信用评级高估与融资的所有制歧视——基于中国公司债的数据

为了分析发债主体所有制性质对公司债发行定价影响的作用机理,从信用评级高估的假设出发,将所有制性质的定价作用区分为直接效应和间接效应,基于贝叶斯法则得出两个推断：评级高估会导致发债主体所有制性质对公司债发行定价的直接效应;高信用等级公司债发行定价会受到发债主体所有制性质的直接影响,低信用等级公司债则不然。通过对2007—2013年沪深两市公开发行的公司债进行实证分析,推断得到了验证。这些分析有利于剖析民营企业融资歧视的形成机制。     

本轮通货膨胀的成因及对策

文中对中国目前通货膨胀的形成原因进行了分析,认为本轮通货膨胀的类型是成本推动型,提出了要谨防由结构性通货膨胀演变为全面通货膨胀,并从货币政策和财税政策两个方面分析如何应对本轮通货膨胀。     

我国通货膨胀的原因辨析：1978-2007——一种源自Grange检验的否定

基于1978-2007年的数据,本文运用Grange检验法对我国改革开放三十年来通货膨胀的共性原因进行了辨析。通过对有关文献提出的相关变量进行检验发现：各个特殊阶段通货膨胀的影响因素并不是三十年来通货膨胀的共性原因;而适度的通货膨胀却对经济增长、进出口增加、固定资产投资总额以及平均工资的增长均具有正向促进作用,表明适度的通货膨胀在我国改革开放中是“非中性”的。     

Wilhelm Röpke and Richard C. Koo On Secondary Deflations and Balance Sheet Recessions

The concept of a ‘secondary deflation’ was developed in the 1930s by the German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who saw it as something different from a normal depression. While a primary deflation is a necessary reaction to the inflation from a boom period, a secondary deflation is independent and economically purposeless. Röpke argued that secondary depressions occurred in the US, Germany, France and Switzerland during the 1930s, but was vague on what made them follow primary depressions. Recently, the Taiwanese–American economist Richard C. Koo has claimed to have discovered the ‘Holy Grail of macroeconomics’, that is, what made the Great Depression so deep and long. During the Great Depression, the bursting of the asset price bubble resulted in private sectors having more debt than assets; as they shifted from maximising profits to minimising debt, the consequent debt deflation shrank the economy. According to Koo, Western economies today are suffering from a similar ‘balance sheet recession’. Strengthened by the notion of a balance sheet recession, Röpke's long‐lost insights might advance our understanding of the business cycle in general and the present crisis in the US and the Eurozone in particular.     

Selection of influential variables in ordinal data with preponderance of zeros

Presence of excess zero in ordinal data is pervasive in areas like medical and social sciences. Unfortunately, analysis of such kind of data has so far hardly been looked into, perhaps for the reason that the underlying model that fits such data, is not a generalized linear model. Obviously some methodological developments and intensive computations are required. The current investigation is concerned with the selection of variables in such models. In many occasions where the number of predictors is quite large and some of them are not useful, the maximum likelihood approach is not the automatic choice. As, apart from the messy calculations involved, this approach fails to provide efficient estimates of the underlying parameters. The proposed penalized approach includes ?₁ penalty (LASSO) and the mixture of ?₁ and ?₂ penalties (elastic net). We propose a coordinate descent algorithm to fit a wide class of ordinal regression models and select useful variables appearing in both the ordinal regression and the logistic regression based mixing component. A rigorous discussion on the selection of predictors has been made through a simulation study. The proposed method is illustrated by analyzing the severity of driver injury from Michigan upper peninsula road accidents.     

The expected real yield and inflation components of the nominal yield curve

The term structure of real yields and expected inflation are two unobserved components of the nominal yield curve. The primary objectives of this study are to decompose nominal yields into their expected real yield and inflation components and to examine their behaviour using state-space and regime-switching frameworks. The dynamic yield-curve models capture three well-known latent factors – level, slope, and curvature – that accurately aggregate the information for the nominal yields and the expected real and inflation components for all maturities. The nominal yield curve is found to increase slightly with a slope of about 120 basis points, while the real yield curve slopes upward by about 20 basis points, and the expected inflation curve is virtually flat at slightly above 2 per cent. The regime-switching estimations reveal that the nominal yield, real yield and expected inflation curves have shifted down significantly since 1999.     

The (de-)anchoring of inflation expectations: New evidence from the euro area

Well-anchored inflation expectations are a key factor for achieving economic stability. This paper provides new empirical results on the anchoring of long-term inflation expectations in the euro area. In line with earlier evidence, we find that euro area inflation expectations have been anchored until fall 2011. Since then, however, they respond significantly to macroeconomic news. Our results obtained from multiple endogenous break point tests suggest that euro area inflation expectations have remained de-anchored ever since.     

全国社会保障基金的风格资产配置研究——基于经济周期视角

根据美林证券的投资时钟理论,结合我国宏观经济的月度指标,将我国宏观经济状态划分为四个阶段,同时将全国社会保障基金的投资细分为10个类别的风格资产,基于经济周期视角对这10类风格资产的收益率状况进行分析,结果表明：在复苏阶段,股票资产的收益率最高,并且不同风格股票在收益率方面的差异不大,表现出齐涨的态势;在过热阶段,不同风格股票在收益率方面表现出较大的差异,小盘股的收益率表现最好,尤其是小盘成长股的收益率最高;在滞胀阶段,最安全的资产应该是现金资产,倘若考虑到通货膨胀率的因素,其实际收益率甚至为负;在衰退阶段,债券类资产的表现最好。同时,基于不同策略的资产配置方案的累计收益率比较结果表明：不同经济周期下的资产配置方案可以显著提高资产组合收益率。     

Rules versus discretion - A disinflation case

This paper compares a strict inflation target regime to a conservative central bank regime to determine the monetary regime appropriate for a disinflation process. The analysis shows that in a two-period model, in which policymakers face given first-period inflationary expectations, a strict inflation target could be preferred to the appointment of a conservative central banker who has discretion. The result differs from that of Rogoff (1985), who assumed rational expectations and concluded that a conservative central banker is always preferable. The disadvantage of the conservative central banker derives from his tendency to accelerate disinflation relative to rate that maximizes social welfare.JEL Classification: E52, E58The authors are grateful to Alex Cukierman, Nissan Liviatan, Allan Drazen, Amit Friedman and Yoav Friedmann for their useful suggestions. We also thank the anonymous referees for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Tel Aviv University macroeconomic workshop, at the Research Department seminar, Bank of Israel, and at the Bank of Israels conference on Macroeconomic Policy, October 2002.     

If ‘money matters’, what about the monetary base?

Crucial to the debates on monetarism is the money aggregate relevant to its key propositions, in particular those that relate to the determination of nominal national income and inflation. In his influential work on ‘market monetarism’, Scott Sumner has accorded a privileged position to the monetary base in the key monetarist propositions. This article argues that, on the contrary, in a modern economy the role of cash is so small, as well as so clandestine, that the monetary base does not play any direct role in the determination of national income and inflation.