Usury laws and private credit in Lima,Peru. Evidence from notarized records

I examine the impact of usury laws on the Peruvian credit market between 1825 and 1852. Using a new data set of nearly 2,000 loans from archival sources, I show that the repeal of colonial anti-usury laws in early 1833 had an important effect on the allocation of credit in Lima. It increased interest rates and promoted access to credit. Furthermore, lenders made loans with greater maturities after the repeal of usury laws.     

The expected real yield and inflation components of the nominal yield curve

The term structure of real yields and expected inflation are two unobserved components of the nominal yield curve. The primary objectives of this study are to decompose nominal yields into their expected real yield and inflation components and to examine their behaviour using state-space and regime-switching frameworks. The dynamic yield-curve models capture three well-known latent factors – level, slope, and curvature – that accurately aggregate the information for the nominal yields and the expected real and inflation components for all maturities. The nominal yield curve is found to increase slightly with a slope of about 120 basis points, while the real yield curve slopes upward by about 20 basis points, and the expected inflation curve is virtually flat at slightly above 2 per cent. The regime-switching estimations reveal that the nominal yield, real yield and expected inflation curves have shifted down significantly since 1999.     

The (de-)anchoring of inflation expectations: New evidence from the euro area

Well-anchored inflation expectations are a key factor for achieving economic stability. This paper provides new empirical results on the anchoring of long-term inflation expectations in the euro area. In line with earlier evidence, we find that euro area inflation expectations have been anchored until fall 2011. Since then, however, they respond significantly to macroeconomic news. Our results obtained from multiple endogenous break point tests suggest that euro area inflation expectations have remained de-anchored ever since.     

Economic slowdowns,hazard rates and foreign ownership

This paper evaluates the link between foreign ownership and firm exit during crises, using a longitudinal micro dataset over an 18-year period. We address two main questions: first, if foreign affiliates have different failure rates than domestic firms during economic downturns, and second if the foreignness effect differs between two different economic downturns. The results partially confirm the liability of foreignness argument, suggesting that when the crisis was more pronounced at home than abroad, the differences in hazard rates between foreign and domestic firms reduce. The footloose argument is also only partially confirmed. For policy makers, our results on survival dynamics during crises are not against policies stimulating inward investment. There is no need to fear that foreign firms destabilize more than usual the host economy during economic slowdowns by immediately closing down operations.     

The effect of cell phones on international motor vehicle fatality rates: A panel-data analysis

This paper analyzes the effects of cell phone usage and economic freedom on motor vehicle death rates by estimating regression models on data for three years across 38 countries. The models incorporate a representative set of motor vehicle fatality determinants. Results indicate that cell phone use has a statistically significant nonlinear impact on highway death rates and that economic freedom does not appear to have an effect.     

Political uncertainty,risk of Frexit and European sovereign spreads

Using data from a prediction market (crowd-based forecasts), we build a daily measure capturing the risk of Frexit related to the 2017 French presidential elections. We study how unexpected changes in this new measure of political uncertainty in France affect European sovereign spreads vis-à-vis Germany. We show that our uncertainty proxy drives not only the French sovereign spread but also the spreads of those EU countries deemed the most vulnerable to the risk of desegregation of the Euro Zone. These results suggest that specific political uncertainty affects short-term investor’s expectations and may outweigh other economic determinants of sovereign spreads shortly prior to high stake elections     

住房自有率与城市蔓延：理论与实证

通过构建一个包含住房租赁市场的封闭、单中心城市一般均衡模型，模型化了住房自有率与城市蔓延之间的关系，理论模型结论显示：首先，与自有住房者相比，租房者倾向于居住在离市中心较近的地方；其次，住房自有率的提高会使城市空间面积扩大，加剧城市蔓延。进一步，利用地级市数据分别对理论命题结论进行了检验，在比较充分地控制内生性问题后，实证结果证实了高住房自有率会加剧城市蔓延。因此，长期以来我国不断升高的住房自有率也是加剧我国城市蔓延的重要原因。     

The impact of macroeconomic factors on income inequality: Evidence from the BRICS

In this paper we investigate how the evolution of income growth, real interest rates, and inflation have driven income inequality across a variety of countries with particular focus on the BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) during the period 2001 to 2015. Our work suggests that, when central banks of the BRICS economies use monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilization, they need to consider the impact monetary policy changes have on the distribution of income in their nations. Our estimates reveal that the unintended consequence of policies that induce economic growth and higher prices is higher income inequality. We find that the positive relationship between the three macroeconomic variables and income inequality for the BRICS economies is stronger during the post-2008 period.     

Time-frequency co-movements between oil prices and interest rates: Evidence from a wavelet-based approach

This paper investigates time–frequency co-movements between crude oil prices and interest rates. To test this relationship, the study applied a continuous wavelet and cross wavelet approaches to data from West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices and interest rates in the United States (U.S.). Results from the sample period revealed significant relationships, in the intermediate term, between WTI crude oil prices and U.S. interest rates. Moreover, co-movements between oil price and interest rate variables were especially sensitive during abnormal political events and periods of financial ‘meltdown’. We further use Partial Wavelet Coherence (PWC) and Multiple Wavelet Coherence (MWC) methods to investigate the impacts of five major control variables namely GDP growth, unemployment, three-month Treasury bill, CPI index and industrial production index. The results show a powerful impact of control variables on oil-interest rates co-movements under different frequencies. Finally, we show evidence of co-integrating long run relationship between oil markets and control variables. These results have important implications for energy investors and policy makers.     

A new multiscale decomposition ensemble approach for forecasting exchange rates

Due to the high complexity and strong nonlinearity nature of foreign exchange rates, how to forecast foreign exchange rate accurately is regarded as a challenging research topic. Therefore, developing highly accurate forecasting method is of great significance to investors and policy makers. A new multiscale decomposition ensemble approach to forecast foreign exchange rates is proposed in this paper. In the approach, the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method is utilized to divide foreign exchange rates into a finite number of subcomponents; the support vector neural network (SVNN) technique is used to model and forecast each subcomponent respectively; another SVNN technique is utilized to integrate the forecasting results of each subcomponent to generate the final forecast results. To verify the superiority of the proposed approach, four major exchange rates were chosen for model comparison and evaluation. The experimental results indicate that our proposed VMD-SVNN-SVNN multiscale decomposition ensemble approach outperforms some other benchmarks in terms of forecasting accuracy and statistical tests. This demonstrates that our proposed VMD-SVNN-SVNN multiscale decomposition ensemble approach is promising for forecasting foreign exchange rates.