AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL DEBT

The treatment of debt in conventional economic theory is considered and compared with recent writings on the economics of self-control and cognitive dissonance. The paper considers factors influencing the level of debt, conditional on debt being greater than zero and goes on to report a multivariate analysis of a sample of individuals in this position. The data comes from the case records of money advisers in Citizens Advice Bureaux (CABS) in Staffordshire. The amount of debt is found to be correlated with indicators of life cycle and a measure of the exercise of self-control.     

A note on the hedging effectiveness of GARCH models

This note compares the hedging effectiveness of the conventional hedge ratio and time-varying conditional hedge ratios (of which GARCH ratio is a special case). It is shown that, in large sample cases, the conventional hedge ratio provides the best performance. For small sample cases, a sufficiently large variation in the conditional variance of the futures return is required to produce the opposite result. The result is due to the fact that the hedging effectiveness measure is based upon the unconditional variance; meanwhile, the conventional hedge ratio minimizes the unconditional variance and the conditional hedge ratio aims at minimizing the conditional variance.     

The 2007 financial crisis and the UK residential housing market: Did the relationship between interest rates and house prices change?

This paper investigates the impact of the 2007 financial crisis on the relationship between real mortgage interest rates and real house prices. It applies a dynamic conditional correlation based methodology that uses fractionally differenced data along with controls for structural breaks and non-interest-rate related factors that influence house prices. The key finding made is that the financial crisis had a long-term structural impact on the monetary transmission relationship. For example, we find that the mean conditional correlation between house prices in England and Wales and the three-year fixed mortgage rate rose by 6.6 percentage points. Similarly, the mean correlation between prices and the standard variable mortgage rate increased 6.4 percentage points to 54%. These findings suggest to us that interest-rate-based monetary policy still has an important role to play in the housing market.     

Reference-dependent subjective expected utility

A reference-dependent generalisation of subjective expected utility theory is presented. In this theory, preferences between acts depend both on final outcomes and on reference points (which may be uncertain acts). It is characterised by a set of axioms in a Savage-style framework. A restricted form of the theory separates attitudes to end states (encoded in a ‘satisfaction function’) from attitudes to gains and losses of satisfaction. Given weak additional assumptions, the restricted theory excludes cycles of choice, explains observed disparities between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept valuations of lotteries, and predicts preference reversal.     

Extending the Nash solution to choice problems with reference points

In 1985 Aumann axiomatized the Shapley NTU value by non-emptiness, efficiency, unanimity, scale covariance, conditional additivity, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. We show that, when replacing unanimity by “unanimity for the grand coalition” and translation covariance, these axioms characterize the Nash solution on the class of n-person choice problems with reference points. A classical bargaining problem consists of a convex feasible set that contains the disagreement point here called reference point. The feasible set of a choice problem does not necessarily contain the reference point and may not be convex. However, we assume that it satisfies some standard properties. Our result is robust so that the characterization is still valid for many subclasses of choice problems, among those is the class of classical bargaining problems. Moreover, we show that each of the employed axioms – including independence of irrelevant alternatives – may be logically independent of the remaining axioms.     

Thomas DeGregori’s “Back to the Future”: A Comment

A fundamental principle of Karl Polanyi's institutional outlook is that any economic system has to be considered as a whole and as a historically specific social organization. This principle implies a comparative method and a critique of conventional economics. Besides, the problem of the interrelation between the economic system and other aspects of social life cannot be avoided. On this basis, Polanyi points out the peculiar "economic" nature of the market-capitalist society and explains the institutional transformations characterizing its history. The opposition "embedded/disembedded," used by Polanyi to distinguish pre-modern economies from the market economy, has been widely adopted in recent times, particularly by economic sociologists, as a key for understanding current complex economic phenomena. However, the reference to Polanyi often presupposes a distorted interpretation of his theory, and a different kind of institutional approach.     

The pull of inter-provincial migration of rural labor force and its influence on policy-making

As a social phenomenon closely related to development of economy, the population is always the focis of economists＇ attention. Based on the fifth census in 2001, this paper analyzes labor migration in Hubet Provtnce and establishes an econometric model to analyze the pull according to the push and pull theory,, which is the famous theory on the population flow and migration. It points out that the per capita consumption and the employment rate attract strongly the rural labors and makes a deep exploration into the ensuing problems. Such conclusion is a special reference to the decision-making of government. The government can provide some guidance to the rural labors according to the per capita consumption and the employment rate in order to avoid the futility of blind migration.     

