Futures markets and real estate public equity: Connectivity of lumber futures and Timber REITs

This paper investigates connectivity between lumber futures contracts, Timberland REITs, the FTSE NAREIT U.S. REIT index, spot prices, and timberland capitalization rates, and contributes to this tranche of research by empirically linking the price discovery process of Timberland Real Estate Investment Trusts to lumber futures. We employ VEC and GARCH models, providing evidence that lumber futures have a positive significant long- and short-run equilibrium relationship with publicly traded Timber REIT prices, connecting a specific futures commodity with its theoretically entwined real estate equity index. As such, exogenous factors that influence Timber REIT prices are documented leading to possible diversification/risk reduction strategies.     

Do Capital Flows Matter to Stock and House Prices? Evidence from China

This article analyzes the impacts of foreign direct investment (FDI) and short-term capital flows, otherwise known as hot money, on stock and house prices in China. Empirical results, estimated using the local projections approach, reveal that a positive hot money net inflow shock significantly increases stock and house prices and the impacts persist for up to 1–2 months, while a positive FDI net inflow shock contributes significantly to lagged house price appreciation but has no effect on stock prices. This study also identifies negative pass-through effects of FDI net inflows on hot money net inflows and positive pass-through effects of stock prices on house prices.     

Evidence that capital formation is overestimated in low- and middle-income countries in ICP 2011

Using the International Comparison Program (ICP) 2011’s cross-country data on input prices and project cost shares, I show that the ICP 2011 construction prices are substantially underestimated in the 143 low- and middle-income countries where these prices were estimated from input prices. As a consequence, the ICP 2011’s estimate of PPP-adjusted construction is overestimated on average by about 100% and gross fixed capital formation is overestimated by 25–30% in these countries. These nonrandom data errors are of sufficient magnitude to cause serious estimation bias in cross-country growth analyses.     

Noisy information,distance and law of one price dynamics across US cities

US micro price data at the city level suggests that both the volatility and the persistence of law of one price deviations are rising in the distance between US cities. A standard two-city equilibrium model with trade costs can predict the relationship between volatility and distance but not between persistence and distance. We show that if there is imperfect information about the state of nominal aggregate demand, with noisy signals that are asymmetric across cities, then distance and persistence will be positively correlated. Our main results are shown to be robust to the introduction of sticky prices and multiple cities.     

The Effects of Oil Price Uncertainty on Global Real Economic Activity

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity using a quarterly vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and allows one to incorporate an extraneous indicator of oil price uncertainty such as realized volatility that greatly improves the precision of the estimated uncertainty series. The estimation results show that an oil price uncertainty shock has negative effects on world industrial production all else equal. For example, it is shown that a doubling of oil price volatility is associated with a cumulative decline as high as 0.3 percentage points in world industrial production.     

Earning the right premium on the right factor in portfolio planning

The optimal portfolio as well as the utility from trading stocks and derivatives depends on the risk factors and on their market prices of risk. We analyze this dependence for a CRRA investor in models with stochastic volatility, jumps in the stock price, and jumps in volatility. We find that the compartment of the total variance into diffusion risk and jump risk has a small impact on the utility in an incomplete market only. In contrast, the decomposition of the equity risk premium into a diffusion component and a jump risk component and the compartment of the latter into its various elements has a huge impact on the utility in a complete market. The more extreme the market prices of risk, i.e. the more they deviate from their equilibrium values, the larger the utility of the investor. Additionally, we show that the structure of the optimal exposures to jump risk crucially depends on which elements of jump risk are priced.     

The cost of capital,asset prices,and the effects of monetary policy

The primary objective of this paper is to study the interaction between monetary policy, asset prices, and the cost of capital. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where individuals face idiosyncratic risk. Incomplete information also provides a transactions role for money so that monetary policy can be studied. In contrast to standard monetary growth models which focus on the transmission of monetary policy to the demand for capital goods, we incorporate a separate capital goods sector so that the supply response to monetary policy is taken into account. Consequently, in contrast to the standard monetary growth model, monetary policy plays an important role in investment activity through the relative price of capital goods. Moreover, different sources of productivity can affect the degree of risk sharing. Although the optimal money growth rate falls in response to an increase in productivity in either sector of the economy, monetary policy should react more aggressively to the level of productivity in the capital sector.     

On the behavior of commodity prices when speculative storage is bounded

This paper investigates the implications of bounded speculative storage, storage bounded from below at zero and above at a capacity, on commodity prices. Binding capacity mirrors the non-negativity constraint on storage and leads to negative price spiking and higher volatility when the market is in deep contango, i.e. low current prices at high stock levels. With bounded storage there is no need to restrict storage to be costly to ensure a rational expectations equilibrium. This allows the model to cover a wide range of storage technologies, including free and productive storage. We also provide an alternative expression for speculative prices that highlights the key role of the storage boundaries. The competitive equilibrium price is the sum of discounted future probability weighted boundary prices. The boundary prices can be viewed as dividends on commodities in storage reflecting the realization of economic profits from storage.     

Ticket Scalping as a Means of Managing Risk

Ticket scalping (known as touting in the UK) is often criticised for raising prices to consumers and producing unjustified profits. Conventional economic theory, however, shows that ticket scalping allows tickets to be reallocated in a more optimal manner with regard to the utility of consumers. This article points to an additional benefit from ticket scalping: by providing a secondary market it acts as a potentially powerful tool of risk management for event organisers. It is argued that curtailing ticket scalping may in the long run lead to a decline in the supply of privately provided events and concerts, especially lesser‐known ones. This in turn may stimulate a demand for public subsidy.     

A panel stationarity test with gradual structural shifts: Re-investigate the international commodity price shocks

This paper proposes a simple panel stationarity test which takes into account structural shifts and cross-section dependency. Structural shifts are modelled as gradual/smooth process with a Fourier approximation. The so-called Fourier panel stationarity test has a standard normal distribution. The Monte Carlo simulations indicate that (i) if the error terms are i.i.d, the test shows good size and power properties even in small samples; and (ii) if the error terms are serially correlated, the test has reasonable size and high power. We re-examine the behavior of the international commodity prices and find out an evidence on the persistence of shocks.