Large Negative Shocks Research Articles

DETERMINANTS OF TOURISM DEMAND IN INDONESIA: A PANEL DATA ANALYSIS

By 2014 Indonesia registered 11.6 million inbound foreign tourists, 135% higher than the year 2000. Since then, government policies to promote tourism flourished. This paper investigates the determinants of inbound tourism from the top nine mayor tourist origin countries into Indonesia covering the period of 2000 to 2014. This research employs a dynamic panel dataset to estimate the impact of per capita real income, relative prices, accommodation capacity, distance and public infrastructure investment on international tourism demand in Indonesia, capturing demand and supply-side effects. The results show that per capita income of tourist, relative price, and available rooms have a positive effect on tourism expenditure in Indonesia, while distance has a negative effect. Dummy variables capture large negative shocks in tourism arising from two terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2005, as well as from the global financial crisis in 2008. Income plays a positive but low impact on tourism demand compared to other nations. The positive effect of prices suggests an advantage of Indonesia in competitive tourism prices. Nevertheless, low prices also denote low value in tourism services. The substantial impact of accommodation may indicate that significant effects of tourism are allocated in lodging, minimizing the impact on other sectors.

Subprime borrowers, securitization and the transmission of business cycles

AbstractA growing literature (e.g., Jaffee et al. 2009, Acharya and Schnabl 2009) argues that securitization improves financial stability if the securitized assets are held by capital market participants, rather than financial intermediaries. I construct a quantitative macroeconomic model with a novel specification for mortgage‐backed securities (MBS) to evaluate this claim. My findings suggest that the existence of the securitization market stabilizes the economy under the condition that financial intermediaries do not engage in the acquisition of securitized assets. In the presence of large negative housing preference shocks, the drop in output in the first year after the shock is halved if subprime MBS are purchased by non‐financial agents rather than held by banks.

Rushed Innovation: Reactive Licensing in the Pharmaceutical Industry

We study the drug licensing behavior (acquisition of rights for developing drugs) of large pharmaceutical firms in the aftermath of large negative shocks to their pipelines, Phase 3 failures (P3Fs). We find that P3Fs lead to increased licensing within a year of the event. This result is significant because one year is a short window given the usual timelines---licensing is a lengthy process that requires extensive planning and careful execution. Supported by a series of additional results, we interpret this finding as a reflection of rushed firm behavior. Correspondingly, our main finding is that drugs licensed in these circumstances (within a year of a P3F event) underperform in subsequent development: they are significantly less likely to reach the market compared to others licensed in normal conditions. Further analysis suggests that this underperformance may stem from the influence of rush on activities taking place in the last mile of the licensing process, and could hinge on the quality of the agreements that firms converge on during negotiation.

Why is contagion asymmetric during the European sovereign crisis?

We use shocks to CDS spreads of peripheral countries to identify the effects of changes in the creditworthiness of these countries on stock returns of EU banks. We predict that large positive spread shocks should have a weaker impact in absolute value than large negative shocks because bank equity is an option on the bank’s assets, policy reactions are asymmetric, and bank portfolios include bonds that benefit from a flight to safety. We find support for this prediction during the European crisis, so that contagion from pervasive creditworthiness shocks is asymmetric. This effect is important enough to make the portfolio contagion channel economically and statistically insignificant for adverse shocks.

Rushed Innovation: Evidence from Drug Licensing

We study the drug licensing behavior (acquisition of rights for developing drugs) of large pharmaceutical firms in the aftermath of large negative shocks to their pipelines, phase 3 failures (P3Fs). We find that P3Fs lead to increased licensing within a year of the event. This result is significant, because one year is a short window given the usual timelines—licensing is a lengthy process that requires extensive planning and careful execution. Supported by a series of additional results, we interpret this finding as a reflection of rushed firm behavior. Correspondingly, our main finding is that drugs licensed in these circumstances (within a year of a P3F event) underperform in subsequent development: they are significantly less likely to reach the market compared with others licensed in normal conditions. Further analysis suggests that this underperformance may stem from the influence of rush on activities taking place in the “last mile” of the licensing process and could hinge on the quality of the agreements that firms converge to during contract negotiations.This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.

