Real estate prices and systemic banking crises

The collapse of real estate prices has historically jeopardized banking stability and triggered systemic banking crises. This paper studies risk contagion in a banking system in real estate price shock by adopting complex network theory. Modelling the real estate-related asset as a common exposure of banks to the real estate market, we propose a model that incorporates two main risk contagion channels, i.e., the financial network and asset fire sales, and reveal how the real estate price shock is transmitted and propagated across banks. We demonstrate that banking stability is highly sensitive to the real estate price shock. Moreover, due to the particularly low liquidity of the real estate market, the asset fire-sales of real estate assets overwhelms the financial network, playing the dominant role in risk contagion. Our model can be adopted by regulators to conduct stress testing and to forge effective risk management strategies.     

Structural holes and hedge fund return comovement: evidence from network-connected stock hedge funds in China

Using data from a new hedge fund database, we examine the impact of social networks on the return comovement of stock hedge funds in China. We use structural holes in the college alumni networks of managers to measure the managers’ social network positions. We perform an empirical analysis on a sample of 3,012 hedge fund products in China from 2010 to 2017. We find that greater structural holes are associated with higher return comovement. The positive impact of the structural holes on return comovement is not affected by market cycles, a manager's major in college, or his or her abilities.     

Which financial stocks did short sellers target in the subprime crisis?

Tracing the SEC ban on the short selling of financial stocks in September 2008, this paper investigates whether such selling activity before the 2008 short ban reflected financial companies’ risk exposure in the subprime crisis. Evidence suggests that short sellers sold short stocks that had the greatest asset and insolvency risk exposures, and that the short selling of financial firms’ stocks was not significantly greater than that of non-financial firms after we match them on firm size and insolvency risk. When the short ban was in effect, the market quality of financial stocks without subprime assets exposure had deteriorated to a larger degree than that of financial companies with subprime assets exposure. The findings imply that such a regulation may mute the market disciplining effects of investors and may also be seen as a counterweight to any perceived macro or systemic risk reduction benefits resulting from such a ban.     

Resilience and Justice

The term resilience has become the popular formulation for plans that deal with preparedness for disaster. It implies adaptation rather than returning to a pre‐crisis state. Its use has been extended from environmental events to social and economic crises. Its fault is that it obfuscates underlying conflict and the distribution of benefits resulting from policy choices. Development of resilience policies is cloaked in complicated models showing complexity and indeterminacy. Marxist analysis provides insights that cut through the failure of these models to assign agency, but it does not offer approaches short of revolution to assist present‐day planning. The conclusion of the essay presents strategies that can lead to greater justice in planning to cope with the impacts of devastating events.     

Lessons from the recent economic crisis: the Australian household stimulus package

This paper provides an impact evaluation analysis of the 2009 Australian Household Stimulus Package, which was composed by three main cash payments: the Back to School Bonus, the Single Income Family Bonus and the Tax Bonus for Working Australians. Using panel data from the 2008 and 2009 HILDA surveys, the results show that these cash payments reduced the risk of poverty and stimulated consumption expenditure. Nonetheless, only the Back to School Bonus and the Single Income Family Bonus were really important in achieving these goals, while the Tax Bonus for Working Australians did not contribute to stimulate consumption and failed to reduce the risk of poverty. Thus, the analysis confirms the crucial role of governments to protect the most vulnerable groups avoiding a dramatic deterioration of social outcomes and favoring a fast economic recovery when interventions are timely and well-targeted.     

Pitfalls and perils of financial innovation: The use of CDS by corporate bond funds

We use the financial crisis of 2007–2009 as a laboratory to examine the costs and benefits of teams versus single managers in asset management. We find that when a fund uses complex trading strategies involving the use of CDS team-managed funds outperform solo-managed funds. This may be due to the greater diversity of expertise, experience and skill of teams relative to single managers. During the financial crisis, however, the performance premium of teams becomes negative, which may be because of the slower decision times of teams, which are especially costly during times of rapidly changing market conditions.     

Defining Capitalism

This article aims to incorporate the essential features of capitalism in an operational definition that identifies capitalism per se (pure laissez‐faire capitalism), and clearly excludes variations such as welfare capitalism and crony capitalism. By concisely highlighting the fundamental structures and mechanisms of capitalism, this essential definition facilitates defences of it that are more robust than those ordinarily offered. It also clarifies the relation between capitalism and phenomena with which it is frequently associated, and suggests a straightforward way of identifying and measuring the extent of capitalism in mixed economies.     

The dark and the bright side of liquidity risks: Evidence from open-end real estate funds in Germany

During the 6-month period from December 2005 to June 2006, the German Real Estate mutual fund industry suffered an unprecedented liquidity crisis. We investigate to what extend competing theories of liquidity crises help explain this event. Our results show that fundamental factors not only mattered for the liquidity outflow in normal times but also during the crisis. However, strategic complementarities accelerated the withdrawals during the crisis suggesting that pure panic behavior contributed substantially to the massive outflows. Thus higher liquidity buffers might help mitigating these tail events. Furthermore, we find that funds with a lower fraction of shares held by institutional investors suffered from less significant outflows suggesting that a segmentation of funds for different investor groups might help mitigate panics.     

新冠肺炎疫情、金融市场震荡与金融危机

新型冠状病毒感染肺炎疫情在全球快速蔓延后,美国等国家金融市场出现大幅度震荡,历史罕见。金融市场震荡是疫情影响投资者信心,金融市场本身的风险需要释放,以及经济基本面悲观预期等因素共同作用的结果。目前来看,疫情对实体经济造成冲击,疫情应对情况也在很大程度上决定了金融市场震荡是否演化为全球金融危机,国外金融市场震荡对国内金融市场的传导需要审慎理性处理。     

A test for inflation persistence in Nigeria using fractional integration & fractional cointegration techniques

This study seeks to test for inflation persistence in Nigeria using the recently developed fractional cointegration VAR model by Johansen and Nielsen (2012) and complemented with univariate fractional integration techniques. The empirical results suggest evidence of high inflation persistence in Nigeria albeit with a lower trend after the global financial crisis. Also, the major classes of inflation – headline, core and food inflation rates, share long run properties regardless of the sample used. This suggests that any policy action directed at a particular class of inflation will have a spill-over effect on the other classes given the strong association among them. The ability to also exploit the fractional cointegration in a multivariate set-up when modeling inflation is a major contribution of this study and ignoring same may lead to wrong conclusions. However, the results are sensitive to the choice of data frequency.