On the Determinants of Surges and Stops in Foreign Loans: An Empirical Investigation

This paper examines the determinants of surge and stop episodes in foreign loans using quarterly data from 55 countries covering 1990Q1 to 2011Q4. The estimation results show that, first, global, contagion and domestic factors are all significantly associated with both loan-led surge and stop episodes. Second, domestic factors are more relevant to stops than to surges and are associated more strongly with episodes in emerging countries than with those in advanced countries. Third, global risk and domestic growth shock are most consistent and important in predicting both types of episodes. Fourth, financial linkage is the most important contagion channel in the occurrence of loan-led episodes. Fifth, capital control is not a useful tool for avoiding either type of episode and may actually increase their likelihood. Finally, stops in emerging countries are strongly related to macroeconomic fundamentals such as inflation, current account balance, net foreign assets, real exchange rate, and previous occurrence of surge episodes. Our results strongly suggest that emerging countries with lower institutional quality levels are more likely to experience both surges and stops.     

Are Female Executives More Risk-Averse than Male Executives?

It is often argued that women are more risk averse than men. This paper provides additional evidence on this issue by examining the stock selling behavior of male and female executives in response to stock option awards. When corporate executives sell shares of their firm upon new stock option awards, it is an indication that they are attempting to reduce risk through diversification of their personal portfolio. More rigorous stock sales by female executives would indicate that they are more risk averse than their male counterparts. However, this paper finds that male executives are more risk averse by engaging in higher diversification-related stock sales than the female executives. It is also found that the stock sales by male executives approximate the optimal hedge ratio.     

A geometric treatment of time-varying volatilities

In this article, we propose a new framework for addressing multivariate time-varying volatilities. By employing methods of differential geometry, our model respects the geometric structure of the covariance space, i.e., symmetry and positive definiteness, in a way that is independent of any local coordinate parametrization. Its parsimonious specification makes it particularly suitable for large dimensional systems. Simulation studies suggest that our model embraces much of the nonlinear behaviour of the covariance dynamics. Applied to the US and the UK stock markets, the model performs well, especially when applied to risk measurement. In a broad context, our framework presents a new approach treating nonlinear properties observed in the financial market, and numerous areas of application can be further considered.     

International trade and macroeconomic dynamics: The case of U.S. bilateral trade with G-7 countries

The short- and long-run effects of exchange rates, income, interest rates and government spending on U.S. bilateral trade with the other G-7 countries are investigated using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. The primary contribution of this study is to consider separating the analysis of exports and imports in an integrated model that empirically encompasses four major schools of thoughts – elasticity, Keynesian income, absorption and monetary approaches – in order to identify macroeconomic linkages to U.S. bilateral trade with the other G-7 countries accurately. Results suggest that, in both the short- and long-run, U.S. imports and exports are highly sensitive to changes in U.S. and foreign income, while U.S. imports and exports are relatively insensitive to changes in bilateral exchange rate. It is also found that both exports and imports are more responsive to changes in government spending than changes in interest rates in both the short- and long-run.     

The Korea-Vietnam trade and the bilateral exchange rate: Asymmetric evidence from commodity trade data

The contribution of the current article is to detect the asymmetric impact that exchange rate fluctuations have on Korea's trade with Vietnam. To this end, the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) process is applied to export and import data disaggregated by 25 commodities. We uncover that the ups and downs of exchange rates have an asymmetric impact on some, though not all, types of Korea's commodities exported to and imported from Vietnam in both the long- and short-run.     

Linkages between natural gas,fertiliser and cereal prices: A note

We use structural vector autoregressions to analyse the dynamic effects of shocks to natural gas and nitrogenous fertiliser prices on three major cereal crops: maize, rice and wheat. We find that the response of cereal prices to natural gas and fertiliser price shocks has been relatively small, instantaneous and transitory. These findings suggest that crop prices may change rapidly in response to energy and fertiliser prices, even when there are no shifts in the underlying fundamentals in crop markets. Furthermore, because the effects of the shocks dissipate rather quickly, short-term measures to address swings in food prices may suffice.