regime switching and the in stability of the price rent relationship evidence from the us present value models of house prices assert that in the absence of self fulfilling bubbles a house price is equal to the present discount value of all future rents which implies a linear relationship between house price and rent and hence a stable price to rent ratio using a markov switching error correction model we re examine this relationship in the us housing market and find two distinctive regimes one with a long run relation between house price and rent predicted by the present value models and the other in which the relation is nonlinear furthermore we find evidence that deviations of house prices from the present value models predictions are caused by the overreaction of house prices to movements in rents rather than speculative bubbles attributable to extraneous factors

rational ponzi games when can a government run a rational ponzi game i e issue debt and never pay back any interest or principal the transversalit y condition of each individual implies that such schemes require an i nfinity of lenders given this horizons are unimportant ponzi games cannot be ruled out by assuming that agents have infinite horizons the authors point out both the basic similarity of and some key diff erences between rational ponzi games and asset price bubbles or fiat money regarding international debt the analysis implies that what matters for the feasibility of rational ponzi games are conditions in the lenders not the borrowers economy copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

containing contagious financial crises the political economy of joint intervention into the asian crisis the notion of contagion has changed the wayscientists perceive financial crises causing heated debate on the politicaleconomy of crisis intervention based on aformal model that shows how a financialcrisis can escalate and spread contagiously this article analyzes game theoreticallyhow a financial market crisis can becontained through intervention the centralfocus is the role that internationalorganizations play in overcoming thecollective action problem of jointintervention it is argued that the imfsupport programs were helpful and probablynecessary in a class of cases we analyzemore carefully in surpassing the thresholdlevel of collective action

models of currency crises with self fulfilling features the discomfort a government suffers from speculation against its currency determines the strategic incentives of speculators and the scope for multiple currency market equilibria after describing an illustrative model in which high unemployment may cause an exchange rate crisis with self fulfilling features the paper reviews some other self reinforcing mechanisms recent econometric evidence seems consistent with the practical importance of these mechanisms

managing credit bubbles we study a dynamic economy where credit is limited by insu cient collateral and as a result investment and output are too low in this environment changes in investor sentiment or market expectations can give rise to credit bubbles that is expansions in credit that are backed not by expectations of future pro ts i e fundamental collateral but instead by expectations of future credit i e bubbly collateral credit bubbles raise the availability of credit for entrepreneurs this

explosive dynamics in house prices an exploration of financial market spillovers in housing markets around the world abstract asset prices in general and real house prices in particular are often characterized by a nonlinear data generating process which may display at times mildly explosive behavior in this paper using the recursive right tailed unit root test methodology proposed by phillips et al 2015a b we find widespread evidence of episodes of explosiveness or exuberance in international real house prices and establish a timeline of such episodes for a panel of 23 countries between first quarter 1975 and fourth quarter 2015 motivated by theory we adopt a dynamic panel logit probit framework to empirically investigate whether macro fundamentals and more specifically financial variables help predict such episodes of exuberance in international real house prices we find that interest rate spreads and real stock market growth together with standard housing fundamentals growth in real personal disposable income per capita and inflation are indeed among the best predictors furthermore we argue that financial developments in other asset markets can play a significant role as a trigger in the emergence of explosiveness in housing markets

exchange rate bubbles fundamental value estimation and rational expectations test abstract we propose a model of periodically collapsing bubbles which extends the van norden 1996 model and nests it by considering a non linear specification for the bubble size in the survival regime and the endogenous determination of the level of the fundamental value of the stochastic process they allow us to test for rationality in the formation of expectations and remove the arbitrariness of exogenously setting the level of the fundamental value this general model is applied to the exchange rate of the brazilian real to the us dollar from march 1999 to february 2011 the futures market exchange rate is used as a proxy of its expected future value and three different structural models are considered for the determination of the fundamental value the first two imply that the exchange rate satisfies either purchasing power parity ppp or a modified version of it the third structural model is a version of the monetary model of exchange rate determination fitted to the period under consideration we obtain the maximum likelihood estimate of the parameters of the models explore the properties of the errors test its restricted versions and compare the three specifications for the fundamental we find that the models we propose fit well the data and are useful in the heuristic interpretation of the exchange rate movements of the period finally we select the structural models that display the best performance according to several criteria

designing an early warning system for currency crises an empirical treatment this article investigates the predictive power of qualitative response models that can serve as the basis for an early warning system for currency crises it employs a signals framework that monitors the behaviour of key economic variables and issues a warning when their values exceed certain critical levels the analysis is carried out for a parsimonious specification with high frequency data taking egypt as a case study it is shown that this class of probability models captures to a good extent the turbulence in the foreign exchange market and the onset of crises

