Does local government competition aggravate haze pollution? A new perspective of factor market distortion

Haze pollution has become a new threat to China's sustainable development, but it may be that local government behaviour can play an important role in the prevention and control of pollutants. A dynamic spatial autoregressive (SAR) model is used to study the relationship between local government competition and haze pollution. To further explore the indirect impact of factor market distortion on haze pollution and control potential endogeneity problems, a newly developed intermediary effect model that incorporates the characteristics of the generalized method of moments (GMM) is utilized to explore how factor market distortion indirectly affects haze pollution. The research results show that regional haze pollution in China is characterized by significant spatial correlation, and local government competition has a positive impact on haze pollution; that is, local government competition exacerbates haze pollution. In general, local government competition not only directly leads to an increase in haze pollution but also further intensifies it by distorting the local factor market, and the intermediary role of factor market distortion is approximately 7.04%. The results of the regional inspection found that competition among local governments in the eastern region did not lead to haze pollution, and distortion of the factor market did not exist as an intermediary effect. However, both direct and intermediary effects are significant in the central and western regions. Therefore, an official performance appraisal system that includes ecological constraints should be established to guide the benign transformation of local government competition, and an environmental management mechanism must be developed for joint prevention and control to reduce haze pollution. In addition, the free flow of factors and marketization are equally important.     

Measuring Inflation Anchoring and Uncertainty: A U.S. and Euro Area Comparison

We use several U.S. and euro‐area surveys of professional forecasters to estimate a dynamic factor model of inflation featuring time‐varying uncertainty. We obtain survey‐consistent distributions of future inflation at any horizon, both in the U.S. and the euro area. Equipped with this model, we propose a novel measure of the anchoring of inflation expectations that accounts for inflation uncertainty. Our results suggest that following the Great Recession, inflation anchoring improved in the United States, while mild de‐anchoring occurred in the euro area. As of our sample end, both areas appear to be almost equally anchored.     

Macroeconomic consequences of state fragility in sub‐Saharan Africa

Are poor macroeconomic outcomes primarily the result of economic policies, or of deeper underlying state fragility problems in sub‐Saharan Africa? We attempt to answer this question by using carefully specified dynamic panel regression techniques to show how state fragility conditions help to explain the differences in the macroeconomic performance of sub‐Saharan African economies, and to identify the most plausible mechanisms of transmission. We find that countries with greater fragility suffer higher macroeconomic volatility and crisis; they also experience weaker growth. When we disaggregate state fragility into its various components, we find that it is the security and social components that have the strongest causal impact on macroeconomic outcomes, while the political component is, at best, weak. Therefore, we conclude that it is state fragility conditions, and not necessarily macroeconomic policies, that are of first‐order importance in explaining the differences in macroeconomic performance for African countries. The knock‐on effects are mostly mediated through the fiscal channel, the aid channel, and the finance channel. Accordingly, we recommend that interventions in fragile states should best focus on exploiting the potential for using fiscal policy, aid, and finance as instruments to improve macroeconomic outcomes in sub‐Saharan Africa.     

Semistatic hedging and pricing American floating strike lookback options

We price an American floating strike lookback option under the Black–Scholes model with a hypothetic static hedging portfolio (HSHP) composed of nontradable European options. Our approach is more efficient than the tree methods because recalculating the option prices is much quicker. Applying put–call duality to an HSHP yields a tradable semistatic hedging portfolio (SSHP). Numerical results indicate that an SSHP has better hedging performance than a delta-hedged portfolio. Finally, we investigate the model risk for SSHP under a stochastic volatility assumption and find that the model risk is related to the correlation between asset price and volatility.     

Market impact: a systematic study of the high frequency options market

This paper deals with a fundamental subject that has seldom been addressed in recent years, that of market impact in the options market. Our analysis is based on a proprietary database of metaorders—large orders that are split into smaller pieces before being sent to the market—on one of the main Asian markets. In line with our previous work on the equity market [Said, E., Bel Hadj Ayed, A., Husson, A. and Abergel, F., Market impact: A systematic study of limit orders. Mark. Microstruct. Liq., 2018, 3(3&4), 1850008.], we propose an algorithmic approach to identify metaorders, based on some implied volatility parameters, the at the money forward volatility and at the money forward skew. In both cases, we obtain results similar to the now well-understood equity market: Square-Root Law, Fair Pricing Condition and Market Impact Dynamics.     

