Price Puzzle Research Articles

Capital asset pricing model, beta stability, and the pricing puzzle of electricity transmission in Brazil

This paper seeks to analyse and propose alternative procedures to estimate the cost of equity through the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) in the context of electricity transmission in Brazil. Under the assumption that a stable beta is important for regulatory purposes since it provides institutional security for investors, as well as fair tariffs for consumers, we test different options to find the set of parameters that provides the most stable beta for the transmission sector. This paper is prescriptive in nature and attempts to offer alternative options for the cost of equity estimation, without changing the theoretical framework (i.e., CAPM) proposed by the Brazilian regulator. To pursue our aim, we test beta stability by modifying three CAPM elements: the risk asset, the proxy for market returns, and the length of the estimation window. By applying robust structural break tests, we show that the desirable beta stability may be reached with the use of a Brazilian pure-play global beta estimated with an 11-year estimation window.

The Impact of Domestic and Foreign Monetary Policy on Iran's economy: Global Modeling

One of the striking features of the business cycles is the patterns of co-movement of output, inflation, interest rates, and real equity prices across countries. This paper empirically examines the effects of domestic and foreign monetary policies on Iran's macroeconomic variables (including real production, inflation, short-term interest rate, and real exchange rate) using quarterly data over the 1996Q1-2015Q4 period and a global vector auto-regression model (GVAR) for Iran, the largest trading partners of Iran including China, India, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, the European Union, and the United State. The results of domestic monetary policies on Iran's macroeconomic variables illustrate a form of Price Puzzle on how monetary policy shocks affect inflation in Iran. The effects of the positive shocks of domestic interest rate on real GDP in Iran is negative. Iran's real exchange rate response to the positive shock of domestic interest rates is negative and significant. The results regarding the impact of the foreign monetary policies on Iran's macroeconomic variables illuminate that only the effects of a positive shock to China's interest rate are significant and negative on Iran's inflation. Besides, there is a significant independency of Iran's real GDP to the monetary policy shocks of the other trading partners of Iran. Also, the response of Iran's real exchange rate to positive monetary shocks in the EU and Turkey is at a positive and significant level. The results indicate that due to the closed economic structure of Iran, global economic crises that lead to a recession in other countries have had the least impact on the Iranian economy.

A Divisia Measure of the Money Supply for Mexico

Currently, Banco de Mexico measures money as a simple sum of the different monetary assets included at four levels of aggregation: M1, M2, M3, and M4. Seminal work by Barnett (1980) and many who followed since have amply demonstrated simple-sum aggregation is highly problematic. A wealth of monetary literature has shown Divisia indices of monetary aggregates are both theoretically and empirically superior to their simple-sum counterparts. While Divisia indices are available for the U.S., the U.K, the Euro area and a few other developed economies, no similar measure currently exists for Mexico. This paper produces the first measure of Divisia money for the Mexican economy under the Banco de Mexico’s Methodological Redefinition of 2018 of its monetary aggregates. Under standard and time-varying constructs of well-accepted structural VAR identifications, we find that Divisia M4 as an indicator of monetary policy yields responses of industrial production and prices that are in every case at least as sensible as (and often an improvement over) their counterpart specifications with a short-term offer rate as the indicator. Importantly, we find the resolution of the price puzzle in our Divisia specifications do not require expanding the information set of the VAR with commodity prices. We reach similar conclusions for Mexico to those Keating et al. (2019) arrive at for the U.S. economy.

Renting Balance Sheet Space: Intermediary Balance Sheet Rental Costs and the Valuation of Derivatives

Abstract A long-standing asset pricing puzzle is that the funding rates in derivatives contracts often differ from those in cash markets. We propose that the cost of renting intermediary balance sheet space may help resolve this puzzle. We study a persistent basis in what is arguably the largest derivatives market, namely, the interest rate futures market. This basis is strongly related to exogenous measures of intermediary balance sheet usage and proxies for the balance sheet costs imposed by debt overhang problems and capital regulation. These results extend to the cash derivatives bases documented in many of the other largest financial markets.

The dynamic effects of monetary policy innovations in Ethiopia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of unanticipated monetary policy innovations on output and price for Ethiopia from 1991:Q1 to 2016:Q1.Design/methodology/approachShort run and long run identification schemes on structural vector autoregressive model are employed in this study.FindingsThe impulse response function results generated show that while a positive shock in interest rate causes a reduction in output and price puzzle, a positive shock to broad money supply has a positive and significant effect on output and price. A positive shock in real effective exchange rate has also an expansionary, though insignificant, effect on impact on both output and price. These results are especially true for the short run identification scheme. As to the results from the variance decomposition, the study shows that the highest variation in output and price is caused by broad money supply shock in the short run.Originality/valueIt adds to the scarce empirical literature on the effects of monetary policy innovations on the Ethiopian economy.

