解析中国投资高增长

近年来中国投资增长迅速,投资占GDP百分比已经超过40%。尽管银行和国有企业改革都取得了很大进步,但是影响投资决策有效性的因素依然存在。制造业、基础设施和房地产推动了固定资产投资。本文的经济计量分析表明,制造业投资与企业流动性(大部分来自于留存收益)显著相关。住宅房地产投资与真实居民收入的增长和真实抵押贷款利率的相关性很弱。这些发现的政策意义是减少企业的流动性,如:要求国有企业向政府支付股利、运用货币政策减少流动性、提高真实利率,以减缓制造业和房地产的投资增速。     

Modelling the Implied Volatility of Options on Long Gilt Futures

This paper investigates the properties of implied volatility series calculated from options on Treasury bond futures, traded on LIFFE. We demonstrate that the use of near-maturity at the money options to calculate implied volatilities causes less mis-pricing and is therefore superior to, a weighted average measure encompassing all relevant options. We demonstrate that, whilst a set of macroeconomic variables has some predictive power for implied volatilities, we are not able to earn excess returns by trading on the basis of these predictions once we allow for typical investor transactions costs.     

Firm-Level Evidence on International Stock Market Comovement *

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the extent to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in 20 countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country-and industry-specific shocks. We find a large and statistically significant link for global shocks. A firm raising its international sales by 10 percent raises the exposure of its stock return to global shocks by two percent. This link has grown stronger over time since the mid-1980s. We find no similarly robust link between international sales and exposure to country-specific shocks. * We are grateful to Marcelle Chauvet, Kathryn Dominguez, Kristin Forbes, Geert Rouwenhorst, Dan Waggoner, participants in the Atlanta Fed Finance Brown Bag, the IMF conference on “Global Linkages”, and the Kiel Institute for World Economics workshop on multinationals for their suggestions. We are especially grateful to Franklin Allen, Marco Pagano, and two anonymous referees for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, we wish to thank Menzie Chinn for sharing his capital account liberalization measure, Iskander Karibzhanov for translating some of our code into C and Young Kim for excellent research assistance.     

The Pricing of Property Trust IPOs in Australia

Following Brounen and Eichholtz (2002) this paper adds to the international literature investigating the underpricing of REIT initial public offerings (IPOs), with a study into Australian property trusts. This study finds that initial day returns can in part be explained by forecast profit distributions (or dividends) and the market sentiment towards property trusts from the date of the prospectus to the date of listing. There is some support for the “winners curse” explanation of underpricing with evidence that large investor or institutional involvement at the outset of the IPO also has some explanatory power.     

An attitude survey approach to the social audit: The Southam Press experience

This article reviews the development and use of the attitude survey technique in the social audit of Southam Press Limited, a large conglomerate with 1978 revenues exceeding C$384 million. Audit representatives of the investment funds of the United Church of Canada found that traditional social audit approaches were insufficiently comparable, predictive and insightful, and sought improvement as set out in this article. Although additional analysis is suggested, this article concludes that social audit findings could well benefit from the application of the attitude survey approach.     

Threshold Effects in Price Transmission: The Case of Brazilian Wheat, Maize, and Soya Prices

Recent studies into price transmission have recognized the important role played by transport and transaction costs. Threshold models are one approach to accommodate such costs. We develop a generalized Threshold Error Correction Model to test for the presence and form of threshold behavior in price transmission that is symmetric around equilibrium. We use monthly wheat, maize, and soya prices from the United States, Argentina, and Brazil to demonstrate this model. Classical estimation of these generalized models can present challenges but Bayesian techniques avoid many of these problems. Evidence for thresholds is found in three of the five commodity price pairs investigated.     

Price clustering in Australian water markets

The finding of clustering in financial prices on particular digits is common across a broad range of financial markets. This article explores whether price clustering is also present in the case of the weekly market for seasonal water in rural Victoria, Australia. We find a similar degree of clustering in the seasonal water market. This suggests that the trading activities of the market produce characteristics that are similar to more sophisticated and deeper financial markets.