Capital Controls as Macro-prudential Policy in a Large Open Economy

The use of international capital flow controls has become increasingly popular in academic and policy circles. But almost all the recent literature studies the case of a small economy, ignoring the spillover effects of capital controls to the rest of the world. This paper re-examines the case for capital controls in a large open economy, where domestic financial constraints may bind following a large negative shock. We consider both ex-ante capital controls (prudential) and ex-post controls (crisis management). In a large open economy, there is a tension between the desire to tax capital inflows to manipulate the terms-of-trade and tax capital outflows for either prudential or crisis management purposes. When capital controls are chosen non-cooperatively, we show that ex-post capital controls are unsuccessful in alleviating financial constraints in a crisis, and ex-ante capital controls are unsuccessful at reducing financial instability before the crisis. Non-cooperative capital controls leave the crisis-hit country even worse off than in an environment with unrestricted capital flows. In addition, a non-cooperative equilibrium with capital controls actually increases the likelihood of a financial crisis occurring. By contrast, capital controls can be effective under international cooperation and can significantly ease financial constraints when applied ex-post for crisis management and reduce the likelihood of a crisis when used ex-ante for prudential purposes.

Cyclical Income Risk in Great Britain

This paper establishes new evidence on the cyclical behaviour of household income risk in Great Britain and assesses the role of social insurance policy in mitigating against this risk. We address these issues using the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008) by decomposing stochastic idiosyncratic income into its transitory, persistent and fixed components. We then estimate how income risk, measured by the variance and the skewness of the probability distribution of shocks to the persistent component, varies between expansions and contractions of the aggregate economy. We first find that the volatility and left-skewness of these shocks is a-cyclical and counter-cyclical respectively. The latter implies a higher probability of receiving large negative income shocks in contractions. We also find that while social insurance (tax-benefits) policy reduces the levels of both measures of risk as well as the counter-cyclicality of the asymmetry measure, the mitigation effects work mainly via benefits.

How Do Investors Determine Stock Prices after Large Price Shocks?

Most large stock price shocks are not accompanied by publicly available information. Then, what other information do investors use to set prices? The authors find that investors rely on reference points and their private information signals. Stocks closer to their 52-week high (52-week low) have negative (positive) returns in the days that follow a large negative (positive) price shock. These results suggest that investors anchor to these reference points and underreact on the event day. The authors also find that future returns drift in the direction of the shock when the stocks’ abnormal returns before the shock are in the opposite direction.

Shock Propagation Through Trade Credit: Evidence From Operation Weak Flesh

We investigate whether and how shocks propagate through trade credit. We exploit a large negative liquidity shock to firms in the Brazilian food industry, resulting from the announcement of a fraud investigation named Operation Weak Flesh. Using a differences-in-differences analysis, we show that quarterly accounts payable of the affected firms drop by 20-30 percent. Their suppliers reduce the provision of trade credit by 5-6 percent. The evidence suggests that risk mitigation concerns dominate business relationship concerns or bargaining power effects. Suppliers mitigate the increased credit risk in the supply chain rather than supporting their customers with additional trade credit.

Resurrecting the Size Effect: Firm Size, Profitability Shocks, and Expected Stock Returns

Many studies report that the size effect in the cross-section of stock returns disappeared after the early 1980s. This paper shows that its disappearance can be attributed to negative shocks to the profitability of small firms and positive shocks to big firms. After adjusting for the price impact of profitability shocks, we find a robust size effect in the cross-section of expected returns after the early 1980s. Our results highlight the importance of in-sample cash-flow shocks in understanding cross-sectional return predictability. Received April 2, 2014; editorial decision August 6, 2018 by Editor Laura Starks.

