Bank net interest margins,the yield curve,and the 2007–2009 financial crisis

Using quarterly call report data from 2000 to 2016, we reexamine the relationship between net interest margins (NIM) and the yield curve for more than 5,500 U.S. commercial banks. In the full sample, yield curve and RGDP growth have positive effects on NIM, while inflation and deposit‐to‐loan ratios (D/L) have negative effects. Splitting the sample around the 2007–2009 crisis, we show the impact of yield curve and RGDP growth on NIM increasing during the “recovery” (2009Q3 to 2016Q4), and inflation and D/L changing signs. Positive effects of yield curve on profits vary with bank size and change over time.     

Leaving EMU: a real options perspective

The real option implicit in a country's decision of whether to leave an existing monetary union when there is uncertainty over the future benefits of this move is examined. The theoretical model used is calibrated for the current Euro-12 area by proxying policymakers’ inflation preferences with unemployment rates and debt-to-GDP ratios. A robust group of countries is observed that would choose to remain within EMU consisting of Belgium, Finland, Greece and Italy; France and Spain loosely also belong to this core. Only Luxembourg would robustly want to leave EMU; Ireland and The Netherlands, however, complement that core closely.     

Minimum Wage Compliance and the Labor Demand Curve

Contrary to the traditional analysis of the employment effects of the minimum wage setting, the author shows that if compliance is contingent upon enforcement, complying with the minimum wage law involves a leftward shift of the labor demand curve rather than an upward movement along the curve. Furthermore, the labor demand curve will shift leftward with enforcement even if enforcement is insufficient to ensure compliance, becoming vertical when the options of compliance and noncompliance are equally attractive. Hence, it is not paying the statutory minimum wage that brings about a reduction in employment down to the full-compliance level but enforcement that, if sufficiently high, induces that same reduction in employment, even if the employer is still noncomplying with the minimum wage law.     

Assessing Variability of Complex Descriptive Statistics in Monte Carlo Studies Using Resampling Methods

Good statistical practice dictates that summaries in Monte Carlo studies should always be accompanied by standard errors. Those standard errors are easy to provide for summaries that are sample means over the replications of the Monte Carlo output: for example, bias estimates, power estimates for tests and mean squared error estimates. But often more complex summaries are of interest: medians (often displayed in boxplots), sample variances, ratios of sample variances and non‐normality measures such as skewness and kurtosis. In principle, standard errors for most of these latter summaries may be derived from the Delta Method, but that extra step is often a barrier for standard errors to be provided. Here, we highlight the simplicity of using the jackknife and bootstrap to compute these standard errors, even when the summaries are somewhat complicated. © 2014 The Authors. International Statistical Review © 2014 International Statistical Institute     

Impact of macroeconomic surprises on the Brazilian yield curve and expected inflation

This study investigates how unexpected announcements in Brazilian and U.S. macroeconomic indicators affect the term structure of nominal interest rates, as well as implicit inflation expectations and real interest rates. Using daily data from March 2005 to December 2012, we employ an extended Vector Error Correction Model to take into account nonstationarity and the long-term equilibrium among different maturities of those curves. We found empirical evidence that macroeconomic surprises, domestic (Brazilian) and external (U.S. American), which lead the market to believe that there might be a higher risk of inflation or an overheated economy, raise nominal interest rates, implicit expected inflation and real interest rates. Surprisingly, in relation to the efficient-market hypothesis, we found that some macroeconomic surprises have a lagged effect on the yield curves. We also tested the impact of the global financial crisis of 2007–09 and found that the crisis affected significantly the direction and magnitude of the responses to macroeconomic news.     

基于价值创新的江苏省民办高职院校发展战略研究

本文试图探索江苏省内民办高职院校如何借鉴运用价值创新战略以面对生源困境,不断改进提升其顾客价值。     

商业银行利率风险计量模型及实证分析--非平移收益曲线条件下的随机免疫策略

传统的久期理论建立在收益曲线平移等严格假设条件上，因而其在实践中的有效性大大降低了。根据Markowitz（1959）等理论可推导出：资产价格的总风险包括收益的方差和全久期向量两部分；假若商业银行采取现金中性（cash neutrality）的资产交易策略，风险计量模型可转换为线性规划问题，从而可以构建基于利率风险最小化模型的随机免疫策略。也就是说，引入随机免疫的理念来替代经典的免疫理论，通过实证分析得出：无现金交易条件下的随机免疫策略能够降低利率风险。     

Can Poverty be Alleviated in China?

The 2000s witnessed the third poverty alleviation wave in China. Compared with its predecessors, the third wave distinguished itself by new interventions and redefined standards for the National Poor Counties. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the new program using a data set consisting of 1,411 of China's western and central counties from 2000 to 2010. It combines the propensity score matching method with the difference‐in‐differences approach, which helps to avoid selection bias and track the policy impact on variables of interest at each time point. It is found that the non‐western local governments tended to manipulate data on income and output growth to maintain the special transfer payments disbursed exclusively to the National Poor Counties. It is also shown that the program failed to improve the infrastructure and sanitary conditions in general.     

Is There a Trade-Off between COVID-19 Control and Economic Activity? Implications from the Phillips Curve Debate

In this paper, we argue that the roles of public policies concerning COVID-19 can be better understood in light of the past discussions on the Great Inflation of the 1970s and the 1980s. Like the Phillips Curve in macroeconomics, the pandemic presents a trade-off between economic activities and something undesirable, which is, in this case, infection. Like the Phillips Curve, this apparent output-infection trade-off is an elusive one and it is lost in the long run. Containing infections calls for decisive policy action. This paper shows that we could design a reaction function, which sets the level of economic activity as a function of the state of infection, in such a way that the possibility of an infection explosion would be eliminated. Our empirical analysis suggests that Tokyo, New York, and London since September 2020 do not satisfy this desirable property.     

Examining the change in wellbeing following a holiday

Building on existing evidence that tourism contributes to wellbeing, this study aims to investigate how both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing changes after a holiday. A longitudinal inquiry involving three waves of observation (during, the fourth week, and the eighth week following a holiday) was carried out in five tourism cities in China, using Latent Growth Curve models to analyze change. Results suggest that life satisfaction – an indicator of hedonic wellbeing – does not decline as expected whereas other indicators of hedonic wellbeing declined dramatically in the first month and then mildly in the second month following a holiday. Comparatively, eudaimonic wellbeing declined gradually and mildly during the same two-month intervals. Higher levels of optimal tourism experiences predicted slower declines of both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.