HONG KONG'S INFLATION AND DEFLATION UNDER THE US DOLLAR PEG: THE BALASSA-SAMUELSON EFFECT OR EXPORT PRICE SHOCKS?

Hong Kong's US dollar peg, adopted in 1983, has failed to deliver price stability. Hong Kong experienced high inflation before the Asian financial crisis and prolonged deflation after it. The annual rate of inflation (GDP-deflator based) was 7.4% in the first period (1985–97) and −2.0% in the second (1998–2007). There was no clear trend for the inflation rate to converge to the US level. The nominal anchor via a fixed exchange rate in Hong Kong had an upward and downward drift in the order of 4% from the US inflation rate, casting doubt on the anchor's efficacy. Despite Hong Kong's high output growth relative to that of the United States, the Balassa-Samuelson effect was not the main factor behind the pre-Asian crisis inflation. Price shocks in service exports played a major role in Hong Kong's general prices through the two periods.     

OUTPUT-INFLATION TRADEOFF IN CHINA

High growth and wide fluctuations in fixed investment are the main driving forces causing inflation in China during its economic reform period. Investment expansion generates strong demand pressures in the consumption goods market. Its inflationary impact is magnified further as it brings about higher wage costs during economic booms. In the paper, an implied short-run tradeoff has been derived from the dynamic simulation of a small macroeconomic model. In a given year, each additional percentage point of aggregate output growth or investment growth will bring about a 2.6 or a 0.9 per cent increase, respectively, in the rate of inflation for that year. These estimates suggest that the surge in fixed investment accounts almost fully for the 1993–95 inflationary spell.     

Contingent capital and bank risk‐taking among British banks before the First World War1

The recent financial turmoil highlights the incentive of highly leveraged financial institutions to take excessive risk, given the protection of limited liability. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many banks operated under liability rules which obligated shareholders to bear larger costs of bank insolvency in the form of contingent, or even unlimited, liability. This article examines the empirical relationship between the size of banks' contingent liability and their risk‐taking behaviour using data on British banks from 1878 to 1912. We find that banks with more contingent liability appear to have taken less risk. We also find evidence that the risk‐reducing effects of contingent liability were larger for banks with higher leverage, suggesting that contingent capital mitigated the moral hazard problem at banks.     

Political Influence and Declarations of Bank Insolvency in Japan

This paper investigates how politics affects bank supervision by examining determinants of bank failures in Japan during 1999–2002, a period during which bank regulators were called upon to resolve insolvent banks in preparation for the lifting of a blanket deposit guarantee. The empirical results suggest that Japan's bank regulators had tendency to delay declarations of insolvency in prefectures that supported senior politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). This result, which is robust to a host of bank-level and prefecture-level controls, suggests that bank supervision is prone to political influence that delays efficient resolution of insolvency.     

ON THE NEUTRALITY OF COALITION FORMATION IN A PURE BARGAINING PROBLEM*

We consider the sequential bargaining game à la Stahl–Binmore–Rubinstein with random proposers, juxtaposing an ex ante coalition formation stage to their bargaining game. On the basis of the expected outcomes in the negotiation over how to split a dollar, players can form coalitions in a sequential manner, within each of which they can redistribute their payoffs. It turns out that the grand coalition does form, and that each player receives his discounted expected payoff, which is obtained by playing as a single player in the negotiation, although there could be many equilibria in the bargaining stage.     

Women's Organizations and Social Capital to Reduce Prevalence of Child Malnutrition in Papua New Guinea

Drawing upon survey data in 2000, this article analyses the maturity of women's community-based organizations in Papua New Guinea (PNG), comparing autonomous organizations with those that receive external support. The results of applying the Heckman model suggest that: (1) autonomous Mothers' Groups are more efficient in improving child nutritional status in the weight-for-age measure than those externally supported; and (2) higher maturity of these groups is associated with lower occurrence of underweight. Support for existing autonomous women's organizations is a particularly relevant intervention in PNG; governance with limited trust in formal institutions and modest outreach of services remain issues for large segments of the rural population.