Empirical Asset Pricing in a DSGE Framework: Reconciling Calibration and Econometrics using Partial Indirect Inference

This paper aims at a critical assessment of the DSGE asset pricing approach. By employing partial indirect inference, we acknowledge that parts of a model are misspecified, while others retain the claim to capture economic reality, namely the ability to price assets traded in real markets. Consequently, we use binding functions that facilitate the consistent estimation of the structural model parameters of interest (concerning investor preferences), while treating others (governing macroeconomic dynamics) as nuisance parameters that are calibrated. The results of our empirical analysis are not unfavorable for the DSGE asset pricing approach, but they also indicate that the very positive interpretation of calibration results, in particular regarding the resolution of asset pricing puzzles, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Probability weighting and default risk: a possible explanation for distressed stock puzzles

This paper suggests incorporating investor probability weighting and the default risk of individual firms into a consumption-based asset pricing model. The extended model provides a unified explanation for several anomalous patterns observed in financial markets. The analysis addresses not only widely recognized asset pricing puzzles, such as the equity premium puzzle, but also less-studied anomalies on financially distressed stocks. The simulation, under which the model is calibrated according to U.S. historical data, shows that a combination of mild overweighting of probability on tail events and nonlinearity of equity values caused by default risk has the potential to resolve these patterns.

The Price Puzzle and the Hysteresis Hypothesis: SVEC Analysis for the US Economy

ABSTRACT This paper shows that monetary policy tightening may lead to an increase in the level of prices. To demonstrate this, we apply SVEC modelling to US monthly data for the 1959–2018 period and endorse the ‘hysteresis hypothesis’ which assumes that monetary policy produces long-lasting effects on unemployment and prices. Contrary to what has been argued by Hanson (2004. ‘The “Price Puzzle” Reconsidered.’ Journal of Monetary Economics 51 (7): 1385–1413) and Castelnuovo and Surico (2010. ‘Monetary Policy, Inflation Expectations and the Price Puzzle.’ The Economic Journal 120 (549): 1262–1283), the phenomenon known as the ‘price puzzle’ or ‘Gibson paradox’ is confirmed both in the pre-1979 and post-1982 periods, showing that the paradox is independent of the active/passive behaviour of the Central Bank. Our findings detect a cost channel of monetary policy demonstrating that a change in the interest rates by monetary authorities may have an effect on income distribution.

Monetary Policy Transmission Mechanisms in the Central and Eastern European Countries

Objective: The aim of this study is to examine monetary policy transmission mechanisms in four Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania), in the presence of fiscal and exchange rate effects. Research Design & Methods: We implement a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) approach for modelling the interdependencies between monetary and fiscal policies, output gap and consumer price inflation (CPI). In our six-variable model, which includes the budget balance, the output gap, CPI, the central bank reference rate, the lending rate and the real exchange rate (RER), short-run restrictions on the contemporaneous structural parameters imply that the budget balance responds to changes in the output gap and lending rate, while the central bank reference rate is a function of output and inflationary shocks. Findings: The results of our research show that the effects of an increase in the central bank’s short-run interest rate on inflation, output gap and the RER are quite heterogeneous across the CEE countries. As the monetary policy response to inflation seems to be significant and rather uniform across countries, though with a different time pattern, there is no evidence of its reaction to the output gap (except for Romania in the long run). Among other results, budget surplus has a strong anti-inflationary impact in all countries but at the expense of a short-lived output slowdown (except for Hungary). The RER undervaluation is likely to stimulate output (Romania) or depress it (Poland), with a neutral stance in the two other countries. As expected, an increase in the lending rate is followed by a fall in output on impact, while there is no significant effect on inflation. Implications/Recommendations: Our study argues in favour of a much stronger response of the central bank reference rate to the output gap in the CEE countries. As suggested by the experience of Poland, an immediate response of the central bank to inflation could explain the lack of the price puzzle when an increase in the reference rate is associated with a sustained increase in consumer prices. An anti-inflationary monetary policy stance should be strengthened by fiscal tightening, while in a recession a higher budget deficit is likely to boost output and prevent a deflationary spiral. Contribution: The article presents the application of the extended IS-MP-IA model to the modelling of monetary policies by the central banks of the CEE countries that practice a floating exchange rate regime.

Consumption with Earnings, Liquidity, and Market Based Models

Financial intermediary economic growth theory with its empirical findings, along with stock-level factors; both ideally relate to a consumption asset pricing model. Changing liquidity and earnings combined with the market proxy wealth growth, allowing a recursive consumption model with a low risk aversion coefficient, a risk-free rate close to historical, a high equity premium, and a reasonable elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The empirical consumption model does well against major asset pricing puzzles. Tested over 118 years it is not rejected while a forward-looking consumption model using the market alone as a wealth proxy fails. Changing liquidity and earnings forecast consumption and their ‘crashes’ precede consumption declines. This consistency across approaches adds credence to common risk factors as important risks to investors.