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

asset bubbles and bailouts as long as bubble size is relatively small bubbles increase production level but once the size becomes too large then bubbles reduce it given this non monotonic relationship this paper investigates the relationship between bubbles and government bailouts it shows that bailouts for bursting bubbles may positively influence ex ante production efficiency and relax the existence condition of stochastic bubbles the level of bailouts has a non monotonic relationship with production efficiency and a partial bailout policy achieves production efficiency moreover it examines the welfare effects of bailout policies rigorously and shows that even non risky bubbles may be undesirable for taxpayers

consequences of discretion in the formation of commodities policy abstract in a simple model of endogenous primary commodity price support policy i policy is affected by private inventories and ii private inventories are affected by speculative attempts to forecast policy the interaction between these two forces is rich yielding bubbles and extrinsic volatility thus helping to explain some odd episodes observed in commodity markets in addition under some conditions a government that wishes to support the price but is unable to commit to future action may be impotent and a government that does not want to support the price may be trapped into doing so by speculative activity

hot money in bank credit flows to emerging markets during the banking globalization era this paper investigates the relative importance of hot money in bank credit and portfolio flows from the us to 18 emerging markets over the period 1988 2012 we deploy state space models a la kalman filter to identify the unobserved hot money as the temporary component of each type of flow the analysis reveals that the importance of hot money relative to the permanent component in bank credit flows has significantly increased during the 2000s relative to the 1990s this finding is robust to controlling for the influence of push and pull factors in the two unobserved components the evidence supports indirectly the view that global banks have played an important role in the transmission of the global financial crisis to emerging markets and endorses the use of regulations to manage international capital flows

testing for rational bubbles in the presence of structural breaks evidence from nonstationary panels this paper presents new results on the rational bubbles hypothesis for a panel of 18 oecd countries using the model developed by campbell 2000 we provide an analysis of international data that exploits increased power deriving from the panel unit root and cointegration methodology together with the flexibility of allowing explicitly for multiple endogenous structural breaks in the individual series differently from the time series methodology the panel data approach allows for a global analysis of the financial crashes that are related to rational bubbles we find strong evidence in favor of bubbles phenomena

speculative bubbles in u k house prices some new evidence in this article we test the view widely held among both academics and practitioners that speculative bubbles have characterized the time series behavior of u k house prices in recent times we motivate our empirical analysis using a stylized overlapping generations model which generates a housing demand function of the form assumed by a large literature illustrating how rational bubbles may arise as a solution to the house price determination equation employing two recently developed econometric techniques specifically designed to test for rational bubbles we then provide empirical evidence for the existence of bubbles in u k house prices over the sample period 1983 2002 a widely held view among academics and practitioners is that the time series behavior of house prices of several major industrialized countries may have been characterized by explosive bubbles which are not present in the underlying fundamentals and which therefore may drive an explosive wedge between house prices and their fundamental determinants in particular with regard to the united kingdom a large empirical literature has studied the determinants of the two booms experienced by house prices in the early 1970s and late 1980s providing some tentative evidence in support of the view that speculation on expected future house prices might have been an important force driving actual house prices see inter alia hendry 1984 muellbauer and murphy 1997 renaud 1997 teraisvirta 1998 more recently concerns of an ongoing house price bubble in the united kingdom have been repeatedly raised by the press and policymakers these concerns are well summarized in the following quote it will be different this time those are the most dangerous words in investment and in economic policy the u k is yet again in an unbalanced expansion behind it lies explosive household

time varying persistence in real oil prices and its determinant abstract we provide empirical evidence for pronounced time variation in the persistence of real oil prices in particular we find episodes of mild explosiveness next to periods with random walk and also mean reverting behavior we address the question whether dynamic persistence can be directly related to macro financial variables spot futures spreads spill over effects from commodities and global real economic activity alongside these variables we use a large data set of more than one hundred fifty potential determinants featuring for example further oil related variables production and inventories and key macroeconomic series for the g7 countries by using model averaging techniques we robustly account for the inherent model uncertainty when dealing with such many potential explanatory variables as it turns out the one and only significant measure to explain time varying oil price persistence is the index of global real economic activity by kilian 2009 other variables related to e g supply shocks or speculation are however insignificant in line with recent findings we argue that fundamentals rather than speculation were the drivers of the explosive oil price in the 2000s

