This paper takes seriously the idea that the coefficients of a VAR and the variance of shocks may be time-varying and so employs a Markov regime-switching VAR model to describe and analyse the time-varying credibility of Hong Kong’s currency board system. The endogenously estimated discrete...

In the wake of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the macroeconomic discussion has returned to the topic of proactive macroprudential policies. One proactive approach, the use of loan-to-value (LTV) policies to curb booming property markets, has long been used by Hong Kong’s monetary...

This paper accounts for China’s economic growth since 1980 in a unified endogenous growth model in which a sequencing of physical capital accumulation, human capital accumulation and innovation drives the rise in China’s aggregate income. The first stage is characterized by physical capital...

Monetary policy in mainland China differs from conventional central banking in several respects. The central bank regulates retail lending and deposit rates, influences the credit supply via window guidance, and, in recent years has even used the required reserve ratio as a tool for fine-tuning...

The recent increase in Chinese house prices has led to concerns that China is vulnerable to asset price shocks. In this paper, we apply recently developed recursive unit root tests to spot the beginning and the end of potential speculative bubbles in Chinese house price cycles. Overall, we find...

In this paper we analyse the impact of policy uncertainty on foreign direct investment strategies. The paper follows the real options approach, which allows to investigate the value to a firm of waiting to invest and/or disinvest, when payoffs are stochastic due to political uncertainty and...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

The New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) posits the dynamics of inflation as forward looking and related to marginal costs. In this paper we examine the empirical relevance of the NKPC for mainland China. The empirical results indicate that an augmented (hybrid) NKPC gives results that are...