Asset indexes and the measurement of poverty,inequality and welfare in Southeast Asia

Using data on household consumer durables from the Asian Barometer Survey, this paper examines the evolution of inequality, poverty and welfare in six countries of South East Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. We start by deriving the most common order of acquisition of these durables, using first an algorithm proposed by Paroush (1965), and then Item Response Theory. We also compute the frequency distribution of the number of durables owned by households. We then use these results to compute inequality, poverty and achievement or welfare indices adapted to the case of ordinal variables.Our empirical results confirm the existence of an order of acquisition. The results show that inequality was higher in Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines and lower in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. A similar classification of countries was obtained when computing multidimensional poverty indices.Finally, using the welfare or achievement index recently introduced by Apouey et al. (2019), we found that welfare was generally higher in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia and lower in Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines.     

A Different Perspective on the Evolution of UK Income Inequality

This paper scrutinizes the conventional wisdom about trends in UK income inequality and also places contemporary inequality in a much longer historical perspective. We combine household survey and income tax data to provide better coverage of all income ranges from the bottom to the very top (and make our estimates available to other researchers). We make a case for studying distributions of income between tax units (i.e. not assuming the full income sharing that goes with the use of the household as the unit of analysis) for reasons of principle as well as data harmonization. We present evidence that income inequality in the UK is as least as high today as it was just before the start of World War 2.     

Stochastic regularization for the mean-variance allocation scheme

Despite being based on sound principles, the original Markovitz portfolio allocation theory cannot produce sound allocations, and restrictions or modifications need to be imposed from outside the theory in order to obtain meaningful portfolios. This is unsatisfactory, and the reasons for this failure are discussed, in particular, the unavoidable small eigenvalues of the covariance. Within the original principles of risk minimization and return maximization, several modifications of the original theory are introduced. First, the strategic and tactical time horizons are separated. A base long-term allocation is chosen at the strategic time horizon, while the portfolio is optimized at the tactical time horizon using information from the price histories. Second, the tactical portfolio is financed by the strategic one, and a funding operator is introduced. The corresponding optimal allocation (without constraints) has one free parameter fixing the leverage. Third, the transaction costs are taken into account. This includes the current re-allocation cost, but crucially the expected costs of the next reallocation. This last term depends on the sensitivity of the allocation with respect to the covariance, and the expectation introduces another dependency on the (inverse) covariance. The new term regularizes the original minimization problem by modifying the lower part of the spectrum of the covariance, leading to meaningful portfolios. Without constraints, the final Lagrangian can be minimized analytically, with a solution that has a structure similar to the original Markovitz solution, but with the inverse covariance regularized by the expected transaction costs.     

Impact of commuting by workers on household dietary diversity in rural India

Drawing insights from the literature on transformation of rural non-farm employment, pathways from agriculture to nutrition, and linkages between migration and nutritional status of household, we seek to understand differences in dietary diversity across three mutually exclusive types of rural Indian households: where all members work in rural areas, at least one member commutes to urban areas, at least one member has no fixed place of work. Our analysis is based on a nationally representative data set from India for the year 2009–10 and we use propensity score matching methods. We find that as compared to households with no commuters, households with rural–urban commuters have higher dietary diversity; whereas households with no fixed place workers have lower dietary diversity. We also find differences in dietary diversity across households which differ by their primary source of income.     

The digital transformation of business models in the creative industries: A holistic framework and emerging trends

This paper examines how digital technologies facilitate business model innovations in the creative industries. Through a systematic literature review, a holistic business model framework is developed, which is then used to analyse the empirical evidence from the creative industries. The research found that digital technologies have facilitated pervasive changes in business models, and some significant trends have emerged. However, the reconfigured business models are often not ‘new’ in the unprecedented sense. Business model innovations are primarily reflected in using digital technologies to enable the deployment of a wider range of business models than previously available to a firm. A significant emerging trend is the increasing adoption of multiple business models as a portfolio within one firm. This is happening in firms of all sizes, when one firm uses multiple business models to serve different markets segments, sell different products, or engage with multi-sided markets, or to use different business models over time. The holistic business model framework is refined and extended through a recursive learning process, which can serve both as a cognitive instrument for understanding business models and a planning tool for business model innovations. The paper contributes to our understanding of the theory of business models and how digital technologies facilitate business model innovations in the creative industries. Three new themes for future research are highlighted.     