equity and bond flows to latin america and asia the role of global and country factors abstract this paper investigates the factors motivating the large capital flows to a number of developing countries in recent years we use monthly us capital flows to nine latin american and nine asian countries to analyze the behavior of bond and equity flows employing a panel data approach we find that although global factors the drop in us interest rates and the slowdown in us industrial production are important in explaining capital inflows country specific developments are at least as important especially for asia we also find that equity flows are more sensitive than bond flows to global factors but that bond flows are generally more sensitive to a country s credit rating and secondary market debt price

rational bubbles during poland s hyperinflation implications and empirical evidence abstract it has been argued that the polish hyperinflation at the end of the eighties was too excessive to be attributed to market fundamentals only in this paper a range of indirect non structural and structural tests for rational exploding deterministic and stochastic bubbles are carried out we adopt a new strategy based on the work of hall and sola 1993a which allows for the possibility of switching regimes in the time series properties of the data to allow for both indirect tests and structural tests for the presence of stochastic bubbles

expectations and bubbles in asset pricing experiments abstract we present results on expectation formation in a controlled experimental environment in each period subjects are asked to predict the next price of a risky asset the realized market price is derived from an unknown market equilibrium equation with feedback from individual forecasts in most experiments prices deviate from the benchmark fundamental and bubbles emerge endogenously these bubbles are inconsistent with rational expectations and seem to be driven by trend chasing behavior or positive feedback expectations of the participants we also analyze individual predictions of participants and find that participants within a group tend to coordinate on a common prediction strategy

allowance price drivers in the first phase of the eu ets abstract in the first phase of the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets the price per ton of co 2 initially rose to over 30 the price then collapsed to essentially zero by mid 2007 by deriving a structural model of the allowance price under the assumption of efficient markets i examine the extent to which this variation in price can be explained by marginal abatement costs i then gradually relax the model by allowing for delayed adjustment of price to fundamentals as well as by introducing lagged lhs variables the pattern of results suggests that while prices were not initially driven by marginal abatement costs this inefficiency was largely corrected after the accounting of 2005 emissions in april 2006

regional vulnerability the case of east asia in a case study of six east asian economies we use dynamic factor analysis to estimate a regional component of the exchange market pressure index empi as a measure of regional financial stress the extent to which this indicator is explained by regional economic and financial factors is interpreted as regional vulnerability to crisis we find that regional external liabilities and exuberance in domestic stock and credit markets as well as the us high yield spread were positively correlated with regional vulnerability individual country empis are also explained by regional factors with country specific factors and trade linkages playing little role

restructuring sovereign debt this paper provides new empirical evidence relevant to the debate over the desirability of reforms to the way that financial markets and the international community deal with sovereign debt crises in particular given the ongoing opposition of investors and some sovereigns to greater use of collective action clauses cacs in emerging market bonds we present new evidence on the way that financial markets have priced the use or non use of cacs

hot money accounting labels and the permanence of capital flows to developing countries an empirical investigation using maximum likelihood kalman filtering techniques and non parametric variance ratio statistics we gauge the relative importance of permanent and temporary components of capital flows to latin american and asian developing countries over the period 1988 1997 for the broad categories of flows in the capital account equity flows ef bond flows bf official flows of commercial bank credit bc and foreign direct investment fdi we find relatively low permanent components in ef bf and of while commercial bc flows appear to contain quite large permanent components and fdi flows are almost entirely permanent these results have a natural interpretation and clear policy implications

rational asset pricing bubbles this paper provides a fairly systematic study of general economic conditions under which rational asset pricing bubbles may arise in an intertemporal competitive equilibrium framework our main results are concerned with nonexistence of asset pricing bubbles in those economies these results imply that the conditions under which bubbles are possible including some well known examples of monetary equilibria are relatively fragile this paper is concerned with the conditions under which asset prices in an intertemporal competitive equilibrium are equal to the present value of the streams of future dividends to which each asset represents a claim according to a central result of the theory of finance this is very generally true in the case of economies with trading at only a finite sequence of dates as long as there are no restrictions upon transactions other than that associated with possible incom pleteness of the set of securities that are traded the result is sometimes called the fundamental theorem of asset pricing here we consider the extent to which such a result continues to be valid in the case of trading over an infinite horizon it has often been observed in the econometric literature on asset pricing bubbles that it is possible in principle for the price of a perpetuity and the dividends on that security to satisfy at all times a present value relation for one period holding returns while the security s price nonetheless does not equal the present value of the stream of dividends expected over the infinite future in such a case the price of the perpetuity is said to involve a bubble component 2 joint stochastic processes for which this component is nonzero are sometimes argued to characterize existing assets for a recent example see froot and obstfeld 1991 but such an inference depends upon aspects of the stochastic

