Bachelor's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

In Hong Kong, housing prices have increased significantly in recent years. Amongst all the reasons for such significant increase, low interest rate has been recognized as one of the major reasons. Many studies have provided empirical evidence to support the negative relationship between interest rate and housing prices. However, in the US, recent studies (Glaeser, Gottlieb and Gyourko, 2010; Kuttner, 2012) show that the observed effect of interest rate changes on housing prices is much less than that predicted by the standard user cost model. According to the Glaeser et al. (2010), there are three potential explanations for the low housing price sensitivity to interest rate fluctuation. First, increase in land (and therefore housing) supply elasticity can reduce the effects of the demand-side variables, including interest rate. Second, high risk premium for long term mortgage rate in the US makes housing prices less sensitive to changes in interest rates. Third, the long-term mortgage contracts in the US cannot reflect the impact of frequent short term interest rate fluctuation. Among these three potential hypotheses proposed to explain the lower than expected housing price sensitivity to interest rate changes, land supply elasticity is more relevant to Hong Kong. By focusing on Hong Kong’s housing market, this thesis examines the relationship between land supply elasticity and the sensitivity of housing prices towards interest rate changes. When demand shift due to interest rate change, land supply (and therefore housing supply) may respond accordingly to reduce the impact of interest rate change. The more elastic the supply is, the weaker the housing price sensitivity to interest rate may be. Alternatively, housing prices are more sensitive to interest rate change when land supply is inelastic. To be more precisely, this study provides an empirical test on whether land supply elasticity reduces housing price sensitivity towards interest changes. Two approaches are applied to provide clear pictures of housing price sensitivity. First, data from different housing subsectors with different land supply elasticity are used for the empirical tests. The results show that prices of large units in the Hong Kong Island are significantly more sensitive to interest rate change, compared to those of small units in the New Territories. This is consistent with the implication of our hypothesis because new land for building luxurious units in Hong Kong Island is limited while there are relatively more lands available in the New Territories for smaller mass residential units. Second, in Hong Kong, all new land supply comes from the government in the form of leasehold land. Hence, government’s land supply policy has a major impact on land supply elasticity. For example, there was a period of restricted land supply before the handover in 1997, which effectively reduced land supply elasticity. On the other hand, the Application List land sales system adopted by the Hong Kong government from 2000 to 2013 should increase the flexibility in land supply. Therefore, this study makes use of these policy changes as nature experiments to investigate the effect of land supply elasticity on housing price sensitivity towards interest fluctuation. The results show that housing prices are more sensitive to interest rate change during the land supply restriction period and more insensitive when the Application List was used for land sales. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Chapter 1 investigates whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts payments for physician services, generating area-specific price shocks that are plausibly exogenous with respect to health care demand. Areas with higher payment shocks experience significant increases in health care supply. On average, a 2 percent increase in payment rates leads to a 5 percent increase in care provision per patient. Elective procedures such as cataract surgery respond twice as strongly as less discretionary services like dialysis. Higher reimbursements also increase the pace of technology diffusion, as non-radiologists acquire magnetic resonance imaging scanners more readily when prices increase. The magnitudes of our empirical findings imply that changing provider incentives explain up to one third of recent growth in spending on physician services. The incremental care has no significant impacts on mortality, hospitalizations, or heart attacks. In chapter 2, we analyze bargaining between health care providers and private insurers in the shadow of large public insurance programs. Using several distinct sources of variation in Medicares payment rates, we find robust evidence that private insurers adapt to Medicare pricing. The relationship between private and public prices is both significantly positive and significantly less than one-for-one. The results reject both the strong view that private insurers mimic Medicare and views that emphasize cost-shifting as the predominant feature of these markets. Private responses to Medicare payments are larger in states with more competitive insurance markets. The evidence is consistent with models in which Medicares payment rates serve as a basis for negotiations between insurers and provider networks. Chapter 3 revisits the standard user cost model of housing prices and concludes that the predicted impact of interest rates on prices is much lower once the model is generalized to include mean-reverting interest rates, mobility, prepayment, elastic housing supply, and credit-constrained home buyers. The modest predicted impact of interest rates on prices is in line with empirical estimates, and suggests that lower real rates can explain only one-fifth of the rise in prices from 1996 to 2006. / Economics

This paper estimates the effects of fiscal institutions on fiscal policy outcomes, addressing issues related to measurement and endogeneity in a novel way. Recently developed indices, based on partially ordered set theory, are used to quantify the stringency of fiscal rules. Identification of their effects is achieved by exploiting the exogeneity of institutional variables (checks and balances, government fragmentation, inflation targeting), which are found to be relevant determinants of fiscal rules. Our two-stage least squares estimates for (up to) 79 countries over the period 1985-2012 provide strong evidence that countries with more stringent fiscal rules have higher fiscal balances (lower deficits), lower interest rate spreads on government bonds, and lower output volatility. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This paper uses data collected from the National Interbank Funding Center of China, the People’s Bank of China, the National Bureau of Statistics, and Bloomberg starting in October 2006 through 2013 to test the economic fundamental’s affecting the housing market in Shanghai, particularly interest rates. This study finds that the 6- month duration Shibor has a negative and significant correlation with house price growth in Shanghai when lagged 4 months. The analysis continues by examining other economic fundamentals affecting house price growth, finding growth in inflation, the money supply and Shanghai real estate investment to have significant, positive relationships with the housing market in China. GDP and the national state balance, on the other hand, have negative and significant relationships with house price growth. The Shanghai stock exchange was found to have no significant impact on the housing market over the time period. The sample period is limited to 87 observations due to the relatively recent development of Shibor for a benchmark interest rate.