Endogenous Disasters

Market economies are intrinsically unstable. The standard search model of equilibrium unemployment, once solved accurately with a globally nonlinear algorithm, gives rise endogenously to rare disasters. Intuitively, in the presence of cumulatively large negative shocks, inertial wages remain relatively high, and reduce profits. The marginal costs of hiring run into downward rigidity, which stems from the trading externality of the matching process, and fail to decline relative to profits. Inertial wages and rigid hiring costs combine to stifle job creation flows, depressing the economy into disasters. The disaster dynamics are robust to extensions to home production, capital accumulation, and recursive utility. (JEL E22, E23, E24, E32, J41, J63, N12)

Linkages between oil price shocks and stock returns revisited

In this paper, we revisit the debate on the relationship between oil price shocks and stock market returns by replicating the quantile-on-quantile (QQ) regression model for the US stock market in Sim and Zhou (2015, Journal of Banking and Finance), and extending it to 15 countries. The classification of these countries as oil importers or oil exporters depends on their net position in crude oil trade. Our results indicate that the main finding by Sim and Zhou (2015) that large negative oil price shocks can bolster stock returns when markets are performing well is only partially supported by the three largest oil importers in our sample – China, Japan and India – during the period 1988:1–2007:12. However, when extending the study to more recent data (period 1988:1–2016:12), we find that China and India experience higher returns when markets perform well and there is a large positive oil price shock. Also, large positive oil price shocks often lead to higher stock market returns when markets perform well for both oil exporting countries – Canada, Russia, Norway – and moderately oil dependent countries – such as Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand. In most cases large negative oil price shocks depress further already poorly performing markets, as in Sim and Zhou (2015). These findings highlight that the relationship between the distributions of oil price shocks and stock market returns is not stable over time in most countries studied. Furthermore, the asymmetric effect between positive and negative oil price shocks observed in the US market by Sim and Zhou (2015) is less evident in most countries for both the baseline and extended periods.

Export characteristics and output volatility: comparative firm-level evidence for CEE countries

The literature shows that openness to trade improves long-term growth but also that it may increase exposure to high output volatility. In this vein, our paper investigates whether exporting and export diversification at the firm level have an effect on the output volatility of firms. We use large representative firm-level databases from Estonia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia over the last boom–bust cycle in 2004–2012. The results confirm that exporting is related to higher volatility at the firm level. There is also evidence that this effect increased during the Great Recession due to the large negative shocks in export markets. We find that export diversification mitigates volatility only in some cases. Exporting more products or serving more markets does not necessarily result in higher stability of firm sales.

Guns and Roses: Flower Exports and Electoral Violence in Kenya

Violent conflicts, particularly at election times in Africa, are a common cause of instability and economic disruption. This paper studies how firms react to electoral violence using the case of Kenyan flower exporters during the 2008 post-election violence as an example. Consistent with our theoretical framework, the violence induced a large negative supply shock that reduced exports primarily through workers’ absence and had heterogeneous effects: larger firms and those with direct contractual relationships in export markets suffered smaller production and losses of workers. On the demand side, international buyers were not able to shift sourcing to Kenyan exporters located in areas not directly affected by the violence nor to neighboring Ethiopian suppliers during the violence. Consistent with difficulties in insuring against supply-chain risk disruptions caused by electoral violence, firms in direct contractual relationships ramp up shipments just before the subsequent 2013 presidential election to mitigate risk.

The efficacy of life insurance company general account equity asset allocations: a safety-first perspective using vine copulas

AbstractWe study the asset allocation decision of a life insurance company’s general account with respect to the possibility of large negative economic shocks and examine how this account is affected by policyholder investment decisions in the company’s separate account. This is accomplished using a performance metric that incorporates downside risk measured using univariate and multivariate extreme value distributions. Because of its well-known price volatility, diversification attributes, and significant weight in the combined general and separate accounts, our primary focus is the company’s equity investments. Although industry asset allocations have varied over the past two decades, we find that the actual allocations to equity in the general account are close to the allocation percentages suggested by our extreme value metrics and both are far below the maximum values indicated by the relevant regulatory bodies.