Leverage effect on stochastic volatility for option pricing in Hong Kong: A simulation and empirical study

This paper explores the importance of incorporating the financial leverage effect in the stochastic volatility models when pricing options. For the illustrative purpose, we first conduct the simulation experiment by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling method. We then make an empirical analysis by applying the volatility models to the real return data of the Hang Seng index during the period from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2017. Our results highlight the accuracy of the stochastic volatility models with leverage in option pricing when leverage is high. In addition, the leverage effect becomes more significant as the maturity of options increases. Moreover, leverage affects the pricing of in-the-money options more than that of at-the-money and out-of-money options. Our study is therefore useful for both asset pricing and portfolio investment in the Hong Kong market where volatility is an inherent nature of the economy.     

Volatility forecasting: long memory,regime switching and heteroscedasticity

In this article, we account for the first time for long memory, regime switching and the conditional time-varying volatility of volatility (heteroscedasticity) to model and forecast market volatility using the heterogeneous autoregressive model of realized volatility (HAR-RV) and its extensions. We present several interesting and notable findings. First, existing models exhibit significant nonlinearity and clustering, which provide empirical evidence on the benefit of introducing regime switching and heteroscedasticity. Second, out-of-sample results indicate that combining regime switching and heteroscedasticity can substantially improve predictive power from a statistical viewpoint. More specifically, our proposed models generally exhibit higher forecasting accuracy. Third, these results are widely consistent across a variety of robustness tests such as different forecasting windows, forecasting models, realized measures, and stock markets. Consequently, this study sheds new light on forecasting future volatility.     

Stock market volatility forecasting: Do we need high-frequency data?

The general consensus in the volatility forecasting literature is that high-frequency volatility models outperform low-frequency volatility models. However, such a conclusion is reached when low-frequency volatility models are estimated from daily returns. Instead, we study this question considering daily, low-frequency volatility estimators based on open, high, low, and close daily prices. Our data sample consists of 18 stock market indices. We find that high-frequency volatility models tend to outperform low-frequency volatility models only for short-term forecasts. As the forecast horizon increases (up to one month), the difference in forecast accuracy becomes statistically indistinguishable for most market indices. To evaluate the practical implications of our results, we study a simple asset allocation problem. The results reveal that asset allocation based on high-frequency volatility model forecasts does not outperform asset allocation based on low-frequency volatility model forecasts.     

VIX term structure and VIX futures pricing with realized volatility

Using an extended LHARG model proposed by Majewski et al. (2015, J Econ, 187, 521–531), we derive the closed-form pricing formulas for both the Chicago Board Options Exchange VIX term structure and VIX futures with different maturities. Our empirical results suggest that the quarterly and yearly components of lagged realized volatility should be added into the model to capture the long-term volatility dynamics. By using the realized volatility based on high-frequency data, the proposed model provides superior pricing performance compared with the classic Heston–Nandi GARCH model under a variance-dependent pricing kernel, both in-sample and out-of-sample. The improvement is more pronounced during high volatility periods.     

政策不确定性、财政扩张与区域商业银行风险——基于中国地方官员变更和银行业的证据

文章利用2007-2017年我国93家区域商业银行的面板数据，并结合省级宏观经济数据和地方官员变更数据，实证考察了中国地方官员变更引起的经济政策不确定性对区域商业银行风险的重要影响。研究结果表明：（1）地方官员变更引起的政策不确定性增大了区域商业银行风险；（2）地方官员变更引起的政策不确定性，通过提高银行的资产收益率降低了商业银行风险；而不确定性时期的财政扩张，通过降低银行资产收益率增大了商业银行风险；并且财政扩张的负面影响大于政策不确定性的正面影响；（3）各省的市委书记发生职位更替引起的政策不确定性对区域商业银行风险的影响更大。文章研究为新时代背景下的金融供给侧结构性改革、政府宏观经济政策的制定以及财政体制与金融体制之间的联系提供参考。