The premise of this paper is that in a monetary production economy, policy decisions of the central bank, or more generally the 'monetary authority', set the tone not only for nominal interest rates but also for 'real' interest rates defined in the usual way. This is a different question than that of which institution(s) acquire the status of monetary authority at any particular stage of socioeconomic or technological development. Rather the suggestion is that the existence of some such social structure is a prerequisite if anything resembling capitalist monetary production is to be viable. The paper demonstrates that a coherent macroeconomic theory can be elaborated on this basis, including an explanation of economic growth, the business cycle, inflation, the functional distribution of income, the 'Keynesian' problem of the impact of demand growth on economic growth, endogenous money, cumulative causation, and endogenous technical change. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

Various models driven by a hidden Markov chain in discrete or continuous time are developed to capture the stylised features of market variables whose levels or values constitute as the underliers of financial derivative contracts or investment portfolios. Since the parameters are switching regimes, the changes and developments in the economy as soon as they arise are readily reflected in these models. The change of probability measure technique and the EM algorithm are fundamental techniques utilised in the optimal parameter estimation. Recursive adaptive filters for the state of the Markov chain and other auxiliary processes related to the Markov chain are derived which in turn yield self-tuning dynamic financial models. A hidden Markov model (HMM)-based modelling set-up for commodity prices is developed and the predictability of the gold market under this setting is examined. An Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) model with HMM parameters is proposed and under this set-up, we address two statistical inference issues: the sensitivity of the model to small changes in parameter estimates and the selection of the optimal number of states. The extended OU model is implemented on a data set of 30-day Canadian T-bill yields. An exponential of a Markov-switching OU process plus a compound Poisson process is put forward as a model for the evolution of electricity spot prices. Using a data set compiled by Nord Pool, we illustrate the vast improvements gained in incorporating regimes in the model. A multivariate HMM is employed as a framework in providing the solutions of two asset allocation problems; one involves the mean-variance utility function and the other entails the CVaR constraint. Finally, the valuation of credit default swaps highlights the important considerations necessitated by pricing in a regime-switching environment. Certain numerical schemes are applied to obtain approximations for the default probabilities and swap rates.

This dissertation contains a series of essays that provide empirical evidence for Australia on some fundamental predictions of real business cycle models and on the convergence and persistence of real interest rates. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the issues examined in each chapter and provides an overview of the methodologies that are used. Tests of various basic predictions of standard real business cycle models for Australia are presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 considers the question of great ratios for Australia. These are ratios of macroeconomic variables that are predicted by standard models to be stationary in the steady state. Using time series econometric techniques (unit root tests and cointegration tests) Australia great ratios are examined. In Chapter 3 a more restrictive implication of real business cycle models than the existence of great ratios is considered. Following the methodology proposed by Canova, Finn and Pagan (1994) the equilibrium decision rules for some standard real business cycle are tested on Australian data. The final essay on this topic is presented in Chapter 4. In this chapter a large-country, small-country is used to try and understand the reason for the sharp rise in Australia??s share of world output that began around 1990. Chapter 5 discusses real interest rate linkages in the Pacific Basin region. Vector autoregressive models and bootstrap methods are adopted to study financial linkages between East Asian markets, Japan and US. Given the apparent non-stationarity of real interest rates a related issue is examined in Chapter 6, viz. the persistence of international real interest rates and estimation of their half-life. Half-life is selected as a means of measuring persistence of real rates. Bootstrap methods are employed to overcome small sample issues in the estimation and a non-standard statistical inference methodology (Highest Density Regions) is adopted. Chapter 7 reapplies the High Density Regions methodology and bootstrap half-life estimation to the data used in Chapters 2 and 5. This provides a robustness check on the results of standard unit root tests that were applied to the data in those chapters. Main findings of the thesis are as follows. The long run implications of real business cycle models are largely rejected by the Australia data. This finding holds for both the existence of great ratios and when the explicit decision rules are employed. When the small open economy features of the Australian economy are incorporated in a two country RBC model, a country-specific productivity boom seems to provide a possible explanation for the rise in Australia??s share of world output. The essays that examine real interest rates suggest the following results. Following the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 there appears to have been a decline in the importance of Japan in influencing developments in the Pacific Basin region. In addition there is evidence that following the crisis Korea??s financial market became less insular and more integrated with the US. Finally results obtained from the half-life estimators suggest that despite the usual findings from unit root tests, real interest rates may in fact exhibit mean-reversion.

Otto Beisheim School of Management, Habil.-Schr.--Vallander, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1997. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 216-220). Also available on the Internet.