The US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have adopted a number of measures, including aggressive policy rate cuts, to ease the liquidity crunch in the financial markets following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Using high frequency spot and forward foreign exchange and interest rate...

This paper extends the single-asset target-zone model pioneered by Krugman (1991) to include both bonds and equities. The new model provides a convenient framework for investigating a 'puzzle' recently noted in Hong Kong. While the economy has experienced persistently lower interest rates...

This study applies the newly developed bubble detection method (Phillips, Wu and Yu, 2011) to identifying asset bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market. Our empirical results show that the method is capable of detecting the 1997 bubble and is able to reveal the corresponding...

This paper applies the factor model proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005) on a large data set to nowcast (i.e. current-quarter forecast) the annual growth rate of China¡¦s quarterly GDP. The data set contains 189 indicator series of several categories, such as prices, industrial...

This paper examines the issue of achieving full convertibility for the Chinese currency, Renminbi (RMB), and its impact on the economies of both mainland China and Hong Kong. It focuses on the sequencing of Renminbi¡¦s full convertibility, clarifying the different concepts of currency...

This paper studies the nexus between the property market and the macroeconomy of Mainland China in 1998-2004, using panel data models covering 31 provinces and major cities. The estimates suggest three main conclusions. First, there seemed to be a two-way linkage between property price and GDP...

We study trade integration among 15 selected Asian and Oceanic economies using factor models. The principal component approach is employed to extract the common factor that drives trade integration from bilateral trade integration series. It is found that the estimated common trade integration...

The "overheating" of the Chinese housing market in recent years has caught the attention of policy makers, the research community, as well as the general public. Leung and Wang (2007) shows that the qualitative features of the aggregate Chinese housing market are well captured by the...

The need for a deeper understanding of the operation of Hong Kong's currency board arrangements was highlighted during the Asian financial crisis in 1998. A model-based approach built on hypothetical stochastic simulations would be useful for this purpose. This paper develops a new procedure of...

This paper estimates output gaps for Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, employing the HP filter and unobservable-components (UC) techniques. The latter approach assumes that actual output is the sum of potential output, which follows a random walk with a time-varying drift,...