Does Central Bank Financial Strength Really Matter for Inflation? The Key Role of the Fiscal Support

This paper examines whether weak central bank finances affect inflation by scrutinizing the key rationale for such a relationship: that the absence of Treasury support makes central bank finances relevant for price stability. Specifically, I ask whether central banks which are not likely to enjoy fiscal support when needed experience higher inflation as their financial situation deteriorates. I find this to be true among a large sample of 82 countries between 1998 and 2008. De facto potential fiscal support appears relevant, while de jure fiscal support, which I survey analyzing 82 central bank laws, does not appear to matter. The results also bring forward an explanation for the conflicting results of the previous empirical studies, which neglected this key component.     

The Choice of Exchange Rate Regime： The Relevance of International Experience to China＇s Decision

The Chinese exchange rate has been the focus of discussion for many months, with both internal and external considerations seemingly pointing to the desirability of a currency revaluation. This paper draws from the lessons of international experience with exchangerate regimes in the period since Worm War Two. It lays out the conditions necessary to validate a fixed exchange rate and some intermediate regimes that might work when a fixed rate is inappropriate. It then discusses what the analysis implies for contemporary China.     

The Foundation and Pattern Choice for the Sustainable Development of Chinese Financial Trust Industry

Since it was resumed in 1979, China＇s financial trust industry has experienced five major improvement and rectification. With the implementation and promulgation of ＂one law and two regulations＂ and the establishment of China＇s Trust Industry Association, financial trust industry is developing into a relatively good stage. In view of practice and regular patterns of its development, we have to set up ideas of sustainable development so as to prevent the financial trust industry from involving in a circle of ＂development-- reorganization---development again--reorganization again＂. At present, the premise to realize financial trust industry＇s sustainable development is to fully understand the unique comparative advantage of financial trust industry and establish scientific market function.     

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve and Lagged Inflation: A Case of Spurious Correlation?

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) specifies a relationship between inflation and a forcing variable and the current period's expectation of future inflation. Most empirical estimates of the NKPC, typically based on generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, have found a significant role for lagged inflation, producing a “hybrid” NKPC. Using U.S. quarterly data, this article examines whether the role of lagged inflation in the NKPC might be due to the spurious outcome of specification biases. Like previous investigators, we employ GMM estimation and, like those investigators, we find a significant effect for lagged inflation. We also use time varying coefficient (TVC) estimation, a procedure that produces consistency under a variety of sources of misspecification. Using two separate measures of expected inflation, we find strong support for the view that, under TVC estimation, the coefficient on expected inflation is near unity and that the role of lagged inflation in the NKPC is spurious.     

What Futures for the People of the Tropical Forests?

The importance of forest products to households living in or near forests has been increasingly recognized. Estimates of numbers of people who in some way rely on forests, for survival or livelihoods, vary widely. Yet numbers alone do not reveal the forests' importance to diverse users. A typology that recognizes the varied relationships of people to forests and forest products permits assessment of the impacts of economic, cultural, and social changes. Understanding these relationships is crucial for institutions to adapt to changing patterns of demand, use, and supply, and to support both “forest-dependent” and “forest-related” peoples.     

The Choice of the Way for China＇s Economic Sustainable Development under the Restrictions of Energy Resources

Energy restrictions are becoming the restrictions on China＇s industrialization and economic sustainable development. This paper states the scientific role of China＇s economic sustainable development mode and makes concrete polices and suggestions about freedom of energy restrictions and the establishment of Mode C based on empirical research on the series of indices for energy measurement.     

The Contribution of Childcare to Local Employment: Poor Work or Work for the Poor?

In recent years local economic development and regeneration agencies have begun to examine how locally based childcare can contribute to economic and social regeneration. This paper is based on current research by the authors and reports on the expectations and current realities of community based childcare as part of an economic regeneration strategy. It suggests that whilst the incorporation of childcare into urban regeneration strategy holds the potential to reduce the barriers to labour market involvement by mothers in low income households, less positive effects are also identifiable. Early evaluation is used to show that the commodification of care within urban regeneration policies reinforces care work as low paid, insecure gendered employment. It concludes by arguing that a more critical evaluation of both the economic and social impact of childcare on area regeneration is necessary.     

Simple analytics of segmented markets: What case for liberalization?

