Price distortions and municipal bonds premiums:evidence from Switzerland

This study examines the pricing of municipal bonds before and after a currency shock in Switzerland.Two approaches are used to decompose the municipal to treasuries bond spreads into liquidity,maturity,and default risk premiums.The first approach is the model of the cross-sectional instrumental variables,and the second approach is the model of the instrumental variables with panel data.This study examines the composition of spreads for both approaches,in three scenarios:before,throughout,and after the currency shock.The study performed Durbin-Wu-Hausman tests for each decisive model to verify endogeneity issues,including the Lagrangian Multiplier test,the Cragg-Donald Wald F statistic to confirm the relationship of instrumental and endogenous variables,and the structural break test(Bai-Perron test)to determine the existence of structural breaks in bond distortions.This study finds that the currency price distortions of the Swiss franc in January 2015 made long-run changes in the composition of the municipal bond spreads.This research contributes to the understanding of municipal bond pricing by showing that default risk accounts for a large portion of the municipal bond spread,while maturity risk plays a lesser role.According to our empirical findings,unexpected large currency price shocks may have long-term implications on the municipal bond spreads.

The Threshold Effect of Factor Price Distortion on Technological Content of Exports:Evidence from China

Using panel data from 31 provinces in China,covering the period from 2003 to 2017,this article analyzes the threshold effect of factor price distortion on the technological content of exports.The results show that factor price distortion does not necessarily impede improvement in the quality of the technological content of exports.Instead,the adverse ejfect can be weakened when the value of per capita GDP is higher than RMB13,154 or the value of FDI goes beyond RMB480.9 billion.This is because a high regional economic development level alleviates the adverse effect of factor price distortion on the technological content of exports.Our results are robust when the dependent variable and sample years are changed.This article also addresses the endogeneity issue.We also consider the underlying mechanism through which factor price distortion affects the technological content of exports.

Rise and Fall of the First Financial Futures Market in China: The Case of Chinese Government Bond Futures

This paper studies the rise and fall of the first financial futures market in China. We compare the characteristics in the Chinese Government bond futures market with those in the US T-bond futures market. They differ in market design and structure, market governance, margin requirements, position limits, delivery process, and the way in which the settlement price is calculated. Furthermore, with a unique dataset, we show that prior to maturities of government bond futures, traders began to accumulate significant amounts of long positions for several selected contracts without the intention to offset, forcing short position holders to either purchase deliverable bonds or offset futures at highly inflated prices, causing higher market volatility and price disequilibrium in both spot and futures markets. Arbitrage opportunity arises and the market eventually collapses. The lessons learned from the suspension of the Chinese Government bond futures market offer an invaluable learning experience.