Liquidity-adjusted conditional capital asset pricing model

This paper derives a liquidity-adjusted conditional two-moment capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and a liquidity-adjusted conditional three-moment CAPM respectively based on theory of stochastic discount factor. The liquidity-adjusted conditional two-moment CAPM shows that a security's conditional expected excess return consists of three parts: its conditional expected liquidity cost, the systemic risk premium and the liquidity risk premium. The liquidity-adjusted conditional three-moment CAPM shows that a security's conditional expected excess return depends on its conditional expected liquidity cost, the conditional covariance between its return and the market return, the conditional covariance between its liquidity cost and the market liquidity cost, and the conditional coskewness of its return and the market return.     

Conditional belief types

We study type spaces where a player's type at a state is a conditional probability on the space. We axiomatize these spaces using conditional belief operators, examining three additional axioms of increasing strength. First, introspection, which requires the agent to be unconditionally certain of her beliefs. Second, echo, according to which the unconditional beliefs implied by the condition must be held given the condition. Third, determination, which says that the conditional beliefs are the unconditional beliefs that are conditionally certain. Echo implies that conditioning on an event is the same as conditioning on the event being certain, which formalizes the standard informal interpretation of conditional probability. The game-theoretic application of our model, discussed within an example, sheds light on a number of issues in the analysis of extensive form games. Type spaces are closely related to the sphere models of counterfactual conditionals and to models of hypothetical knowledge.     

Volatility spill-overs in commodity spot prices: New empirical results

The classical rational expectations model of commodity markets implies that expected spot price risk is an explanatory variable in spot price regressions; and also that inventory carryover, which is reduced by a larger price variance, creates autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic processes in spot prices. In order to falsify/verify this theory, it has typically been assumed that the square root of the conditional variance of spot prices, a proxy for spot price risk, enters the conditional mean function of spot prices. Based on this simple representation, a typical but counter intuitive outcome has been that spot price risk has an insignificant impact on spot prices, see, e.g., Beck (Beck, S., 1993. A Rational Expectations Model of Time Varying Risk Premia in Commodities Futures Markets: Theory and Evidence. International Economic Review 34, 149–168, Beck, S., 2001. Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity in Commodity Spot Prices. Journal of Applied Econometrics 16, 115–132). In this paper, we propose an alternative functional relationship (from GARCH(1,1) to GARCH(1,1)-AR(m)) between spot price risk and spot prices that is fully supported by the classical rational expectations model, and based on this new representation we are able to provide stronger empirical support for Muth's rational expectation theory.     

Securitization of mortgage debt,domestic lending,and international risk sharing

Abstract Securitization makes mortgage‐related risks internationally tradeable and thus contributes considerably to the international diversification of macroeconomic risk: in the years 2003–2008, the increase in international cross‐holdings of securitized mortgage debt has lowered industrialized countries’ conditional consumption volatility (relative to the United States) by about 10–15 percentage points. We turn to the role of domestic credit in explaining this result. Domestic credit leads to better international risk sharing only if debt is securitized and traded internationally. Conversely, the risk‐sharing benefits from securitization seem to evaporate if credit dries up – as it did in the recent financial crisis.     

Valuing the Incremental Benefits of Groundwater Protection when Exposure Levels are Known

Both economic theory and psychological research indicate that benefit functions for reductions in health risk exposures may be conditional on current exposures. Using nitrates found in household wells, it is demonstrated that perceptions of health risks across exposure levels are affected by the individual's current exposure level, thus providing support for a conditional benefits function approach. Functions of conditional incremental benefits are estimated from a contingent valuation study of households that had been informed of their water test results. Incremental benefits reach a peak at an intermediate level of nitrates and then decline. Possible explanations for this non-convexity are provided.     

Stock market comovements in Central Europe: Evidence from the asymmetric DCC model

We examine time-varying stock market comovements in Central Europe employing the asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model. Using daily data from 2001 to 2011, we find that the correlations among stock markets in Central Europe and between Central Europe vis-à-vis the euro area are strong. The correlations increased over time, particularly after their EU entry and largely remained at these levels during the financial crisis. The stock markets exhibit asymmetry in the conditional variances and to a certain extent in the conditional correlations as well, pointing to the importance of applying a sufficiently flexible econometric framework. The conditional variances and correlations are positively related, suggesting that the diversification benefits decrease disproportionally during volatile periods.     