Discussion about the liberalization of controlled markets in developing countries frequently assumes that the removal of price or quantity restrictions will lead rapidly to increased marketed output. However, when parallel markets exist, market controls may not depress marketed output and may actually increase it. Conversely, liberalization may not increase marketed output much, if at all. The benefits of liberalization will be greater where parallel markets are costly to enter, so that decontrol increases efficiency, and scarce resources such as entrepreneurial and administrative ability are diverted into the rent-seeking activity of gaining access to illegal parallel markets. This paper employs partial equilibrium techniques to analyze market controls and liberalization in the presence of parallel markets for foodgrains, credit, labor, and foreign exchange.     

The case for price level or inflation targeting—What happened to monetary policy effectiveness during the Japanese disinflation?

This paper examines whether price level or inflation targeting would have been appropriate policy choices for Japan during its disinflation and deflation period. We employ Markov switching and structural vector autoregressions, together with structural IS equations, to investigate monetary policy effectiveness during the Japanese disinflation. We find evidence of regime switching in the mid-1990s in a model including the nominal policy interest rate. When monetary policy shocks are identified by using the McCallum rule for monetary base, a monetary expansion is found to have a statistically significant impact on prices. Moreover, a lower real ex ante interest rate can still stimulate the economy despite the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.     

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.     

From financial repression to financial crisis? The case of China

This study explores the connections between financial repression policies and the possibility of financial crisis, a relationship that has been overlooked in previous literature. We focus on China, a country with one of the highest levels of financial repression in the world. China's case shows that when financial repression is maintained at a modest level, as the government did before 2008, the possibility of a financial crisis is low; however, when financial repression policies are pushed to an excessive level, as the government did after 2008, the national asset‐liability structure may be damaged to such an extent that a financial crisis becomes likely. The key to understanding the changing role of China's financial repression policies lies in the survival strategy of the Chinese party‐state, which regards finance as a powerful weapon and is eager to use it to address certain economic, political, or social problems that may endanger its rule.     

The Lack of International Consumption Risk Sharing: Can Inflation Differentials and Trading Costs Help Explain the Puzzle?

The bulk of evidence on the lack of international risk sharing is based on regressions of idiosyncratic consumption growth on idiosyncratic output growth. This paper argues that the results from such regressions obtained from international data are, however, not directly comparable to those based on regional data: the standard practice of running such regressions on international data fails to account for persistent international differentials in consumer prices, whereas—implicitly—most of the literature based on regional data has accounted for these differences. When risk sharing regressions are set up in conceptually the same way in international and regional data sets, the estimated coefficients are also very similar. To explore this result further, we adapt the variance decomposition of Asdrubali et al. (Q J Econ 111:1081–1110, 1996) to allow for deviations from purchasing power parity across countries. While quantity (income and credit) flows are the dominant channel of risk sharing among regions, relative consumption and output price (internal terms of trade) fluctuations account for the bulk of the deviation from the complete markets outcome in international data. To the extent that persistent differences in consumer prices are an indication of goods market segmentation, our findings provide empirical evidence for the proposition by Obstfeld and Rogoff (NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, 2000) that segmented international goods markets rather than asset market incompleteness may account for the (apparent) lack of risk sharing between countries.

The empirics of economic geography: how to draw policy implications?

Using both reduced-form and structural approaches, the spectrum of policy recommendations that can be drawn from empirical economic geography is pretty large. Reduced-form approaches allow the researchers to consider many variables that impact on regional disparities, as long as they are careful about interpretation and endogeneity issues. Structural approaches have the opposite advantages. Less issues can be simultaneously addressed, but one can be more precise in terms of which intuitions are considered and the underlying mechanisms and effects at work. Many regional policy issues remain unanswered, opening some interesting future lines of research.     

The high demand for international reserves in the Far East: What is going on?

This paper explores econometric and theoretical interpretations for the relatively high demand for international reserves by countries in the Far East and the relatively low demand by some other developing countries. Using a sample of about 125 developing countries, we show that reserve holdings over 1980–1996 seem to be the predictable outcome of a few key factors, such as the size of international transactions, their volatility, the exchange-rate arrangement, and political considerations. The estimating equation does a good job of predicting reserve holdings in Asia before the 1997 financial crisis. After the crisis, the estimating equation significantly underpredicts the reserve holdings of several key Far East countries, as one might expect from the Lucas Critique. This underprediction is consistent with models explaining reserve demand in developing countries. Specifically, we show that sovereign risk and costly tax collection to cover fiscal liabilities lead to a relatively large precautionary demand for international reserves. In the aftermath of a crisis, countries that have to deal with higher perceived sovereign risk and higher fiscal liabilities (both funded and unfunded) will opt to increase their demand for reserves. The models also help us understand why some developing countries do not hold large precautionary reserve balances in the aftermath of crises. Countries with high discount rates, political instability or political corruption find it optimal to hold smaller precautionary balances. We also show that models that incorporate loss aversion predict a relatively large demand for international reserves. Hence, if a crisis increases the volatility of shocks and/or loss aversion, it will greatly increase the demand for international reserves. Consequently, we conclude that the ‘puzzling’ pattern in international reserve holdings is reasonably explained by the extended models described in this paper.     

