Changes In Economic Fundamentals Research Articles

Quantifying spillovers among regions

The standard procedure for quantifying spillover effects of changes in economic fundamentals among separate regions (or countries) is to link the regions through predetermined weights – for example through fixed weighted trade indices or fixed spatial weights based on geographical distance. We provide a method for quantifying spillover effects among the U.S., the euro area, and the U.K. using spatial weights that are determined endogenously. We specify a new spatially augmented VAR model and we introduce a Bayesian estimation technique to freely estimate and quantify spatial interactions. We are able to quantify the effects of shocks to economic fundamentals in the three regions considered without imposing a priori restrictions on the size and directions of the spillovers. To illustrate our technique, we quantify the spillover effects of a series of shocks, including the recent rises in inflation and money supply shocks, in each of the three regions under consideration on the other regions.

Assessing Literatures on the Dependence of Stock Market Development on Upstream Oil Royalty Revenue and Systematic Risk Factors: Highlighting the Relevance of Dutch Disease Theory and Capital Asset Pricing Model

The paper assessed past literatures on the dependence of stock market financial development on upstream oil royalty revenue account and systematic risk factors and evaluating the relevance of Dutch Disease theory and capital asset pricing model. Theoretical approach supports the role of oil royalty revenue vis-à-vis oil price volatility, foreign exchange rate risk, financial liquidity risk and interest rate risk in determining the performance and financial development of stock market. It is well documented in research that stock prices react to information on oil revenue, crude oil production, monetary policy interest rate, foreign exchange rate uncertainty and diaspora cash remittances. Traditional valuation of stock is based on capital asset pricing model but the modern relevance is in doubt due to anomalous performance of investors and behavioural sentiments. Stock markets of emerging economies over the past few decades have witnessed remarkable growth as indicated by the value and volume of trade in the markets along with the level of capital inflows from developed markets, thereby providing numerous opportunities for investments. The development of the stock market is vital as it provides more opportunities for greater mobilization of funds from with and diaspora remittances and better efficiency in resource allocation. Nevertheless, investment returns in the stock market of developing economies continue to be more reactive to changes in economic fundamentals due to their fragile and volatile nature. This makes them even more unpredictable and unstable unlike the stock markets of developed economies, which are known to be more stable. Stock market financial development is not symptomatic of Dutch Diseases based on the fact that Oil-induced Dutch Disease assumes an oil sector which largely contributes to the economy while so many vital systematic risk factors affects stock market development. Optimistically this study along with other previous and future studies will increase the knowledge about Dutch Disease and will contribute to lessen the harmful effects that Dutch Disease causes. In spite of the common perception that oil is extremely important for financial and economic dynamics, there is, unexpectedly, a dearth of research on how oil revenue and prices influence stock market financial development.

DAMPAK VARIABEL MAKROEKONOMI PADA VOLATILITAS PADA PASAR MODAL SYARIAH INDONESIA: Pendekatan Model Error Correction

Pasar modal syariah Indonesia terus mengalami perkembangan dan menjadi alternatif investasi. Dibandingkan dengan pasar modal konvensional, pasar modal syariah diyakini lebih kuat terhadap krisis, perubahan fundamental ekonomi dan goncangan pasar keuangan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis pengaruh variabel makroekonomi terhadap Indeks Saham Syariah Indonesia. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode Error Correction Model (ECM). Hasil penelitian ini adalah naiknya kurs dan harga minyak mentah dunia akan menurunkan Indeks Saham Syariah Indonesia (ISSI), dalam jangka panjang dan jangka pendek kenaikan BI Rate akan menaikkan Indeks Saham Syariah Indonesia (ISSI) dan naiknya tingkat inflasi tidak mempengaruhi Indeks Saham Syariah Indonesia (ISSI).

