Unit Root Analyses of the Causality Between Japanese Money and Income

Unit root techniques and cointegration analysis have develop ed considerably in the last ten years. At the same time, the nonstationary test for Granger causality has been developed. We shed some new light on Japanese money supply and income causality by using nonstationary techniques. We specify univariate ARMA models of money, income, GNP deflator and rate of interest, initially by using the Dickey and Fuller (DF) or the augmented DF (ADF) tests. Two diagnostic tests are applied to each selected ARMA regression. One is the residual DF test, and the other is the moving average (MA) unit root test of residuals . After selecting the ARMA model, some causality tests are applied to the error correction model (ECM) of a vector autoregression (VAR) one of which is ordinary least squares (OLS) and another is the maximum likelihood (ML) method. The former requires only the standard F -test on the deleted variables in the ECM. The latter requires the Johansen's ML method in estimating cointegration. Causality is found to go from income to money supply but not the other way. Appendices include a simple implementation of the MA unit root test, a pedagogical proof of the Granger causality tests developed by Toda and Phillips (1993) and an interpretation of the test proposed by Toda and Yamamoto (1995).
JEL Classification Numbers: C32, E50     

Pricing of Forward and Futures Contracts

There has long been substantial interest in understanding the relative pricing of forward and futures contracts. This has led to the development of two standard theories of forward and futures pricing, namely, the Cost-of-Carry and the Risk Premium (or Unbiased Expectations) hypotheses. These studies have modelled the relationship between spot and forward/futures prices either through a no-arbitrage condition or a general equilibrium setting. Relatively few studies in this area have considered the impact of stochastic trends in the data. With the emergence of non-stationarity and cointegration in recent years, more sophisticated models of futures/forward prices have been specified. This paper surveys the significant contributions made to the literature on the pricing of forward/futures contracts, and examines recent empirical studies pertaining to the estimation and testing of univariate and systems models of futures pricing.     

Non-linearities in Real Interest Rate Parity: Evidence from OECD and Asian Developing Economies

Abstract

This paper investigates the validity real interest rate parity (RIP) for a sample of 19 OECD and Asian developing economies. The distinction of this paper is that we exploit both linearity and non-linear unit root tests as advocated by Dufrénot et al. (Applied Economics, 38, pp. 203–229, 2006) to validate the parity. The major finding are: (i) the alignments from real interest rate differentials (RIDs) are corrected in a non-linear fashion and that the adjustments is asymmetric in both size and speed; (ii) that RIP holds for the developed and developing countries; and (iii) the empirical results are invariant with respect to the US, Japan or Germany as the centre country.     

Nonlinearity and the Unit Root Hypothesis for African Per Capita Real GDP

Once described as an epic center of growth tragedy, African nations have lately achieved relatively rapid growth rates, which have raised hopes that the continent is finally on the path to economic convergence with other emerging economies. However, there is a need to establish whether stabilization policies for the purpose of enhancing the GDP are effective in African countries. One of the means of examining the effectiveness of these policies is through the investigation of the unit root properties of per capita GDP in the continent. This study aims to add to the existing papers on GDP in African countries by investigating the non-stationarity of per capita GDP in 52 African countries, while using a newly proposed nonlinear unit root test. The results suggest that per capita GDP follows the non-stationarity process in half of the entire sample.     

Raising the bar (8)

This editorial summarizes the papers published in issue 13(3) so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper challenges the home market hypothesis that large countries host more firms relative to their size than small countries by considering the lobbying activities of multinational firms. The second paper analyzes the implications of a spatial weight matrix used to estimate a spatial econometric model that depends on an endogenous economic variable. By adding a spatial context, the third paper provides a novel contribution to the literature on international norms in de facto measures of human rights performance. The fourth paper examines the determinants of accepting informal work in Poland. The fifth paper deals with non-stationarity and cointegration in a dynamic spatial econometric panel data model when the number of observations in the time – rather than in the cross-sectional– domain tends to infinity.     

The statistical evolution of prices on the Istanbul stock exchange

This study documents the statistical properties of the stock returns on the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) for the January 1988 to December 1999 period and tries to assess the evolution of the underlying stochastic structure over this time period. It also investigates empirically the relative efficiency of the ISE to test whether the rapid development of this market over the last decade caused it to become a relatively more efficient market. This is accomplished through a number of parametric and non-parametric tests of the random walk hypothesis using daily, weekly and monthly observations of the value-weighted ISE-100 index series. The emphasis is more on the evolution of the price process than on static tests of a random walk model as such. The findings indicate that the price mechanism in the ISE has evolved into a more informationally efficient process in little more than a decade of existence.     

Using stochastic growth models to understand unit roots and breaking trends

This paper provides economic underpinnings for some recent econometric models of unit roots and breaking trends. It shows that in an endogenous growth model, difference stationarity is present in every growing variable; and this phenomenon is generated by the propagation mechanism of the model. For an exogenous growth model, either difference stationarity or trend stationarity may be present, depending on the nature of external impulses. Regarding long-run growth rates, permanent changes in economic fundamentals lead to segmented trends in endogenous growth models, but only shifting trends in exogenous growth models.     

城市地价空间非平稳格局与测度技术优化应用探索

研究目的：在明晰城市地价空间非平稳格局形成机制的基础上，探索将空间计量经济学前沿技术首次应用于国内地价研究，改进当前常用的地价估计方法及模型，提升地价空间测度的科学性与准确性，为实现对地价空间格局更科学系统的认知及城市空间资源精细化管理提供参考。研究方法：多尺度地理加权回归—空间自回归模型（MGWRSAR模型）。研究结果：（1）区位引导地价形成空间依赖性和异质性非平稳并存的特征。（2）目前既有研究中地价空间格局测度的模型方法未同时考虑两类空间属性参数异构的情况，存在无法测度地价空间依赖强度动态变化的缺陷，模型估计的偏差降低了地价空间研究的准确度。（3）实证结果表明，相较于常用的空间计量模型，MGWR-SAR模型在地价空间非平稳格局测度及决定因素研究中的估计效果更佳。研究结论：未来可采用MGWR-SAR模型提高地价空间测度研究的准确性，并且该模型在其他地理要素空间测度上也具有一定适用性，可为其研究提供技术参考。