Accuracy of German federal election forecasts, 2013 & 2017

The present study reviews the accuracy of four methods (polls, prediction markets, expert judgment, and quantitative models) for forecasting the two German federal elections in 2013 and 2017. On average across both elections, polls and prediction markets were most accurate, while experts and quantitative models were least accurate. However, the accuracy of individual forecasts did not correlate across elections. That is, the methods that were most accurate in 2013 did not perform particularly well in 2017. A combined forecast, calculated by averaging forecasts within and across methods, was more accurate than three of the four component forecasts. The results conform to prior research on US presidential elections in showing that combining is effective in generating accurate forecasts and avoiding large errors.     

Polls to probabilities: Comparing prediction markets and opinion polls

The forecasting of election outcomes is a hugely popular activity, and not without reason: the outcomes can have significant economic impacts, for example on stock prices. As such, it is economically important, as well as of academic interest, to determine the forecasting methods that have historically performed best. However, the forecasts are often incompatible, as some are in terms of vote shares while others are probabilistic outcome forecasts. This paper sets out an empirical method for transforming opinion poll vote shares into probabilistic forecasts, and then evaluates the performances of prediction markets and opinion polls. We make comparisons along two dimensions, bias and precision, and find that converted opinion polls perform well in terms of bias, while prediction markets are good for precision.     

Is commercial real estate a good hedge against inflation? Evidence from South Africa

This study investigates the inflation hedging ability of Commercial Real Estate (CRE) in South Africa. The Vector Error Correction (VEC) model for cointegrated time series was used to investigate the long run relationship between property returns and inflation and to determine whether inflation drives property returns, and if so, to what degree it drives returns. This study finds that in the short run, CRE investments are generally a pervasive hedge against inflation. In the long run, retail and industrial property hedge against inflation, with retail property being the better inflation hedge of the two property types.     

Relationships among regional housing markets: Evidence on adjustments of housing burden

High regional house prices relative to income may result in residents moving to other regions with lower housing burden; this generates relationships among regional housing markets. From this perspective, this study employed Markov-switching models to examine housing affordability in 10 regional housing markets in the UK. The results show that levels of housing burden among regions are related, thereby proving that a high cost of housing burden in one region may result in residents buying houses in other regions. Moreover, this study found that house prices in most regions tend to converge with income levels but are asymmetric within the period of convergence. Specifically, because the period of high housing loans lasts longer, and vice versa, housing demand increases as soon as house prices drop. Thus, periods of “inexpensive” house prices do not last long. This paper explains why living costs in different regions are related, and proposes that housing demands may have asymmetric reactions when house prices are too high or too low.     

The economics of the Syrian refugee crisis in neighbouring countries: The case of Lebanon

In this article, we investigate the effects of a massive displacement of workers from a war‐torn economy on the economy of a neighbouring country. Applying a general equilibrium approach to the Lebanese economy, we explore effects from various components of the crisis on the labour market, the production apparatus and macroeconomic indicators. Along with previous literature, our findings suggest limited or no adverse effects on high‐skilled native workers, but a negative impact on the most vulnerable Lebanese workers. When aid takes the form of investment subsidies, significantly better growth and labour market prospects arise, recalling the necessity of complementing humanitarian aid with development aid to succeed in achieving long‐term objectives. This may however not be politically viable in a context where refugees are considered as temporary.     

The effects of Airbnb on hotel performance: Evidence from cities beyond the United States

Although Airbnb's impact on hotels has been quantified for major hotel markets in the United States, these effects have not been quantified in international hotel markets. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to examine the effects of Airbnb listings on key hotel performance metrics in an international context. In particular, we examine the effects of Airbnb listings on hotel revenue per available room (RevPAR), average daily rate (ADR), and occupancy rate (OCC) in major international hotel markets, namely London, Paris, Sydney and Tokyo. The results show that Airbnb listings in these major cities have been increasing more than 100% year over year and that the effect of Airbnb on hotel RevPAR and OCC is negative and statistically significant. In particular, a 1% increase in Airbnb listings decreases hotel RevPAR by between 0.016% and 0.031% in these hotel markets. The implications of these findings for destinations and hoteliers are discussed.     

Semi‐efficient valuations and put‐call parity

We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely, absence of arbitrage (in the sense of NUPBR) and absence of relative arbitrage among all buy‐and‐hold strategies (called static efficiency). A valuation process for a payoff is then called semi‐efficient consistent if the financial market enlarged by that process still satisfies this combination of properties. It turns out that this approach lies in the middle between the extremes of valuing by risk‐neutral expectation and valuing by absence of arbitrage alone. We show that this always yields put‐call parity, although put and call values themselves can be nonunique, even for complete markets. We provide general formulas for put and call values in complete markets and show that these are symmetric and that both contain three terms in general. We also show that our approach recovers all the put‐call parity respecting valuation formulas in the classic theory as special cases, and we explain when and how the different terms in the put and call valuation formulas disappear or simplify. Along the way, we also define and characterize completeness for general semimartingale financial markets and connect this to the classic theory.     

Tax Benefits of Open Individual Private Pension Plans

This article describes the open private pension plans offered in Brazil, which is one of the four pillars of the Brazilian retirement system. A framework is created to describe and analyze the impact of the transaction costs and tax advantages one can obtain from these financial products. This framework allows us to show and measure the advantages of these products versus other alternatives for long-term investment in the Brazilian financial market. It is shown that private plans are better than direct investment in funds in a high interest rate environment.     

Comparing the forecasting performances of linear models for electricity prices with high RES penetration

We compare alternative univariate versus multivariate models and frequentist versus Bayesian autoregressive and vector autoregressive specifications for hourly day-ahead electricity prices, both with and without renewable energy sources. The accuracy of point and density forecasts is inspected in four main European markets (Germany, Denmark, Italy, and Spain) characterized by different levels of renewable energy power generation. Our results show that the Bayesian vector autoregressive specifications with exogenous variables dominate other multivariate and univariate specifications in terms of both point forecasting and density forecasting.     

Metal prices made in China? A network analysis of industrial metal futures

In addition to being the world's greatest consumer and producer of industrial metals, China now also features the most actively traded industrial metal futures contracts worldwide. To examine China's role in the global price formation process of industrial metal futures markets, we use a sample of 29 futures contracts traded on exchanges in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and China. We estimate vector autoregressive models and conduct variance decompositions, which are then visualized in the form of networks. The results indicate that China, despite its role as key actor in both real and financial industrial metal markets, is a price taker.