Aggregate Implications of Firm Heterogeneity: A Nonparametric Analysis of Monopolistic Competition Trade Models

We measure the role of firm heterogeneity in counterfactual predictions of monopolistic competition trade models without parametric restrictions on the distribution of firm fundamentals. We show that two bilateral elasticity functions are sufficient to nonparametrically compute the counterfactual aggregate impact of trade shocks, and recover changes in economic fundamentals from observed data. These functions are identified from two semiparametric gravity equations governing the impact of bilateral trade costs on the extensive and intensive margins of firm-level exports. Applying our methodology, we estimate elasticity functions that imply an impact of trade costs on trade flows that falls when more firms serve a market because of smaller extensive margin responses. Compared to a baseline where elasticities are constant, firm heterogeneity amplifies both the gains from trade in countries with more exporter firms, and the welfare gains of European market integration in 2003-2012.

Aggregate Implications of Firm Heterogeneity: A Nonparametric Analysis of Monopolistic Competition Trade Models

We measure the role of firm heterogeneity in counterfactual predictions of monopolistic competition trade models without parametric restrictions on the distribution of firm fundamentals. We show that two bilateral elasticity functions are sufficient to nonparametrically compute the counterfactual aggregate impact of trade shocks, and recover changes in economic fundamentals from observed data. These functions are identified from two semiparametric gravity equations governing the impact of bilateral trade costs on the extensive and intensive margins of firm-level exports. Applying our methodology, we estimate elasticity functions that imply an impact of trade costs on trade flows that falls when more firms serve a market because of smaller extensive margin responses. Compared to a baseline where elasticities are constant, firm heterogeneity amplifies both the gains from trade in countries with more exporter firms and the welfare gains of European market integration in 2003-2012. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

House price diffusion of housing submarkets in Greater Sydney

Despite numerous studies investigating house price diffusion between regional cities, few have considered a spillover effect among housing submarkets within a metropolitan city. This study expands upon the limited literature to examine house price diffusion of housing submarkets (namely, low-priced and high-priced submarkets) in Greater Sydney, one of the most diverse housing markets in Australia, using convergence tests, cointegration techniques, Granger causality and dynamic ordinary least square cointegration tests. The results show that a long-run relationship in house prices exists between these two submarkets in Greater Sydney. Importantly, the empirical results show that a large degree of diffusion takes place from the less prosperous submarket to the high-end submarket. This supports the equity transfer hypothesis via a filtering process in which house prices in the low-priced submarket will be transmitted into the high-priced submarket. The study also finds that the low-priced submarket is the primary reactor to changes in economic fundamentals. These findings have some profound implications for policy-makers and housing investors.

Abnormal mortgage delinquencies as housing crisis early symptoms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the differences between the actual mortgage prompt and late payments and their respective expected measures from 2004 to 2010 to spot early symptoms of housing crisis.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explores these discrepancies across the entire US market and along various delinquency lengths of 30, 60 and 90 days. This paper constructs a Bayesian forecasting model that relies on prior distributional properties of diverse time horizons.FindingsAbnormal mortgage delinquency rates are identified in real time and can be served as early symptoms for housing crisis.Practical implicationsThe statistical scheme proposed in this paper can function as a valuable predictive tool for lending institutions, bank audit companies, regulatory bodies and real estate professional investors who examine changes in economic settings and trends in short sale leads.Social implicationsThe abnormal mortgage delinquencies can serve as indicators of changes in economic fundamentals and early signs of a mounting housing crisis.Originality/valueThis paper presents a unique statistical technique in the context of mortgage delinquencies.

Towards a floating RMB exchange rate regime

ABSTRACTThe main challenge of China’s current exchange rate regime is that with large and frequent interventions, the RMB exchange rate cannot adequately respond to the changes in economic fundamentals. This will lead to unilateral exchange rate expectations and large-scale capital inflows or outflows. In addition, large and frequent foreign exchange market interventions have a negative impact on economic structural optimisation, RMB internationalisation, and foreign investment. Two strategies can be used to introduce a floating exchange rate system: one is a free-floating exchange rate, and the other is wide range fluctuation against a basket of currencies. The latter is a transitional option before introduction of the former: a free-floating exchange rate.

