We offer an explanation of why changes in house prices are predictable. Extending the static model in Leung and Tsang (2010), we analyze the housing market with loss averse sellers and anchoring buyers in a dynamic setting. A buyer's current offer price increases with the housing unit's previous...

In a simple macro-finance term structure (MFTS) model with macroeconomic variables as risk factors, it matters little whether an econometrician has a strong prior on a particular macroeconomic model. I show in a Monte Carlo experiment that econometricians with drastically different priors will...

Bitcoin is traded in a number of exchanges, and there is a large and time-varying price dispersion among them. We identify the sources of price dispersion using a standard time-varying vector auto-regression model with stochastic volatility. Using weekly data over the past 3 years, we find that...

The Mutual Market Access scheme in 2014 triggered an influx of capital from mainland China to Hong Kong. We argue that it is exogenous demand shock for the Hong Kong stocks market and thus provides a unique opportunity to test whether the demand curves for stocks are downward sloping. We find a...

Under the stay-at-home orders issued by states, economic activities are reduced or put on hold by some states across the U.S. to control the spread of COVID-19. By combining several sources of data, we estimate the output loss due to such restrictions using a network approach. Based on our most...

Transaction fees in the bitcoin system work differently from those in conventional payment systems due to the design of the bitcoin mining algorithm. In particular, transaction fees and transaction volume in the bitcoin system increase whenever the network is congested, and our VAR results...

Using a network approach, we estimate the output loss due to the lockdown of the Hubei province triggered by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Based on our most conservative estimate, China suffers about 4% loss of output from labor loss, and global output drops by 1% due to the economic...

It is widely-known that different methods of detrending data yield different business cycle features. The choice of the detrending method, however, is usually arbitrarily made. This paper aims at revealing potential pitfalls of different detrending methods for the estimation of a standard...

We extract principal components from a panel of 17 exchange rates and use the deviations from the components to forecast future exchange rate movements, following the idea in Engel, Mark, and West (2015). Instead of using the standard method, we apply a generalized principal components analysis...

The origins of the Great Inflation, a central 20th century U.S. macroeconomic event, remain contested. Prominent explanations are poor forecasts or deficient activity gap estimates. An alternative view: the FOMC was unwilling to fight inflation, perhaps due to political pressures. Our findings,...