Economic policy uncertainty, monetary policy, and housing price in China

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the impact of macroeconomic variables on house price volatility under different regimes of policy uncertainty, incorporating the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index and several Chinese macroeconomic data sets for the period from 1999 to 2014. We adopt a logistic smooth transition vector autoregressive model and a generalized impulse response function. The results show that macroeconomic progress leads to house price growth, which is augmented by policy uncertainty. In addition, the effect of macroeconomic shocks on house price volatility varies under different regimes of policy uncertainty. We find that shocks are asymmetric under regimes of high and low policy uncertainty. Under a high policy uncertainty regime, expansionary quantitative monetary policy can facilitate house price growth, whereas a contractionary monetary policy gives rise to an enduring “Home Price Puzzle,” which makes it difficult to regulate house prices.

Government Debt, Dividend Growth, and Stock Returns

This paper documents that the increase in public debt can lead to higher dividend payout to shareholders, which suggests public debt can be a strong cash flow predictor which helps better predict future stock returns. Specifically, the higher public debt-to-GDP ratio can predict both higher dividend growth and higher stock returns, and the predicted changes are in the same magnitudes. The finding is consistent with Lettau and Ludvigson's (2005) argument that there exists a common component among stock returns and dividend growth. We argue that i) public debt can drive the co-movement among returns and dividend growth, and the existence of a common component can resolve the US asset pricing puzzle as emphasized by Cochrane (2007, 2011) that the dividend-price ratio can only predict discount rates but not cash flows; ii) the strong cash flow predictability of the public debt-to-GDP ratio can not be consumed by the popular consumption-to-wealth ratio (cay) and many other macroeconomic states variables; iii) future stocks returns can be better out-of-sample predicted after controlling for public debt. The empirical evidence documented in the US aggregate market can also be extended to the US cross-section and the international markets, especially for the advanced financial markets, which helps to explain the weak cash flow predictability recently documented by Rangvid et al. (2014) and Maio et al. (2015). To rationalize the finding, we propose a production-based asset pricing model incorporating cash-retention friction on the corporate sector. The model can produce testable predictions that the increase in public debt moves both dividend payment and the cost of capital in the same direction, resulting in the capture of the common component.

The effects of exchange rate pass-through and cost channel on price level: The case of fragile five countries

ABSTRACTIn this study, we investigated whether the exchange rate and the interest rate had an effect on the inflation rate in the fragile five countries between the years of 1996Q4 and 2015Q4. In this context, a model was created to estimate the effect of interest rate and exchange rate on the inflation rate. The methods used in the study take into account cross-section dependence and heterogeneity. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that there was an exchange-rate and interest-rate pass-through effect in the fragile five countries. Moreover, it was found out that the cost channel and price puzzle were effective in Indonesia and South Africa but were not effective in Turkey, Brasil and India.

The Effectiveness Of Monetary Policy In South Africa Under Inflation Targeting: Evidence from a Time-Varying Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive Model

In the 1970s and 1980s, the economies of several developed and developing countries witnessed much volatility in output growth, inflation and other macroeconomic variables. Thereafter, these became considerably low and more stable. This latter development has been named the "great moderation" with first observation in the US and comparable evidence for other developed and developing economies including South Africa. However, the 2007/2009 economic and financial crisis resulted into heightened uncertainty and volatility. This brings to question the role of monetary policy and its effectiveness in the economy. This paper examines the transmission mechanism of shocks to monetary policy in South Africa using quarterly data from 1980:1 to 2012:4. We also in addition identify demand and supply shocks. Our analyses are based on a factor-augmented vector autoregression with time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility (TVP-FAVAR), which allows us to simultaneously analyze the changing impulse responses of a set of 177 macroeconomic variables covering the inflation, real activity, asset prices and monetary series. We also have intangible variables, such as confidence indices, and survey variables. These data capture the broad trends in the South African economy. Our results based on the impulse response functions, are consistent with economic theory as we observe no price puzzle that is often associated with the standard VAR models. We find evidence of modest time variation in the transmission of shocks. Overall, the macroeconomic variables seemed to have responded slightly more to the monetary policy shocks in the post -2000 (inflation targeting) sub-period than the pre-2000 period, albeit the differences in the effects are statistically insignificant. The forecast error variance decomposition results show the changes in the macroeconomic variables are largely determined by the demand shock relative to the monetary policy shock although the contribution of the latter increased slightly over time. Our results suggest the need for a more efficient role of the monetary authority as this will both improve its credibility and greater economic stability. As inflation still remains within the upper portion of the 3–6% target range, appropriate mix of supply and demand side policies could be explored alongside monetary policy to reduce inflationary pressures.

