The HKMA has completed a research study on the setting of mortgage rate by Authorized Institutions (AIs). The purpose of the project is to consider whether in an environment of intensive competition and, until recently, abundant liquidity in the banking system, the AIs have adequately taken into...

A re-examination of the competitive conditions of the banking industry in Hong Kong, based on the Panzar-Rosse approach and using a panel dataset with longer time-series data, reconfirms previous findings in our RM 04/2004 that the degree of competition was fairly high during the period...

Forward exchange rates convey information about the risk premiums of the currency exposures of the investors. The extraction of these risk premiums provides market information for the expected future values of a currency, which may be useful for policymakers in their market surveillance and...

In this paper, we model the policy stance of the People¡¦s Bank of China (PBoC) as a latent variable, and the discrete changes in the reserve requirement ratio, policy interest rates, and the scale of open market operations are taken as signals of movement of this latent variable. We run a...

Investors' attitude towards risk is a key factor driving the movement in asset prices. Global reduction in investors' risk appetite has coincided with episodes of global financial market correction. In this paper, we derive a measure for risk appetite based on the methodology of Gai and Vause...

This study develops a probit econometric model to identify a set of leading indicators of banking distress and estimate banking distress probability for Hong Kong and other EMEAP economies. Macroeconomic fundamentals, currency crisis vulnerability, credit risk of banks and companies, asset price...

This paper applies a gravity model to investigate the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) in East Asia. We find that economic fundamentals (such as market size, per capita income, and country risk indicators), economic and cultural ties, and information asymmetry are important...

While Hong Kong's monetary policy is effectively tied to the US, its real economy has been experiencing increased integration with the Mainland through trade, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), tourism, and increasingly financial flows. Co-movements of business cycles in Hong Kong and the Mainland...

Exchange-rate movement is regularly monitored by central banks for macroeconomic-analysis and market-surveillance purposes. Notwithstanding the pioneering study of Meese and Rogoff (1983), which shows the superiority of the random-walk model in out-of-sample exchange-rate forecast, there is some...

This paper studies the significance of Mainland-related shocks in determining Hong Kong money market interest rates after controlling for the influences of US variables. Analysis using a vector auto-regression model suggests that an unexpected rise in the Mainland policy interest rate, or a...