on the rationale of bank lending in pre crisis thailand evidence from credit files is provided to examine bank lending determinants of thai commercial banks their lending practice follows reasonable patterns as a standard set of variables including indirect risk variables explains much of the variance in interest rate spread reflecting institutional differences with mature markets we find a higher importance of relationship banking and risk control via credit availability information about later default reveals prudent relationship lending however banks could have made better use of available information about borrowers riskiness these findings do not support a general verdict of bad banking but indicate room to improve lending decisions

the theory of rational bubbles in stock prices free disposal of equity which directly rules out the existence of negative rational bubbles in stock pric es also imposes theoretical restrictions on the possible existence o f positive rational bubbles the analysis in this paper shows that a positive rational bubble can start only on the first date of trading of a stock thus the existence of a rational bubble at any date woul d imply that the stock has been overvalued relative to market fundame ntals since the first date of trading and that prior to the first da te of trading the issuer of the stock and potential stockholders who anticipated the initial pricing of the stock expected that the stock would be overvalued copyright 1988 by royal economic society

economic and environmental benefits of eliminating log export bans the case of costa rica an increasing number of tropical timber producing nations have enacted bans on export of logs arguing that this will reduce deforestation expand downstream wood processing and improve the scale efficiency of domestic processing create jobs and retain more value added nationally the theoretical literature is clear that trade restrictions are generally welfare reducing except in special cases such as when there is a potential for an optimal export tax at best a log export ban is a second best policy tool for reducing deforestation and addressing the associated environmental externalities in overall terms the suggestion that log export bans can achieve the objectives expected of them is dubious however very little quantitative evidence exists to demonstrate this claim and the paper attempts to address this gap by looking at the economic and environmental impacts of eliminating a log export ban in costa rica the authors argue that eliminating the export ban is pareto improving and could generate economic gains as high as 14 million per annum with the possibility of relatively modest environmental benefits

effects of an export embargo on related goods logs and lumber this paper extends and applies the marshallian derived demand model in the context of international trade the model is utilized to derive estimates of the market equilibrium net welfare and welfare incidence effects of a hypothetical embargo of softwood log exports from the pacific coast region of the united states the approach is potentially applicable to the analysis of various restrictions on primary products exports which may be instituted to maintain the viability of domestic processing industries

conditional testing for unit root bilinearity in financial time series some theoretical and empirical results abstract this paper introduces a t ratio type test for detecting bilinearity in a stochastic unit root process it appears that such a process is a realistic approximation for many economic and financial time series it is shown that under the null of no bilinearity the test statistics are asymptotically normally distributed proofs of these asymptotic normality results require the gihman and skorohod theory for multivariate diffusion processes finite sample results describe speed of convergence power of the tests and possible distortions to unit root testing which might appear due to the presence of bilinearity it is concluded that the two step testing procedure suggested here the first step for the linear unit root and the second step for its bilinearity is consistent in the sense that the size of the step one test is not affected by the possible detection of bilinearity at step two the empirical part of the paper describes testing unit root bilinearity for 65 garch adjusted stock market indices from mature and emerging markets it is shown that for at least 70 of these markets the hypothesis of no unit root bilinearity has to be rejected

pitfalls in testing for explosive bubbles in asset prices a number of studies e g robert j shiller 1981 olivier j blanchard and mark watson 1982 kenneth d west 1988 have argued that dividend and stock price data are not consistent with the market fundamentals hypothesis in which prices are given by the present discounted values of expected dividends these results have often been construed as evidence for the existence of bubbles or fads related arguments have been made with respect to gold bonds and foreign exchange a major problem with such arguments e g james hamilton and charles whiteman 1985 is that apparent evidence for bubbles can be reinterpreted in terms of market fundamentals that are unobserved by the researcher behzad t diba and herschel i grossman 1984 1988b and hamilton and whiteman 1985 have recommended the alternative strategy of testing for rational bubbles by investigating the stationarity properties of asset prices and observable fundamentals 1 in essence the argument for equities is that if stock prices are not more explosive than dividends then it can be concluded that rational bubbles are not present since they would generate an explosive component to stock prices 2 using unit root tests autocorrelation patterns and cointegration tests to implement this procedure diba and grossman 1988b p 529 state that the analysis supports the conclusion that stock prices do not contain explosive rational bubbles this paper shows that the above battery of tests is in fact unable to detect an important class of rational bubbles the point is demonstrated by constructing rational bubbles that appear to be stationary when unitroot tests are applied even though they are explosive in the relevant sense simulations show that when such bubbles are present stock prices will not appear to be more explosive than dividends on the basis of these tests even though the bubbles are substantial in magnitude and volatility the presence of rational bubbles in actual stock prices thus remains an open question

