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。     

The Role of Inflation Target Adjustment in Stabilization Policy

How and under what circumstances can adjusting the inflation target serve as a stabilization-policy tool and contribute to welfare improvement? We answer these questions quantitatively with a standard New Keynesian model that includes cost-push-type shocks. Our proposed inflation target rule calls for the target to be adjusted in a persistent manner and in the opposite direction to the realization of a cost-push shock, which is essentially a makeup strategy. The inflation target rule, combined with a Taylor-type rule, significantly reduces inflation fluctuations originating from cost-push shocks and mitigates the stabilization trade-off, resulting in a similar level of welfare to that associated with the Ramsey optimal policy.     

The risk-based approach under the new EU data protection regulation: a critical perspective

Abstract

The first broad reform of personal data protection legislation in the European Union entered into force in May 2018 (Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the General Data Protection Regulation). Remarkably, with this reform a risk-based approach has been introduced as the core data protection enforcement model, while data protection authorities see their regulatory role significantly weakened. The risk-based approach is to be implemented by the data controllers (i.e. the operators) via data protection impact assessments (evoking the established environmental impact assessment procedure) and notification of breaches, among other procedures. Hence the scope of both the concepts of risk and risk regulation spread beyond conventional domains, namely the environment, public health or safety, i.e. physical risks, to encompass risks to intangible values, i.e. individual rights and freedoms, presumably harder to assess and manage. Strikingly, the reform has been accompanied by a confident discourse by EU institutions, and their avowed belief in the reform’s ability to safeguard the fundamental right to data protection in the face of evolving data processing techniques, specifically, big data, the Internet of Things, and related algorithmic decision-making. However, one may wonder whether there isn’t cause for concern in view of the way the risk-based approach has been designed in the data protection legislation. In this article, the risk-based approach to data protection is analysed in the light of the reform’s underlying rationality. Comparison with the risk regulatory experience in environmental law, particularly the environmental impact assessment procedure, is drawn upon to assist us in pondering the shortcomings, as well as the opportunities of the novel risk-based approach.     

The Political Economy of Policy Vacuums: The European Commission on Demographic Change

ABSTRACT

Supranational organisations can only confront politico-economic issues that are recognised as important. Typically, issues gain recognition either when they provide an external shock to the system, shaking political actors into action, or when they are framed as important in policy networks concerned with developing the appropriate scientific approach. Ideally political and scientific actors align in creating pressures to recognise the issue as salient and to mobilise organisational responses. Issues differ in their capacity to be driven by both political and scientific pressures, creating crisis management, technocratic, and reform agenda outcomes. Here we explore a further variation, where pressures around an issue are insufficient, creating a policy vacuum. We examine one such policy vacuum in Europe: demographic change. This issue belongs to no particular Directorate-General in the European Commission, but is subject to policy frames from DG EMPL and DG ECFIN. Without sufficient political and scientific pressures, no particular policy position is occupied and advocated despite recognition of the issue’s importance. We discuss the role of policy vacuums and the need for their identification in political economy research.     

Macroeconomic Effects of Asset‐Price Shocks in a Globalized Financial Market

In this paper, I study a model in which shocks to asset prices affect the real sector of the economy through a credit channel. As financial markets become internationally integrated, the economy becomes less vulnerable to domestic asset‐price shocks, but more vulnerable to foreign asset‐price shocks. To the extent that monetary policy stabilization is feasible and desirable, the globalization of financial markets shifts the focus of monetary policy from domestic asset prices to worldwide asset prices.     

Evaluating monetary policy with financial stability objective: rules vs. discretion

This article explores whether adding the goal of financial stability to the more traditional goals of output and price stability could improve optimality of monetary policy. A Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model that endogenously incorporates financial frictions is used to derive optimality conditions across rule-based and discretionary monetary policy environments. The results indicate that it is optimal for the Central Bank to keep output below the potential level in the short term so as to dampen the inflationary effects arising from supply and financial shocks. When the economy is exposed to a financial shock, both leverage and credit spread rise significantly, thereby tipping the economy into a financial crisis and raising the probability of macroeconomic risk.     

Inflationary shocks and real output growth in nine Muslim-majority countries: Implications for Islamic banking and finance

Low and stable inflation is important for maintaining the viability of Islamic banking and finance within a dual banking system. Inflationary shocks when transmitted to real output growth cause a shift of investment to fixed return products as a hedge against the uncertainty of returns on equity investment under Islamic profit-loss sharing contracts. This study examines the transmission of inflationary shocks to the real economy for nine Muslim-majority countries (Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) that have introduced Islamic banking, all except Iran within dual-banking systems. A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework is deployed to understand macroeconomic relationships using annual data from the late 1970s to 2014. The key finding is that inflationary shocks affect real interest and exchange rates which in turn impact real output growth. The paper argues that the absorption of inflationary shocks in real interest and exchange rates is the outcome of rigidities in nominal interest and exchange rates within repressed financial systems. Policy regimes that allow for greater adjustment in nominal interest and exchange rates under a deregulated financial system would offer better shock absorption capacity which would lead to less volatility in inflation, real interest and exchange rates, and real output growth. The resulting more stable macroeconomic environment would be more conducive to the development of an Islamic financial sector that would promote economic growth.     

Putting ‘merchants of debt’ in their place: the political economy of retail banking and credit-based financialisation in Germany

Why did household debt in Germany not increase after the year 2000? This article offers a supply-side explanation for this deviant debt trajectory by tracing the historical evolution of retail banking in the German political economy. It argues that at the end of the 1990s and in the light of European Monetary Union, profitability issues and banking fragmentation became severe enough to interrupt the path towards credit-based financialisation as prevalent among other capitalist economies. These factors interacted with a traditional lack of tools and incentives for rapid credit expansion, even though they were renegotiated in the processes of financial liberalisation, internationalisation and innovation. By employing historical-qualitative as well as statistical evidence for the argument, the paper’s contribution becomes twofold. First, it introduces and conceptualises retail banking as a focal point in the analysis of national financial systems and their transformation. Second, it complicates the standard accounts of German non-financialisation and reveals the ‘contested’ character of financial reform.