Narrow Results

This study examines the correlation between oil price fluctuation and absolute business development in Pakistan. Our study focusses on three economic sectors, agriculture and livestock, manufacturing and electricity production and transportation from 1980 to 2018 using the autoregressive distributed lag, with linear regression to evaluate the (time series or panel) data (please elaborate the frequency of data as well either it is daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly data). Our findings reveal negative impact of oil price on the economic development overall, and manufacturing, electricity production and livestock sectors individually; while, there is positive relationship observed with communication and transport sectors. There is need for policymaker’s attention on highly oil-dependent sectors to run their operations. Empirical findings suggest a 30% shortage of oil supply responsible for the highest fluctuated structure of oil pricing, which suddenly increases the projected welfare loss through a 40% reduction in gross domestic product. This study suggests that the country should maintain a minimum 100-day strategic petroleum reserves to hedge any adverse effect of oil price fluctuation on economic and social welfare losses.

This paper analyzes the effects of U.S. monetary policy on sovereign credit default swap (CDS) markets in a total of 66 countries including both advanced and emerging market economies at the monthly time horizon from 2001 to 2016. We employ a four-variable vector autoregression (VAR) model to estimate the monetary policy shock and examine the pass-through of U.S. monetary policy shocks to sovereign CDS markets. We find that the effect of monetary policy shocks on CDS markets is strong, especially during the European sovereign debt crisis and the period the U.S. monetary policy rate was near zero. Our analysis indicates that expansionary U.S. monetary policy leads to the widening of the sovereign credit spreads and the heightening of the CDS market volatility.

In the folklore of emerging markets, there is a popular belief that bubbles are inevitable. In this paper, our objective is to estimate a state-space model for rational bubbles in selected Asian economies with the aid of the Kalman Filter. For each economy, we derive a possible picture of the bubble formation process that is implied by the state-space formulation. The estimation is based on the rational valuation formula for stock prices. Our results provide a possible way of defining the presence of rational bubbles in the stock markets of Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Malaysia.

This paper examines the key characteristics of Singapore's exchange rate-centered monetary policy; in particular, its managed float regime which incorporates key features of the basket, band and crawl system popularized by Williamson (1998, 1999). We assess how the flexibility accorded by this framework has been advantageous in facilitating adjustment to various shocks to the economy. A characterization of the countercyclical nature of Singapore's exchange rate policy is also offered, with reference to recent work on the monetary policy reaction function and estimates of Singapore's behavioral equilibrium exchange rate. We also review previous econometric analysis which provides evidence that Singapore's managed float system may have helped to mitigate the spillover effects of such increased volatility into the real economy. The track record of Singapore's managed float regime over the past two decades suggests that intermediate regimes are a viable alternative to the so-called "corner solutions", especially when supported by consistent macroeconomic and microeconomic policies as well as strong institutions.

Trading in commodity derivatives on exchange platforms is an instrument to achieve price discovery and better price-risk management besides helping the macroeconomy with better resource allocation. In the 2008–2009 budget, the Indian government proposed to impose a commodity transaction tax (CTT) amounting to 0.017% of trading value. In this context, we examine the relationship between trading activity, volatility and transaction cost for five most traded commodities in India. Results suggest that there exists a negative relationship between transaction cost and liquidity and a positive relationship between transaction cost and volatility. Further, the results of structural model support the results of VAR analysis. Therefore, if the government imposes CTT, it would lead to higher volatility and lower trading activity affecting market efficiency and liquidity.

This study applies the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model to investigate the non-linear dynamic relationship between bond fund flows and investment volatility in Taiwan. Our empirical results are as follows. (1) A bond fund's net flow and volatility present a non-linear relationship, (2) Investors' behavior is different under the volatility threshold value and the control variables of asset of funds, management fees and the Sharpe indicator, (3) The different risk attributes of bond funds produce completely different investor behavior. In sum, the threshold of volatility is an important index to look at when investing in bond funds.

Along with the international trade and economic ties, international stock markets are performing increasingly closely. This paper investigates the volatilities and the return co-movements among three stock markets in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States, from January 1, 2007, to July 5, 2019. We use the MIDAS framework to separately characterize short-term and long-term features. The results reveal that different market volatilities have different sensitivities to the same events. After the second half of 2016, the volatility of China’s stock market gradually dropped below that of the other two markets. As for market co-movements, the return correlation between China and Hong Kong rose sharply after 2007. Although the co-movements for return rates among these three stock markets possess mutual dynamic synchronization features, deviations exist occasionally due to the emotional transfer of funds in the international market when a significant economic or financial event occurs. The analysis suggests that countries should stabilize the financial investment environment and guard against hot money activities.