An eye for an eye? The trade and price effects of China's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports

We analyze the trade and price effects of China's retaliatory tariffs on imports from the United States in the period from January 2017 to May 2019. We apply the difference-in-differences approach to the up-to-date China Customs data on imports disaggregated by eight-digit HS product category and source country. We find large reductions in the value and quantity of imports from the US and an almost complete tariff pass-through onto import prices. These results remain robust to extensive changes in the specification and in data sample and to a variety of placebo tests using processing imports or exempted products that were originally included in the tariff lists but removed before implementation. We also find that the trade and price effects are heterogeneous across products, differing either in the end-use or in the ownership types of the importing firm. Similar to recent findings in the US (Amiti et al., 2019, Amiti et al., 2020), our estimates suggest limited terms-of-trade gain due to China's tariff hikes.     

What Prompts the People＇s Bank of China to Change Its Monetary Policy Stance？ Evidence from a Discrete Choice Model

In the present paper, we model the policy stance of the People＇s Bank of China （PBC） as a latent variable, and the discrete changes in the reserve requirement ratio, policy interest rates, and the scale of open market operations are taken as signals of movement of this latent variable. We run a discrete choice regression that relates these observed indicators of policy stance to major trends of macroeconomic and financial developments, which are represented by common factors extracted from a large number of variables. The predicted value of the estimated model can then be interpreted as the implicit policy stance of the PBC. In a second step, we estimate how much of the variation in the PBC＇ s implicit stance can be explained by measures of its policy objectives on inflation, growth and financial stability. We find that deviations of CPI inflation from an implicit target and deviations of broad money growth from the announced targets, but not output gaps, figure significantly in the PBC＇s policy changes.     

Does Homeownership Lead to Longer Unemployment Spells? The Role of Mortgage Payments

This paper examines the impact of housing tenure choice on unemployment duration in Belgium using EU-SILC micro data. We contribute to the literature in distinguishing homeowners with mortgage payments and outright homeowners. Accounting for tenure endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity, we find that homeowners with a mortgage exit unemployment first, while outright owners stay unemployed the longest. Tenants take an intermediate position. Our results emphasize the key role of housing costs in the link between housing tenure and labour market outcomes. Considered together with the results of recent macroeconomic research on housing and employment in Belgium, this paper provides indirect evidence for significant negative effects of homeownership on the labour market and the economy beyond the owners themselves.     

Do Capital Inflows Matter to Asset Prices? The Case of Korea*

In the present paper, we investigate whether capital flows induce domestic asset price hikes in the case of Korea. This issue is relevant for crisis‐hit economies trying to prevent a boom–bust cycle as well as in the formulation of macroeconomic policy objectives in emerging market economies. Korea has recently experienced large capital inflows, in particular a surge in portfolio inflows. Furthermore, asset prices, including stock prices, land prices and nominal and real exchange rates, have also appreciated. The empirical results, obtained using a vector autoregression model, suggest that capital inflow shocks have caused stock prices but not land prices to increase. The effects on the nominal and real exchange rates have been limited, which relates to the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves.     

Substitutes or complements? The interactions between components of capital inflows for Asia

Despite an emerging and interesting literature on the pecking order of capital flows that might arise from asymmetric information and financing constraints, the dynamics of the interactions between the various components of capital flows, namely FDI, portfolio equity, portfolio debt and bank flows appear a little under-researched. This paper presents an empirical examination of this issue for a sample of East Asian countries – looking only at the inflows of capital – by asking the following questions: Are the respective components of capital flows substitutes or complements? Does one type of capital flow enhance or inhibit the others? Is this effect mitigated or exacerbated during crises? What effect does the volatility of each of the components of flows have on the level of each flow? The policy implications of this analysis can be viewed in terms of countries financial liberalisation policies. If two types of flows are substitutes, then a policy of liberalising, or indeed restricting, one type of flow may actually crowd out the other. This may well be an unintended consequence of a country's financial liberalisation policy.