On estimating long-run effects in models with lagged dependent variables

A common procedure in economics is to estimate long-run effects from models with lagged dependent variables. For example, macro panel studies frequently are concerned with estimating the long-run impacts of fiscal policy, international aid, or foreign investment.Our analysis points out the hazards of this practice. We use Monte Carlo experiments to demonstrate that estimating long-run impacts from dynamic models produces unreliable results.Biases can be substantial, sample ranges very wide, and hypothesis tests can be rendered useless in realistic data environments. There are three reasons for this poor performance. First, OLS estimates of the coefficient of a lagged dependent variable are downwardly biased in finite samples. Second, small biases in the estimate of the lagged, dependent variable coefficient are magnified in the calculation of long-run effects. And third, and perhaps most importantly, the statistical distribution associated with estimates of the LRP is complicated, heavy-tailed, and difficult to use for hypothesis testing. While many of the underlying problems have been long-known in the literature, the continued widespread use of the associated empirical procedures suggests that researchers are unaware of the extent and severity of the estimation problems. This study aims to illustrate their practical importance for applied research.     

Why do commercial banks hold government bonds? The case of Japan

We investigate the determinants of the demand for Japanese government bonds (JGBs) by commercial banks in Japan. In particular, by estimating portfolio equations for JGB demand and bank loans, based on a panel data set from the late 1990s to the 2000s, we rigorously test the popular assertion that the long stagnation of the real economy caused a shift in the portfolios of commercial banks from bank lending to JGBs. We find that the popular assertion is not empirically supported. Rather, the portfolio shift from loans to JGBs has been caused by a fall in the ratio of the loan rate to unit lending costs, or the bank’s price–cost margin for lending.     

地方人大中的地域代表现象探析——基于五省市人大代表建议的内容分析

本文试图探析在中国地方人大中是否存在地域性代表及其相关因素。通过收集和分析2017年国内五省市人大收到的近四千条代表建议,发现在地方人大代表的履职行为中,一定范围内存在从整体资源中为选区争取利益的现象。进一步回归分析的结果显示:来自经济发展水平相对较低的地区的代表,更倾向于提出地域性建议;由代表联名提出的建议更可能是地域性建议;担任地方党政领导职务的省市人大代表,在提出建议时更倾向于提出地域性建议。上述实证发现对中国地方人大地域性代表的实现机制提供了初步启发性证据,也有助于丰富我们对非竞选体制下的政治代表性和回应性机制的理解。     

Lumpy Investment and Corporate Tax Policy

In the presence of both convex and nonconvex capital adjustment costs in a dynamic general equilibrium model, corporate tax policy generates both intensive and extensive margin effects via the channel of marginal Q. Its impact is determined largely by the strength of the extensive margin effect, which, in turn, depends on the cross‐sectional distribution of firms. Depending on the initial distribution of firms, the economy displays asymmetric responses to tax changes. Moreover, an anticipated increase in the future investment tax credit reduces investment and adjustment rate initially.     

Japan's financial crises and lost decades

In this paper, we explore the role of financial intermediation malfunction in macroeconomic fluctuations in Japan. To this end we estimate, using Japanese data, a financial accelerator model in which the balance sheet conditions of entrepreneurs in a goods-producing sector and those of a financial intermediary affect macroeconomic activity. We find that shocks to the balance sheets of the two sectors have been quantitatively playing important role in macroeconomic fluctuations by affecting lending rates and aggregate investments. Their impacts are prominent in particular during financial crises. Shocks to the entrepreneurs’ balance sheets have played a key role in lowering investment in the bubble burst during the early 1990s and in the global financial crisis during the late 2000s. Shocks to the financial intermediaries’ balance sheets have persistently lowered investment throughout the 1990s.     

Is Downward Wage Flexibility the Primary Factor of Japan's Prolonged Deflation?

By using both macro‐ and micro‐level data, this paper investigates how wages and prices evolved during Japan's lost two decades. We find that downward nominal wage rigidity was present in Japan until the late 1990s, but disappeared after 1998 as annual wages became downwardly flexible. Moreover, nominal wage flexibility may have contributed to Japan's relatively low unemployment rates. Although macro‐level movements in nominal wages and prices seemed to be synchronized, such synchronicity is not observed at the industry level. Therefore, wage deflation does not seem to be a primary factor of Japan's prolonged deflation.     

Truthful germs are contagious: A local-to-global characterization of truthfulness

We study the question of which social choice functions from an abstract type space to a set of outcomes are truthful, i.e., implementable by truthful mechanisms, when utilities are quasi-linear. For convex domains, our main theorem characterizes truthful social choice functions as those satisfying two properties: local weak monotonicity and vortex-freeness. The first of these constrains the function values at any two sufficiently proximal points, while the second asserts that its line integrals around sufficiently small triangular loops must vanish.The characterization implies a local-to-global principle that allows one to deduce truthfulness of a function from its behavior on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of each point. Other consequences include a simple alternate derivation of the Saks–Yu Theorem that weak monotonicity characterizes truthfulness of functions having a convex domain and finite range, and a sufficient condition for constructing truthful functions by “stitching together” truthful subfunctions on different subsets of the domain.     

Local Powers of Optimal One‐sample and Multi‐sample Tests for the Concentration of Fisher‐von Mises‐Langevin Distributions

One‐sample and multi‐sample tests on the concentration parameter of Fisher‐von Mises‐Langevin distributions on (hyper‐)spheres have been well studied in the literature. However, only little is known about their behaviour under local alternatives, which is due to complications inherent to the curved nature of the parameter space. The aim of the present paper therefore consists in filling that gap by having recourse to the Le Cam methodology, which has recently been adapted from the linear to the spherical setup. We obtain explicit expressions of the powers for the most efficient one‐ and multi‐sample tests. As a nice by‐product, we are also able to write down the powers (against local Fisher‐von Mises‐Langevin alternatives) of the celebrated Rayleigh test of uniformity. A Monte Carlo simulation study confirms our theoretical findings and shows the empirical powers of the above‐mentioned procedures.     

辽宁上市公司董事会报告透明度影响因素研究

以46家辽宁上市公司为样本,对影响董事会报告透明度因素的研究发现:股权集中度、管理层持股比例、董事会规模、独立董事比例与董事会报告透明度呈正相关关系;股权制衡度,董事长与总经理是否两职合一,审计意见类型与董事会报告透明度呈负相关关系。上市公司应该通过股票期权等方式提升管理人员的持股比例,激励他们积极治理公司,提高董事会报告信息披露的透明度;上市公司第二大股东应适度提高持股比例,防止一股独大现象;同时减少董事长与总经理两职合一,也会有助于提高董事会报告的透明度。     

Financialization of Housing in Brazil: New Frontiers

The financialization of housing has been increasingly identified as an important driver of social and economic change in contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the Brazilian context, this article considers the extent to which recent changes in housing regulations, policies and markets confirm or challenge narratives about the financialization of housing in the international academic debate. I argue that while many of the trends stressed in the literature are apparent, more extreme processes of financialization within the Brazilian housing sector remain limited––not only because of institutional and regulatory constraints, path dependence or political resistance, but also because of fundamental structural conditions of Brazil's position as a peripheral economy. Three different but mutually reinforcing processes are scrutinized in order to evaluate the financialization of housing and its limits in Brazil: the re‐regulation of the real estate financial sector initiated in the 1990s; the changing funding patterns among real estate companies since the mid‐2000s; and the increasing commodification of housing induced by a large‐scale and heavily subsidized housing program launched in 2009.