Release of a liquidity regulation: What do we learn for credit and house prices?

This paper studies the effects of the release of a limit on banks’ maturity transformation – akin to the Net Stable Funding Ratio – for mortgage supply and house prices. After the regulatory easing, credit supply increased only for the banks that were previously constrained by the regulation and not for the others. We also show that the expansion in mortgages triggered by the deregulation accelerated house prices. The effect was channeled through higher demand for housing and the relaxation of borrowers’ financial constraints. Even though the impact of the credit supply shock persisted, the interaction between credit and house prices was not conducive to a housing market overheating.     

房价预期与城镇居民家庭股市参与——理论探讨与微观经验证据

本文基于中国家庭金融调查数据,通过构建理论模型和实证检验分析了房价预期与家庭股市参与的关系,考察了行为金融偏差在房价预期影响股市参与过程中的作用,并根据背景风险、社会网络和户主特征进行异质性分析。结果表明:(1)房价上涨预期通过降低居民家庭的股票收益率预期和增加住房资产,进而降低居民家庭的股市参与概率和参与程度;(2)“心理账户”以及“有限关注”的存在显著弱化了房价上涨预期对家庭股市参与的负向作用;(3)房价上涨预期对股市参与概率和参与程度的负向作用在收入风险更高、健康状况更差、社会网络水平较低以及受教育程度偏低的家庭中更大。因此,稳定房价预期能够通过提升家庭股市参与,进而从需求角度促进股票市场的健康发展。     

Factors that influence manufacturer and store brand behavioral loyalty

This study examines the factors that are linked to consumer goods brands having unusually high or low behavioral loyalty, after controlling for the association between brand size and loyalty that occurs due to the ‘double jeopardy’ effect. Behavioral, or repeat-purchase loyalty is measured as the brand's average share of category requirements (in volume) among its buyers over a 12-month period. We examine a range of factors that theory or past evidence suggests are associated with higher or lower behavioral loyalty, including brand type (store brand/manufacturer brand), price level, promotion intensity, as well as average brand volume per occasion and pack size. Using extensive US panel purchasing data, we find that store brands exhibit relatively higher behavioral loyalty than manufacturer brands. We explain the theory behind this result. We also find that the brand's average pack size and volume bought per occasion has a markedly positive association with behavioral loyalty. Finally, we find that the effect of low price on excess loyalty is moderated via a positive association with average volume purchase per occasion. These findings add to the body of knowledge relating to patterns in behavioral brand loyalty for both manufacturer and store brands, as well as the marketing-mix factors that influence it.     

Neural networks for estimating Macro Asset Pricing model in football clubs

The recent crisis caused by COVID-19 directly affected consumption habits and the stability sof financial markets. In particular, the football industry has been hit hard by this pandemic and therefore has more volatile stock prices. Given this new scenario, further research is needed to accurately estimate the value of the shares of football clubs. In this paper, we estimate an asset pricing model in football clubs with different compositions of risk nature using non-linear techniques of artificial neural networks. Usually, asset pricing models have been estimated with linear methods such as ordinary least squares. Our results show a precision higher than 90% for all the estimated models, which far exceeds those shown by linear methods in the previous literature. We find that the residual represents about 40% of the variance of the price-dividend ratio. Long-term risks follow in importance, and above all, the habit component and its behaviour in the face of changes. The importance of the residual component exists due to a low correlation between the asset price and consumer behaviour, but to a much lesser extent than that shown in previous studies. The estimation carried out with artificial neural networks, both the Deep Learning methods and especially the Quantum Neural Network, opens up new possibilities to estimate more efficiently the pricing of financial assets in the football industry.     

How online reviews and coupons affect sales and pricing: An empirical study based on e-commerce platform

With rapid economic growth largely fueled by digital technologies, online reviews are among the new wave of technologies that still make a significant contribution to this new digital economy. However, there is scarce academic research in promoting or responding online reviews using reduction coupons with threshold issued by sellers and pricing decisions. We employ a three-stage least squares (3SLS) model to estimate the effects of online reviews and coupons on online product sales and price. We also extend our research using the data of two product categories. Our results mainly include: (1) Negative impact of negative online reviews on sales is moderated by price, and consumers are more tolerant of negative reviews of high-priced products. (2) Consumers' perceived usefulness of online coupons helps promote more sales and weaken the relationship between negative reviews and sales. (3) Positive online reviews weaken the negative relationship between online negative reviews and the price of product. (4) Consumers’ increased perceived usefulness of online coupons will encourage sellers to set a higher price and weaken the negative relationship between negative reviews and the price of product. (5) Compared with the search product, sellers regard negative reviews from the product with experience attributes as less helpful and apply less effective coupon promotion to response to negative reviews. Our study clarifies the interaction between online reviews and online coupons on e-commerce platforms under the operation scenario. We also provide empirical support for accurate promotion and higher sales revenue through reasonable pricing decisions and specified reduction coupons.     

Housing booms and bank growth

The rapid increase in U.S. house prices during the 2001–2006 period was accompanied by a historically rapid expansion of bank assets. We exploit cross-regional variation in local housing booms to study how housing demand shocks affected the growth of the banking sector. We estimate the effect of housing demand shocks that are orthogonal to observed non-housing demand shocks and credit supply shocks in each bank’s market area. We employ several instrumental variables that plausibly identify variation in local housing demand that is exogenous to local banks. We find that the housing boom had a large effect on bank asset growth—the cross-regional elasticity of bank growth with respect to housing demand shocks is around 0.6. The regional elasticity estimate suggests that housing demand shocks can potentially account for a large fraction of the growth of the banking sector during this period.     

Same but different - The effect of the unit of measure on the valuation of a unit price

Unit prices are a ubiquitous phenomenon. The respective legal norms leave a certain freedom of choice with regard to the reference unit. However, research on the impact of alternative measurement units on consumer behaviour is still in its infancy and its findings are inconclusive. Moreover, this influence has so far only been measured directly. Investigating the product category bottled beer (with its essential product attributes ‘brand’, ‘price’, ‘alcohol content’ and ‘size of packaging unit’), a Choice Based Conjoint experiment provides empirical evidence that a large (per 1 L) compared to a small (per 100 mL) size unit of measurement leads to a significant shift of importance towards the product attribute ‘price’ at the expense of the ‘brand’. In addition, consumers react more sensitively to price changes. At the strategic level, retailers can use these insights to sharpen their positioning through a suitable unit price measure. When making operational decisions, retailers should bear in mind that the reference unit influences the likelihood of purchase, the scope for price increases and the opportunities for up-selling.     

Differential pricing and production strategies for heterogeneous products under cannibalization and promotional effects

This study examines the optimal pricing and production strategy of a closed-loop supply chain consisting of a manufacturer, a recycler, and consumers. Considering the cannibalization and promotion effects of remanufactured products on new and secondhand products, we constructed Stackelberg game models under different scenarios. We analyze the impact of the changes in the two effects on the optimal prices and production strategies of the manufacturer and recycler, as well as their countermeasures. We find that (i) how the cannibalization and promotional effects influence the manufacturer and the recycler's pricing and production strategies differ under different scenarios; (ii) when the two effects exceed a threshold, the manufacturer abandons new or remanufactured products, and the recycler prefers to stop production on its new products or continue to remanufacture products; and (iii) the two effects always reduce the profits of the manufacturer and increase the profits of the recycler.