Risk spillover between the US and the remaining G7 stock markets using time-varying copulas with Markov switching: Evidence from over a century of data

This paper analyses the risk spillover effect between the US stock market and the remaining G7 stock markets by measuring the conditional Value-at-Risk (CoVaR) using time-varying copula models with Markov switching and data that covers more than 100 years. The main results suggest that the dependence structure varies with time and has distinct high and low dependence regimes. Our findings verify the existence of risk spillover between the US stock market and the remaining G7 stock markets. Furthermore, the results imply the following: 1) abnormal spikes of dynamic CoVaR were induced by well-known historical economic shocks; 2) The value of upside risk spillover is significantly larger than the downside risk spillover and 3) The magnitudes of risk spillover from the remaining G7 countries to the US are significantly larger than that from the US to these countries.     

Bank ownership type and temporal evolution of long‐term bank funding in the period 2005–2017

This study uses a large panel dataset of Western European banks to examine the determinants of bank funding stability. Banks are divided into three categories by bank ownership type; the ownership types in this study are commercial banks, cooperative banks and savings banks. Three sources of stable bank funding are investigated: customer deposits, equity, and long‐term liabilities. Furthermore, the sum of these funding components is used as a proxy variable for a bank's total available stable funding (ASF). A special focus is on the temporal evolution of these funding types. The regression results show that commercial banks’ funding became much more stable in the period 2005–2017. However, that funding remains, on average, less stable than does cooperative and savings banks’ funding. In addition, funding stability has remained at the pre‐crisis level in cooperative and savings banks, despite a steep dip in cooperative banks’ ASF during the sovereign debt crisis. Furthermore, banks substantially decreased financing from long‐term liabilities after the financial crisis, replacing it with customer deposits and equity.     

Modelling distribution of aggregate expenditure on tourism

The aim of this article is to obtain a statistical distribution that describes the aggregate expenditure of tourists related to their length of stay at a given location. This distribution enables us to estimate two parameters simultaneously; one controls the length of stay and the other, the expense incurred. We propose two distribution models, for which closed-form expressions are obtained. Covariates are introduced in order to study the factors that affect the aggregate expenditure. The results obtained indicate that the models achieve a reasonably good fit, with and without covariates.     

R&D based knowledge capital and future firm growth: Evidence from China’s Growth Enterprise Market firms

Building upon a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, this paper examines the role of knowledge-based capital (KC) in improving firms’ future growth in productivity. Based on the analysis of Chinese listed firms from 2006 to 2017 in the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM), we find KC often generates endogenous movements in productivity and earnings over the business cycles, suggesting that the nature of KC is pro-cyclical. Moreover, investment in KC is often classified as a corporate expense and is thus deducted from the current year’s profits. Therefore, firms with high R&D investments have significantly higher future productivity growth but lower current profitability than do those with lower R&D investments. Given these characteristics, KC’s benefits to productivity and future earnings are thus not immediate. For faster growth in the long term, firms should continue investing in KC even if they may face a short-term fall in corporate earnings as a result of internal knowledge investment, especially for fast-growing GEM firms.     

Economic Globalization and Inflation in China: A Multivariate Approach

This paper evaluates whether globalization has increased the role of global factors in driving inflation in China. Unlike other published studies on the relationship between globalization and inflation, which mostly use Phillips curve models, this paper uses multivariate dynamic models to examine the dynamic interactions between globalization and inflation in China. Empirical results with quarterly data spanning from 1995 to 2012 show that the global output gap significantly affects the dynamics of inflation in China. In particular, the global output gap is superior to the domestic output gap in predicting domestic inflation. Impulse response and variance decomposition analyses reinforce this finding. Our results indicate that the central bank of China should take developments in global output into account in its monetary policy‐making process.     

Oil price and Gulf Corporation Council stock indices: New evidence from time-varying copula models

Using a time-varying GJR copula approach, we determine the conditional dependence of the GCC stock indices on oil price between 2007 and 2016. We show how to improve the forecasting accuracy of the co-movement of energy and stock prices in an equally weighted portfolio. Contrary to prior findings, we demonstrate that due to the different co-movements across the GCC stock indices, portfolios of oil assets and several GCC stocks are less likely to be affected by systemic risk. The different co-movements across several stock indices over time provide different entry and exit points for stock investors. This approach is in line with the ‘buy low/sell high’ adage.     

Fiscal Subsidy Policy on Home Appliances: Its Effects on Domestic Consumption and Exports in China

This paper evaluates the effects of the Home Appliances Going to the Countryside (HAGC) policy, a fiscal subsidy program implemented in China to boost private consumption of home appliances in rural areas from 2007 to 2012. Using the policy as a natural experiment and employing the difference‐in‐difference estimator, we find that the policy did not increase domestic sales of relevant goods as expected; instead, it actually reduced domestic sales and significantly promoted exports. These surprising results are robust across regressions of alternative datasets, more controls, and different regions. We further provide detailed information of undisclosed audit data for a county in Zhejiang province to shed light on the underlying mechanism of such unexpected results, suggesting loopholes in the HAGC and changes in export tax rebate rates.     

Where is the GE? Consumption Dynamics in DSGEs

We offer a partial equilibrium perspective on the behavior of consumption in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. We consider a benchmark dynamic general equilibrium model and show that a standard calibration implies that the real interest rate is essentially fixed. One manifestation of this feature is that, with separable preferences, the reaction of consumption to total factor productivity (TFP) shocks is flat: the random‐walk permanent income hypothesis holds almost exactly, pretty much as in a partial equilibrium consumption‐savings problem. These results help explain the prominent role of aggregate demand, and how it is achieved, in modern DSGE analysis.     

Do denominations of origin provide useful quality signals? The case of Bordeaux wines

This paper investigates whether the existing Denominations of Origin (DOs) provide useful quality signals for wine consumers. To test our conjecture that the large number of existing DOs is too many for the typical consumer, we investigate the patterns of co-movement among average monthly wholesale prices for red wines from the 11 main DOs in Bordeaux over 16 years, 1999–2014. Our results indicate that consumers substitute among these wines according to the similarity of semantic elements in the names of DOs on the labels, and not according to prices or terroir that could reflect intrinsic quality where the names as such cannot. This finding suggests that the current DOs are too numerous and complex to provide helpful quality signals to consumers. A substantial reduction of the number of DOs might be warranted to better address the broader informational issue in wine markets.     

Liquidity risk and maturity management over the credit cycle

We show that firm demand-side factors are strong drivers of procyclical refinancing behavior over the credit cycle using novel data from the Shared National Credit program. Firms are more likely to refinance early when credit conditions are good to keep the effective maturity of their loans long and hedge against having to refinance in tight credit conditions. High credit quality firms are better able to hedge, making their refinancing propensity more sensitive to credit cycles than less creditworthy firms. There is a strong relationship between refinancing a loan, and subsequent growth in capital expenditure, especially when a loan is refinanced early.