The technology and economic determinants of cryptocurrency exchange rates: The case of Bitcoin

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have ignited intense discussions. Despite receiving extensive public attention, theoretical understanding is limited regarding the value of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, as expressed in their exchange rates against traditional currencies. In this paper, we conduct a theory-driven empirical study of the Bitcoin exchange rate (against USD) determination, taking into consideration both technology and economic factors. To address co-integration in a mix of stationary and non-stationary time series, we use the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model with a bounds test approach in the estimation. Meanwhile, to detect potential structural changes, we estimate our empirical model on two periods separated by the closure of Mt. Gox (one of the largest Bitcoin exchange markets). According to our analysis, in the short term, the Bitcoin exchange rate adjusts to changes in economic fundamentals and market conditions. The long-term Bitcoin exchange rate is more sensitive to economic fundamentals and less sensitive to technological factors after Mt. Gox closed. We also identify a significant impact of mining technology and a decreasing significance of mining difficulty in the Bitcoin exchange price determination.

RMB exchange rate regime reform and the Trilemma facing LOEs

The discussions on Renminbi (RMB) exchange rate could not depart from the ongoing reform of RMB exchange rate regime, which must be designed and promoted as an integral part of the large open economy macroeconomic policy framework. As a large open economy facing the Trilemma, China should explicitly establish the principle of domestic monetary policy dominance in the impossible trinity, with the exchange rate policy and capital account management should both conform to this fundamental principle. Simplistically pegging RMB to the US dollar will result in lack of flexibility and violate this principle, especially against the backdrop of unsynchronized economic cycles of major economies and the prospect of further Fed tighten up that the real effective exchange rate of RMB moves passively along with the US dollar which cannot reflect the relative changes in economic fundamentals in China and abroad, which will cause distortions, resulting in resource misallocations and loss of welfare. The reform of RMB exchange rate regime should be market-oriented, towards a direction with more flexibility.

COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF UNION MEMBERSHIP WITHOUT COLLECTIVE BARGAINING BENEFITS

Traditional unions rely on collective bargaining benefits to attract workers to the union. A key ingredient of collective bargaining benefits is union wage premium which will force employers to retrench some workers. A macro-focused union differs from traditional union or micro-focused union in two ways. First, a macro-focused union will work together with the government and management to raise productivity and therefore shift the demand for labor curve upward. Second, the macro-focused union will want to maximize employment and therefore aim at competitive wage level for not only its members but non-union members too. Consequently, this may create a huge free ridership problem as workers may refuse to pay the member fee but still enjoy the club benefits. This paper focuses on a situation where a macro-focused labor union offers non-collective bargaining benefits through offering discount to a subset of consumption goods. However, individual workers’ preference is not publicly observed. The union leader may pay a certain survey fee to find out. Therefore, in the equilibrium, the union leader needs to weigh the benefits of larger union size against the costs of survey fee. Similarly, on the workers’ side, the tradeoff is the union member fee together with some psychology cost of being a union member against a discount on his favorable consumption goods. We develop a mathematical framework that incorporates all these elements above. We show both theoretically and quantitatively what determines the equilibrium union size and union leader’s survey decisions. Moreover, we also examine at the aggregate level, how the union workers’ and union leader’s welfare levels may respond to certain changes in economic fundamentals, such as preference shift and changes in survey fee, etc.