团队创造力影响主流与新流创新绩效的机制及路径

基于创造力理论,对团队创造力进行了向例与变例、过程与结果的二维度、两阶段划分,分析了其对主流、新流创新绩效的作用机理,并提出研究假设。利用来自278份有效调研问卷的数据进行多元回归分析和结构方程模型分析。结果显示:向例团队创造力两阶段均正向促进主流创新绩效,结果阶段抑制新流创新绩效;变例团队创造力两阶段均正向促进新流创新绩效,结果阶段抑制主流创新绩效;向例(变例)团队创造力创造结果阶段在创造过程阶段与主流(新流)创新绩效之间起部分中介作用,向例(变例)团队创造力创造结果阶段在创造过程阶段与新流(主流)创新绩效之间起完全中介作用。     

Causal effects of the United States and Japan on Pacific-Rim stock markets: nonparametric quantile causality approach

This article adopts a nonparametric quantile causality approach to examine the causal effects of the U.S. and Japan stock markets on the stock markets of the Pacific-Rim region. This approach allows us to detect not only nonlinear causalities in conditional return (mean) and conditional volatility (variance) but also the asymmetries of causalities under extreme market conditions (bullish vs. bearish states). Our results provide significant evidence of causality in return and volatility at different points of the conditional distributions of returns, with the greater effects from the U.S. than from Japan. Asymmetric quantile causality patterns are particularly pronounced in the case of Japan.     

The Conditional Convergence Properties of Simple Kaldorian Growth Models

Findings of conditional convergence are usually interpreted within a neoclassical growth framework. This follows from the methodology of testing for conditional convergence, whereby the estimating equation is explicitly derived from a neoclassical growth model. Given this explicit derivation, findings of conditional convergence might be thought to discriminate against alternative approaches to growth in general and the Kaldorian approach to growth in particular. This article shows, however, that this is not the case. It does so by examining the conditional convergence properties of the ‘core’ model of Kaldorian growth theory—the Kaldor‐Dixon‐Thirlwall (KDT) model. In particular, the paper demonstrates that this model predicts conditional convergence of a qualitatively identical nature to that predicted by the neoclassical growth model. A simple extension of the KDT model that is reconciled with quantitative estimates of the speed of conditional convergence is also presented.     

Loss aversion and the term structure of interest rates

This article studies how the loss averse behaviour affects the term structure of real interest rates. Since the pro-cyclical conditional expected marginal rate of substitution, implied from the US consumption data, is consistent with the proposition of loss aversion, we incorporate the loss averse behaviour of prospect theory into the consumption-based asset pricing model. Motivated by the similarity between habit formation and the prospect theory utility, habit formation is exploited to determine endogenously the reference point of this behavioural finance utility. The highly curved characteristic of the term structure of real interest rates can thus be captured by the additional consideration of loss aversion. This model also fits the downward sloping volatility of the real yield curve in the data of US Treasury Inflation-Protection Securities (TIPS). Moreover, depending on the effective risk attitude of the representative agent with the loss averse behaviour of prospect theory, our model is capable of generating a normal or an inverted yield curve.     

Exchange Rate Exposure of Sectoral Returns and Volatilities: Further Evidence From Japanese Industrial Sectors

In this paper we argue that the commonly employed exposure coefficient/beta is inadequate for capturing the entire impact of exchange rate changes on firms' future operating cash flows. Instead, we employ the bivariate Glosten–Jagannathan–Runkle generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity mean model to investigate four aspects of exchange rate exposure, including sensitivity of stock returns to exchange rate changes, sensitivity of stock returns to the volatility of exchange rate changes, sensitivity of conditional variance of returns to exchange rate volatility, and the dynamic conditional correlation between returns and exchange rate changes, respectively, using data from 10 industrial sectors in Japan. We find significant evidence of such exchange rate exposure which is not captured by the conventional measure. The diagnostic statistics confirm the adequacy of our model, and, hence, the robustness of the results.     

Outline of forecast theory using generalized cost functions

The cost functions used to form forecasts in practice may be quite different than the squared costs that is often assumed in forecast theory. The impact on evaluation procedures is determined and simple properties for the derivate of the cost function of the errors are found to provide simple tests of optimality. For a very limited class of situations are forecasts based on conditional means optimal, generally, the econometricians needs to provide the whole conditional predicted distribution. Implications for multi-step forecasts and the combination of forecasts are briefly considered.