capital flows to developing countries long and short term determinants this article focuses on the determinants of the large portfolio flows from the united states to latin american and asian countries during 1988 92 cointegration techniques reveal that both domestic and global factors explain bond and equity flows to developing countries and represent significant long run determinants of portfolio flows the article also investigates the dynamics of portfolio flows by estimating seemingly unrelated error correction models global and country specific factors are equally important in determining the long run movements in equity flows for both asian and latin american countries while global factors are much more important than domestic factors in explaining the dynamics of bond flows u s interest rates are a particularly important determinant of the short run dynamics of portfolio especially bond flows to developing countries copyright 1997 by oxford university press

are there efficiency gains from the removal of natural resource export restrictions evidence from british columbia log export bans lebs are a popular development tool utilised by developing nations with sizable endowments of timber however the actual impact of these policies is debatable british columbia has a developed forestry sector and still maintains a leb this trade restriction continually creates conflicts with canada s international trade partners including the united states this paper examines the efficiency implications of a hypothetical removal of roundwood export restrictions in british columbia using roundwood price and quantity data from 1995 to 2008 a time series econometric approach is utilised to determine supply and demand elasticities for british columbia s roundwood empirical results from a vector error correction model suggest that a removal of export restrictions will generate an overall increase of approximately 347 91 million us dollars per year to british columbia s forest economy

finished product inventories and price expectations in the softwood lumber industry a monthly model is presented of the u s softwood lumber sector price expectations and beginning period inventories have important roles in producers production sales and inventory decisions cross price effects among domestic producing regions are minimal however there is substantial competition between u s and canadian producers our model produces supply elasticities demand elasticities and inventory response parameters that are different from and more comprehensive than those obtained in previous work

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

the falsification of four popular hypotheses about the asian crisis various claims have been made about the causes of the asian crisis and its spread here we use data on the behaviour of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses that portfolio investors and hedge funds played a dominant role in initiating and or spreading the crisis that moral hazard kept efficient markets from predicting the crisis and finally the common lender hypothesis of kaminsky and reinhart in the process we also test implications of the calvo mendoza model of rational investor ignorance all are falsified as monocausal explanations for example portfolio investments that could not have been subject to substantial moral hazard continued to flow into asia until very shortly before the crisis likewise banks were a much larger source of capital outflows during the crisis than were portfolio investors while falsified in their strongest forms several of these hypotheses in less strong forms should play a role in a more nuanced analysis it is necessary to move past simple single factor approaches in order to produce a more complete synthetic explanation of this episode

international capital crunches the time varying role of informational asymmetries we examine the determinants of capital flows to four developing countries during the 1990s using an explicitly disequilibrium econometric framework in which the supply and demand for capital are not necessarily equal and the actual amount of the flow is determined by the short side of the market we are thus able to detect instances of international capital crunch where capital flows are curtailed because of supply side rationing and to relate these instances to movements in the underlying fundamentals the analysis highlights the role of asymmetric information as distinct from the traditional concern with default risk in conditioning capital flows

housing price fluctuations and financial risk transmission a spatial economic model financial risk derived from housing price fluctuations in china garnered much public concern recently based on the theoretical analyses of the transmission of financial risk from housing price flu

moral hazard asset price bubbles capital flows and the east asian crisis the first tests we examine the view that the recent east asian crisis was precipitated by bursting asset price bubbles which had been fuelled by strong capital inflows that were largely the result of a moral hazard problem in financial intermediation and was exacerbated by a vicious cycle of asset price deflation and incipient and actual capital flight we find evidence of stock market bubbles in all east asian economies examined although not in australia we examine various categories of capital flows to these countries and find in particular relatively high reversible components in portfolio flows to east asian economies