Investor induced contagion during the banking and European sovereign debt crisis of 2007–2012: Wealth effect or portfolio rebalancing?

This study investigates the way a crisis spreads within a country and across borders by testing the investor induced contagion hypothesis through the liquidity channel on stock-bond relationships of the US and five European countries before and during the global banking and European sovereign debt crisis of 2007–2012. We provide evidence consistent with the wealth effect as a source of contagion for the majority of countries. Nevertheless, we uncover evidence of investor induced contagion sourced by the portfolio rebalancing effect for correlations involving Spanish and Italian bonds during the debt crisis. Further, we find that tight (narrow) credit spreads reduce (magnify) the wealth and portfolio rebalancing effects, which are offset by the opposite effects of risk aversion amongst investors, a dynamic that is not restricted to crisis periods.     

UNIVERSAL SEMICONSTANT REBALANCED PORTFOLIOS

In this paper, we investigate investment strategies that can rebalance their target portfolio vectors at arbitrary investment periods. These strategies are called semiconstant rebalanced portfolios in Blum and Kalai and Helmbold et al. Unlike a constant rebalanced portfolio, which must rebalance at every investment interval, a semiconstant rebalanced portfolio rebalances its portfolio only on selected instants. Hence, a semiconstant rebalanced portfolio may avoid rebalancing if the transaction costs outweigh the benefits of rebalancing. In a competitive algorithm framework, we compete against all such semiconstant portfolios with an arbitrary number of rebalancings and corresponding rebalancing instants. We investigate this framework with and without transaction costs and demonstrate sequential portfolios that asymptotically achieve the wealth of the best semiconstant rebalanced portfolios whose number of rebalancings and instants of rebalancings are tuned to the individual sequence of price relatives.     

Rebalancing and Regional Economic Performance: Northern Ireland in A Nordic Mirror

Northern Ireland has been characterised as having an excessively large public sector. This characterisation has led some to explain poor regional economic performance in terms of ‘crowding out’. This diagnosis has been used to justify a policy of ‘rebalancing’ and the region copying its southern neighbour's lower rate of corporation tax. The experience of large public sectors in the Nordic economies seems however to suggest that higher public spending is not necessarily damaging. This argument is examined critically. Rodrik's comparative institutional analysis indicates that in the Nordics a large public sector was the result of building a successful tradable private sector rather than its cause. In terms of the possible ‘economic dividend’ from devolution we suggest that a Hayekian insight is better: no ‘silver bullets’ exist.     

Exchange Rate Regime,Financial Market Bubbles and Long‐term Growth in China: Lessons from Japan

Since 2014, capital inflows into China have turned into capital outflows, reversing the gradual appreciation path of the renminbi against the US dollar into an erratic depreciation path. The paper explains the current capital outflows by comparing China and Japan with respect to the impact of exchange rate expectations on speculative capital flows. It is argued that both in China and Japan, given benign liquidity conditions in the USA, policy‐induced appreciation expectations have generated capital inflows that have contributed to overinvestment and financial market bubbles. The current reversal of capital flows is seen as a signal that the bubble in China has burst. To stabilize growth in China and to discourage speculative capital outflows a fixed exchange rate to the dollar is recommended. Given Japan's experience and given that China's foreign assets remain high, the depreciation pressure on the Chinese renminbi can be expected to abate.     

RISK HORIZON AND REBALANCING HORIZON IN PORTFOLIO RISK MEASUREMENT

This paper analyzes portfolio risk and volatility in the presence of constraints on portfolio rebalancing frequency. This investigation is motivated by the incremental risk charge (IRC) introduced by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. In contrast to the standard market risk measure based on a 10‐day value‐at‐risk calculated at 99% confidence, the IRC considers more extreme losses and is measured over a 1‐year horizon. More importantly, whereas 10‐day VaR is ordinarily calculated with a portfolio’s holdings held fixed, the IRC assumes a portfolio is managed dynamically to a target level of risk, with constraints on rebalancing frequency. The IRC uses discrete rebalancing intervals (e.g., monthly or quarterly) as a rough measure of potential illiquidity in underlying assets. We analyze the effect of these rebalancing intervals on the portfolio’s profit and loss distribution over a risk‐measurement horizon. We derive limiting results, as the rebalancing frequency increases, for the difference between discretely and continuously rebalanced portfolios; we use these to approximate the loss distribution for the discretely rebalanced portfolio relative to the continuously rebalanced portfolio. Our analysis leads to explicit measures of the impact of discrete rebalancing under a simple model of asset dynamics.