Unit roots and trend breaks in the Greek labor market

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the time series behavior of Greek labor market series by providing an empirical perspective on trend breaks and unit roots. Trend breaks represent aggregate behavior responses to “infrequent” changes in economic fundamentals, including changes in fiscal or labor market conditions, as have been perceived in Greece during the last years. Unit roots reveal whether “regular” shocks have significant effects on the level of the series over a specified finite horizon. Design/methodology/approach – The authors employ recent procedures that deal with the “circular testing problem” between tests on the parameters of the trend function and unit root tests that often arises in empirical applications. These techniques assess trend function stability and are robust regardless of whether the noise component is stationary or having a unit root. Then, conditional on the presence of breaks, the authors test whether the series can be characterized by a stochastic trend. Findings – The analysis provides evidence of “infrequent” trend breaks that appear to coincide with the recent global economic crisis and the implementation of the counteraction (fiscal) measures to the Greek debt crisis. Allowing for trend breaks does not lead to a rejection of the unit root hypothesis, which might reflect the low flexibility of the country’s labor market operation. Practical implications – The procedures employed can be viewed as new tools that might help empirical researchers to explore more accurately the characteristics of individual time series and to find reasonable approximations to the true processes of the time series examined. Originality/value – The paper provides new information on the presence of structural changes in the Greek labor market, and on whether the “aggressive” and “occasional” nature of fiscal measures can be approximated by infrequent changes in the slope of the trend function.

On the efficiency of the global gold markets

This paper examines the weak-form efficiency of the global gold markets with specific focus on the random walks (RWS) and martingale difference sequence (MDS) hypotheses, and consequently, investigates the extent to which predictability or non-predictability of global daily spot gold price return series behaviour can be explained by volatilities in macroeconomic fundamentals. We apply traditional parametric variance-ratio tests and their recent non-parametric modifications based on ranks and signs to one of the largest datasets on world gold markets to-date, consisting of daily spot price series of 28 emerging and developed gold markets from January 1968 to August 2014. First, our results show that gold markets in Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Vietnam are not weak-form efficient neither from the perspective of the strict RWS nor in the relaxed MDS sense. By contrast, RWS and MDS hypotheses cannot be rejected for gold markets in Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland, UK and US at the conventional rejection levels. Results for gold markets in Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey are, however, mixed. Second, our findings show that greater changes in economic fundamentals are associated with lower levels of rejecting the RWS and MDS hypotheses. Third, our evidence shows that the probability of rejecting the weak-form efficiency is higher in emerging gold markets than developed ones. Fourth, our results show that the RWS hypothesis is rejected more frequently than its MDS alternative, and thereby justifying our decision to conduct an explicit test of the RWS and MDS hypotheses. Our results are robust to estimating subsamples, overlapping rolling windows and endogeneity corrected models, as well as controlling for a number of country-specific institutional and trading factors. Our findings have crucial implications for global portfolio managers, investors, poly-makers and regulatory authorities.

Do net positions in the futures market cause spot prices of crude oil?

The last decade has witnessed sharp increases in the price of crude oil. There are two possible explanations for these increases: dramatic increases in financial firms' position in the oil futures market and recent increases in oil prices from changes in economic fundamentals. This paper examines the causal relationship between the net financial position and the crude oil price by using three types of Granger non-causality tests: the classical Granger non-causality test, a robust Granger non-causality test and a Granger non-causality test in quantiles. The empirical results provide some evidence of causality from the net financial position to the spot price of crude oil. In addition, futures prices serve as a transmission mechanism underlying the causal relationship between the net financial position and the crude oil price.

Quality Earnings: Insights from Comparing GAAP to NIPA Earnings

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis produces a measure of aggregate corporate profits (NIPA earnings), which is an integral component of the accounting for GDP. The key advantage of NIPA earnings is rigorous determination with no earnings management and no political meddling; other advantages include double-checks from independent sources and consistent rules over time. Thus, NIPA earnings provide a useful counterpoint to GAAP measures of corporate profits. Using a sample of aggregate GAAP and NIPA earnings over 1950-2010, the main findings are as follows. GAAP and NIPA earnings are in remarkable sync in the early years, with similar means and standard deviations, and with earnings changes correlating at 0.89 during 1950-1980. This close relation greatly deteriorates, however, during the second half of the sample, 1981-2010. While the behavior of NIPA earnings remains roughly the same over these two periods, the volatility of GAAP earnings increases ten-fold, and the correlation between GAAP and NIPA earnings changes falls to 0.35. Additional tests reveal that the increase in the volatility of GAAP earnings is mostly due to rapid earnings reversals, and especially the effect of large transient items during economic downturns. Overall, the evidence points to little change in economic fundamentals over time, while there is substantially increased noise in the GAAP measurement of corporate profitability.

