR models on a long monthly US data set for eight variables that include excess stock and bond returns, the real T-bill yield, predictors used in the finance literature (default spread and the dividend yield), and three macroeconomic variables (inflation, industrial production growth, and a measure of real money growth). Heteroskedasticity may be accounted for by making the covariance matrix a function of the regime. We find evidence of four regimes and of time-varying covariances. We show that the best in-sample fit is provided by a four state model in which the VAR(1) component fails to be regime-dependent. We interpret this as evidence that the dynamic linkages between financial markets and the macroeconomy have been stable over time. The four-state model can be helpful in forecasting applications and provides one-step ahead predicted Sharpe ratios.     

中国房地产市场过热与风险预警

从消费与投资两方面来说，1998年以来中国房地产市场的快速发展仅是以往“存量需求”的释放，而不是潜在需求真正地转化为有效需求。这一过程又主要依赖于银行信贷的支撑和代际收益的转移，这自然导致了中国房地产市场的虚假繁荣和价值的严重高估，造成房地产市场资产价格与价值的严重背离和房地产泡沫的出现。面对中国房地产价格快速飚升的威胁，为了避免房地产价格波动影响金融稳定以及国内经济的未来发展，首先要从金融体系的稳定性入手，建立房地产价格失衡预警指标体系、建立金融体系与宏观经济失衡的预警指标并提高金融机构风险测量能力。同时政府要在土地政策、信贷政策、税收政策和住房政策等方面采取积极的应对措施。     

资产价格、通货膨胀与货币政策的动态分析:理论与中国实践

传统的CPI和GDP平减指数仅仅涵盖了普通商品和服务,股票和房地产等资产价格上涨的因素并不包括在内。随着现代金融的不断深化,通货膨胀与资产价格的内在关系越来越被人们所关注。虽然刚刚经历了2008年的金融危机,2009年房地产价格仍然不断快速上涨,有关泡沫的言论不断升温。探寻资产价格变化与通货膨胀预期的内在关系,完善货币政策对于资产价格的反应机制,对于维护经济金融的平稳发展意义重大。     

Financial dollarization

We present a portfolio model of financial intermediation in which currency choice is determined by hedging decisions on both sides of a bank’s balance sheet. We show that minimum variance portfolio (MVP) allocations provide a natural benchmark to estimate the scope for dollarization of assets and liabilities (financial dollarization) as a function of macroeconomic uncertainty. Within this benchmark, we find that financial dollarization displays high persistence whenever the expected volatility of the inflation rate remains high in relation to that of the real exchange rate, even after price stabilization has been achieved. The empirical evidence confirms that MVP dollarization approximates financial dollarization closely for a broad sample of countries.     

银行信贷与宏观经济波动:2003—2009

基于中国宏观经济金融的现实环境,通过构建反映宏观经济变量之间内在联系的结构向量自回归(SVAR)模型,实证检验2003年以来银行信贷投放对中国宏观经济波动的影响。结果表明:一方面,中国信贷规模资金的投放对宏观经济的稳定发展产生了重要的推动作用,但是信贷投放对经济增长的冲击效应会随着时间的变化逐渐趋弱;另一方面,短期来看,信贷资金的大规模投放不会对物价水平的攀升产生影响,但由于其是物价变动的主要因素,在长期内,必须合理估计中国将来在物价水平调控方面可能面临的较大压力。     

固定汇率制度与浮动汇率制度下经济的自动稳定性

本文运用规范的开放宏观模型和比较静态分析方法,讨论了固定汇率制度或浮动汇率制度下、如果没有政策的干预,面对真实或名义瞬时冲击时的产出和物价的自动稳定性。分析表明,两种汇率制度下经济稳定表现与经济系统的结构参数有密切的关系,没有一个汇率制度在所有情形下都表现得最好。但对特定的发展中国家经济结构特征和外生冲击来源的可能性来说,相对于浮动汇率制度,固定汇率制度更利于经济的自动稳定。     

我国房地产价格与通货膨胀关系的实证分析

近年来,我国房地产等资产的价格高涨所引起的“资产泡沫型通货膨胀”现象比较明显。通过观察我国近年来房屋销售价格指数和居民消费价格指数的走势发现,房地产高涨与通货膨胀之间具有很大的联动作用。因此,研究房地产价格与通货膨胀的关系,寻找破解房地产价格高涨、缓解通货膨胀压力的方法,具有重要的学术研究价值和现实意义。本文利用Granger因果关系检验模型,验证了我国房地产价格与通货膨胀关系之间存在Granger因果关系,并围绕高房价是怎样影响通货膨胀的逻辑思路,提出破解高房价、缓解“资产泡沫型通货膨胀”压力的解决方法。     

THE PARADOX OF DEBT AND MINSKY'S FINANCIAL INSTABILITY HYPOTHESIS

Some authors have claimed that the paradox of debt invalidates Minsky's theory of financial instability. Their theoretical frameworks are radically different from Minsky's in several aspects. Important Minskian elements, the role of margins of safety as a basis of financial decisions and the effects of asset prices on debt dynamics, among others, are absent in the critics' frameworks. We maintain that the thrust of the paradox of debt‐based criticism to Minsky's theory has been exaggerated and key insights of Minsky's theory of financial instability can be formalized in an alternative macroeconomic framework. We provide a stock‐flow consistent model of Minskian long waves.     

Emerging Asia: Decoupling or Recoupling

In this paper, we investigate the degree of real economic interdependence between emerging East Asian and major industrial countries to shed light on the heated debate over the ‘decoupling’ of emerging East Asia. We first document the evolution of macroeconomic interdependence for emerging East Asian economies through changing trade and financial linkages at both the regional and global levels. Then, by employing a panel vector autoregression (VAR) model, we estimate the degree of real economic interdependence before and after the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis. Empirical findings show that real economic interdependence increased significantly in the post‐crisis period, suggesting ‘recoupling’, rather than decoupling, in recent years. Output shocks from major industrial countries have a significant positive effect on emerging East Asian economies. More interestingly, the reverse is also true. Output shocks from emerging East Asia (and China) have a significant positive effect on output in major industrial countries. The result suggests that macroeconomic interdependence between emerging East Asia and industrial countries have become ‘bi‐directional’, defying the traditional notion of the ‘North–South relationship’ as one of ‘uni‐directional’ dependence.