Macro Risks and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

We extract aggregate supply and aggregate demand shocks for the US economy from macroeconomic data on inflation, real GDP growth, core inflation and the unemployment gap. We first use unconditional non-Gaussian features in the data to achieve identification of these structural shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. We find that recessions in the 1970s and 1980s are better characterized as driven by supply shocks while later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks. The Great Recession exhibited large negative shocks to both demand and supply. We then use conditional (time-varying) non-Gaussian features of the structural shocks to estimate risk for supply and demand shocks that drive (negatively skewed) and (positively skewed) variation for supply and demand shocks. The Great Moderation, a general decline in the volatility of many macroeconomic time series since the 1980s, is mostly accounted for by a reduction in the good demand variance risk factor. In contrast, the risk factors driving bad variance for both supply and demand shocks, which account for most recessions, show no secular decline. Finally, we find that macro risks significantly contribute to the variation in yields, bond risk premiums and the term premium. While overall bond risk premiums are counter-cyclical, an increase in bad demand variance is associated with lower risk premiums on bonds.

Macro Risks and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s were driven primarily by supply shocks, later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks, and the Great Recession exhibited large negative shocks to both demand and supply. We estimate "macro risk factors" that drive "bad" (negatively skewed) and "good" (positively skewed) variation for supply and demand shocks. The Great Moderation is mostly accounted for by a reduction in good variance. In contrast, bad variances for both supply and demand shocks, which account for most recessions, shows no secular decline. We document that macro risks significantly contribute to the variation yields, risk premiums and return variances for nominal bonds. While overall bond risk premiums are counter-cyclical, an increase in demand variance lowers risk premiums.

Adjustment to small, large, and sunspot shocks in open economies with stock collateral constraints

This paper characterizes analytically the adjustment of an open economy with a stock collateral constraint to fundamental and nonfundamental shocks. In the model, external borrowing is limited by the value of physical capital. Three results are established: (1) Adjustment to external shocks is nonlinear. In response to small negative output shocks, the economy adjusts as prescribed by the intertemporal approach to the current account, with increases in debt, deficits in the trade and current account balances, and no significant movement in the price of collateral. By contrast, in response to large negative output shocks the economy experiences a sudden stop with debt deleveraging, trade and current account reversals, and a Fisherian deflation of asset prices. (2) Generically, weak fundamentals (low output and high external debt) give rise to multiple equilibria. (3) In this case, the economy is prone to self-fulfilling sudden stops driven by downward revisions of expectations about the value of collateral.

Food expenditure responses to income/expenditure shocks in rural China

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of large income and expenditure shocks on household food expenditures and determines whether the impacts of large shocks differ among households, especially low-income households.Design/methodology/approachThe study’s data are drawn from a household survey conducted in rural China. Multivariate analysis examines the impacts of large income and expenditure shocks on food expenditures.FindingsThe impacts of large positive income shocks on food expenditure are moderate. However, households reduce their per capita food expenditures within a range of about 25-30 percent after suffering large negative shocks. The greatest impact is found for shocks where expenditures more than double, followed by the impact of shocks where income declines by more than half. Moreover, food expenditures among low-income households are much more sensitive to large negative income and expenditure shocks. The paper concludes with policy implications.Originality/valueThis is the first Chinese study to empirically examine the impacts of different income and expenditure shocks on household food expenditures. The results have important implications for smoothing households’ food consumption after they suffer from shocks.

The Effects of Commodities and Financial Markets on Crude Oil

Investigating crude oil price volatility is crucial, because crude oil price certainly affects the economy through many channels. This study applies a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) model to examine the impact of crude oil market on basic commodities, financial markets and industrial production. We find that the production in the US economy has an important effect on the crude oil prices. In addition we noticed a higher increase in crude oil price volatility after a large negative shock, contrary to a large positive one. Also, it was found that, in the short-run, oil price volatility is not influenced by short-run interest rates or industrial production. An adverse linkage between crude oil prices and industrial production has been proved confirming the economic theorists claiming that there is a close linkage between oil price shocks and economic activity. Finally, our findings indicate that there is Granger causality between crude oil and the endogenous variables used in the Granger causality framework.