Fragility of reputation and clustering of risk-taking

Reputation concerns in credit markets restrain borrowers’ temptations to take excessive risk. The strength of these concerns depends on the behavior of other borrowers, rendering the reputational discipline fragile and subject to breakdowns without obvious changes in economic fundamentals. Furthermore, at an aggregate level, breakdowns are clustered among borrowers who have intermediate and good reputations, magnifying otherwise small economic shocks.

When does coordination for free trade regimes fail?

This paper examines why the recent efforts to arrange free trade regimes have failed repeatedly focusing on the increased uncertainties in economic fundamentals and the asymmetric political economic characteristics of trading countries reflected in the hawkish trade retaliatory tendencies. We demonstrate that, under informational barriers due to economic uncertainties, a slight negative change in economic fundamentals as well as the signals about the economic fundamentals can lead to the collapse of free trade regimes. Moreover, the fear of a trading partner's deviation to protectionist policies might trigger preemptive protectionist measures resulting in a trade war when trade policies show strategic complementarity. However, a free trade regime is more likely to be sustained when it is commonly known that each country has strong symmetric retaliatory tendencies in case trade friction occurs. Nonetheless, if the asymmetry in retaliatory tendencies of trading countries increases the preemptive incentive, a free trade regime is more likely to collapse to a trade war.

Short-Term Buyers and Housing Market Dynamics

This study demonstrates that taking into account heterogeneous investment horizons will improve our understanding of housing price and trading dynamics. Using an OLG (Overlapping Generations) model in which agents have heterogeneous preferences and investment horizons, with transaction costs, short term investors are more sensitive to changes in economic fundamentals and are less likely to own (and trade) in a declining market. The model predicts that the ownership composition contains information about current and future house prices and trading dynamics. Empirically, we find that home owners’ expected holding horizons co-vary negatively with house prices, and they also predict future (short term) returns.

Good News, Bad News, and Consumer Confidence

ObjectivesWe test for asymmetric reactions of consumer confidence and the news media to changes in economic fundamentals. We examine the relationship between media reporting and consumer confidence.MethodsUsing data from the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment and a new data set on media coverage constructed by ourselves, we estimate time series regressions that explain changes in consumer confidence and media coverage of economic news.ResultsWe find evidence of asymmetric reactions by consumers to changes in economic fundamentals; however, we find no evidence of a systematic negativity bias. We also find no evidence of bias in the media. The findings of asymmetric reactions are strengthened when we control for expectations.ConclusionAsymmetric reactions in consumer confidence depend on the nature of the economic fundamental that is changing. Reference points are important in determining consumer reaction, but they do not explain asymmetric responses.

Latin America: Vulnerabilities Under Construction?

This paper documents developments in mortgage credit and the housing sector in Latin America over the past decade, and compares them with those of other emerging economies. In particular, it examines the real estate and mortgage markets to assess whether (i) growth in mortgage credit is excessive compared to long-term trends; (ii) trends in house prices reflect changes in economic fundamentals; and (iii) the extent to which household and banking sector vulnerabilities could lead to potential fragilities. Although data limitations hamper a rigorous analysis of trends, our analysis suggests that while there are no imminent misalignments in the real estate and mortgage sectors, they could emerge if current trends persist. Strengthening supervision and addressing data gaps is thus critical to ensure adequate monitoring of risks and vulnerabilities in these sectors.