Was the expansion of housing credit in Japan good or bad?

This paper shows, using data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, that housing credit has become increasingly available over time in Japan, especially since 2000, and that this has made it easier for Japanese households to purchase housing and enabled them to do so at an earlier age. However, it also shows that the greater availability of housing credit has increased households’ housing loan repayment burden, which has resulted in their cutting back on their other consumption expenditures and created the potential for retirement insecurity. Another concern is that the increasing availability of housing credit has been accompanied by a pronounced shift from fixed-rate to variable-rate housing loans. This is cause for concern given the low level of financial literacy that prevails among the Japanese population and the likelihood that interest rates on variable-rate housing loans will be raised sooner or later as monetary policy is tightened.     

Household responsibility system and China's agricultural Growth revisited: Addressing endogenous institutional change

The rise of the Household Responsibility System has been widely viewed as a significant contribution to China's agricultural growth. However, this empirical conclusion is rested upon a convenient but doubtful presumption that the process of institutional change, also known as decollectivization, is exogenous. We contribute to this literature by explicitly recognizing the endogeneity of institutional changes, and exploit exogenous variations in lagged weather shocks and initial fixed assets for consistent estimation. With improved data on irrigation, mechanization, weather and institutional changes in a provincial panel data during 1970–1987, the results of panel instrumental estimations reveal that the Household Responsibility System had a significantly positive effect on China's agricultural growth, which was larger than indicated by OLS estimates that suffer from adverse selection and attenuation biases.     

Islamic and conventional portfolios optimization under investor sentiment states: Bayesian vs Markowitz portfolio analysis

This paper investigates the portfolio optimization under investor’s sentiment states of Hidden Markov model and over a different time horizon during the period 2004–2016. To compare the efficient portfolios of the Islamic and the conventional stock indexes, we have employed two approaches: the Bayesian and Markowitz mean-variance. Our findings reveal that the Bayesian efficient frontier of Islamic and conventional stock portfolios is affected by the investor’s sentiment state and the time horizon. Our findings also indicate that the investor’s sentiment regimes change the Islamic and the conventional optimal diversified portfolios.Moreover, the results show that the potential diversification benefits seem to be more important when using the Bayesian approach than when applying the Markowitz approach. This finding is valid for the bearish, depressed, bullish and calm states in Islamic stock markets. However, the diversification of potential portfolios is significant only for the bullish and the bubble states in the conventional financial markets.The findings of the study provided additional evidence for investors to exploit googling investor sentiment states to evaluate the portfolio performance and make an optimal portfolio allocation.     

The long-run reversal in the long run: Insights from two centuries of international equity returns

We perform the most comprehensive test of long-term reversal in national equity indices ever done. Having examined data from 71 countries for the years 1830 through 2019, we demonstrate a strong reversal pattern: the past long-term return negatively predicts future performance. The phenomenon is not subsumed by other established cross-sectional return patterns, including the value effect. The long-term reversal is robust to many considerations but highly unstable through time. Finally, our findings support the overreaction explanation of this anomaly.     

Compensation for illiquidity in China: Evidence from an alternative measure

This paper shows that liquidity is an important source of priced risk in China. Using A-share stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen Exchange over the period 2007–2017, we examine the influence of liquidity on stock returns. A new liquidity measure that captures multiple dimensions of liquidity is proposed. Fama-Macbeth cross-sectional regression shows that the expected return is negatively correlated with liquidity. Based on Fama and French (1993), we propose a five-factor pricing model by incorporating reversal factor and liquidity factor. Time-series regressions show that the liquidity factor makes significantly marginal contributions to explaining excess stock returns. The liquidity factor based on the proposed measure works better than alternative liquidity measures such as turnover, Amihud illiquidity measure and the measure in Liu (2006).