The price puzzle revisited

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the price puzzle that contractionary monetary policy increased inflation rates between 2000 and 2014 in the U.S. Previous studies tried to explain the puzzle, but we analyze it from a unique angle by tracing the credit generated by the Fed. Our findings show that the increased federal credit did not flow into business investment. Instead, U.S. financial institutions invested it in risky but profitable financial derivatives. The missing link between federal credit and business investment explains the price puzzle.

Assessing the Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks Using Dynamic Factor Models

This paper extends the current literature which questions the stability of the monetary transmission mechanism, by proposing a factor-augmented vector autoregressive (VAR) model with time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility. The VAR coefficients and error covariances may change gradually in every period or be subject to abrupt breaks. The model is applied to 143 post-World War II quarterly variables fully describing the US economy. I show that both endogenous and exogenous shocks to the US economy resulted in the high inflation volatility during the 1970s and early 1980s. The time-varying factor augmented VAR produces impulse responses of inflation which significantly reduce the price puzzle. Impulse responses of other indicators of the economy show that the most notable changes in the transmission of unanticipated monetary policy shocks occurred for GDP, investment, exchange rates and money.

Monetary Policy, Housing Rents and Inflation Dynamics

In this paper we study the effect of monetary policy shocks on housing rents. Our main finding is that, in contrast to house prices, housing rents increase in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks. We also find that, after a contractionary monetary policy shock, rental vacancies and the homeownership rate decline. This combination of results suggests that monetary policy may affect housing tenure decisions (own versus rent). In addition, we show that, with the exception of the shelter component, all other main components of the consumer price index (CPI) either decline in response to a contractionary monetary policy shock or are not responsive. These findings motivated us to study the statistical properties of alternative measures of inflation that exclude the shelter component. We find that measures of inflation that exclude shelter have most of the statistical properties of the widely used measures of inflation, such as the CPI and the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE), but have higher standard deviations and react more to monetary policy shocks. Finally, we show that the response of housing rents accounts for a large proportion of the "price puzzle" found in the literature.

Valuation Risk Revalued

This paper shows the recent success of valuation risk (time-preference shocks in Epstein- Zin utility) in resolving asset pricing puzzles rests sensitively on an undesirable asymptote that occurs because the preference specification fails to satisfy a key restriction on the weights in the Epstein-Zin time-aggregator. In a Bansal-Yaron long-run risk model, our revised valuation risk specification that satisfies the restriction provides a superior empirical fit. The results also show that valuation risk no longer has a major role in matching the mean equity premium and risk-free rate but is crucial for matching the volatility and autocorrelation of the risk-free rate.

Two resolutions of the margin loan pricing puzzle

This paper supplies two possible resolutions of Fortune’s (2000) margin-loan pricing puzzle. Fortune (2000) noted that the margin loan interest rates charged by stock brokers are very high in relation to the actual (low) credit risk and the cost of funds. If we live in the Black–Scholes world, the brokers are presumably making arbitrage profits by shorting dynamically precise amounts of their clients’ portfolios.First, we extend Fortune’s (2000) application of Merton’s (1974) no-arbitrage approach to allow for brokers that can only revise their hedges finitely many times during the term of the loan. We show that extremely small differences in the revision frequency can easily explain the observed variation in margin loan pricing. In fact, four additional revisions per three-day period serve to explain all of the currently observed heterogeneity.Second, we study monopolistic (or oligopolistic) margin loan pricing by brokers whose clients are continuous-time Kelly gamblers. The broker solves a general stochastic control problem that yields simple and pleasant formulas for the optimal interest rate and the net interest margin. If the author owned a brokerage, he would charge an interest rate of (r+ν)/2−σ2/4, where r is the cost of funds, ν is the compound-annual growth rate of the S&P 500 index, and σ is the volatility.

The financial distress pricing puzzle in banking firms

AbstractThis paper examines whether the financial distress pricing puzzle observed for non‐financial firms is also observed for financial firms and how this puzzle differs according to the extent of short‐sale constraints. By using the eight distress measures developed for financial firms, we find that there is a strong negative relation in the cross‐section between financial distress and subsequent bank stock returns, regardless of adjustment for risk. However, this distress pricing puzzle is statistically significant only for high short‐sale constrained banks, but not for low short‐sale constrained banks. Thus, short‐sale constraints are at least one non‐risk attribute that causes the distress pricing puzzle for financial firms. We also find that despite its simple form, compared to the other complex distress measures, non‐performing loans (NPLs) are the most informative in predicting future bank stock returns as well as bankruptcy and failure.