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This article studies the dynamic relationship between international (WTI, Brent and Dubai) and domestic (Da Qing) crude oil prices in China using threshold cointegration method. We find evidence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between each pair of international and Da Qing oil prices, favouring the market integration hypothesis. We also estimate asymmetric adjustments under the momentum threshold autoregressive (M-TAR) specification in a TVECM, and the results show that adjustments to eliminate disequilibrium happen faster when oil price spread increases than when it decreases. The long-run and short-run Granger causality tests support the notion that China has influence on the international oil markets. The results imply that China should open up its domestic and imported oil markets, and also establish a well-functioning crude oil futures market, as they are essential for arbitrage and hedging strategies.

This paper studies the dynamic relationships between GDP, residential property prices, and stock prices in Hong Kong. The study is interesting because most people put their wealth into these two markets. We find that there are long-run feedback effects between the two asset markets, providing evidence of wealth and credit-price effects in Hong Kong. There are also long-run, bi-directional causal links between real GDP and real asset prices. Hence, real asset prices can drive long-run economic growth and vice versa. Finally, the paper discusses what policy lessons can be drawn from the empirical analyses that have been undertaken.

An econometric analysis of Hong Kong's monthly per capita water usage for the 25-year period of April 1985 through March 2010 reveals that per capita usage is insensitive to price but dependent upon past usage, per capita income, weather, and seasonal factors, with rising income countering what would otherwise be a downward trend. Given Hong Kong's current inflationary environment and large government budget surplus, these findings affirm the Hong Kong Water Supplies Department's adopted strategy of total water management towards sustainable use of water resources, in lieu of either periodic service interruption or price increases as policy instruments.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the day-of-the-week effect on both the return and conditional variance (volatility) of the H-shares index in Hong Kong from 3 January 2000 to 1 August 2008. Using an Exponential General Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) specification to model the conditional variance, we find that the day-of-the-week effect is present in both return and variance equations. In particular, higher risk-adjusted returns are found on Monday and Friday. However, after adjusting for market risks that vary across the days of the week, only the Monday effect remains. The conditional variance model also finds that the highest volatility of return also occurs on Monday. Thus, the Monday effects on risk-adjusted returns may be a reward for higher volatility on that day. However, after adjusting for transaction costs, the abnormal returns for Monday become negligible.

This study employs a new test to detect the existence of stochastic explosive root bubbles. We find evidence of bubbles in stock markets of Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, but no evidence of bubbles in South Korea over our sample period.

This paper undertakes an empirical investigation into the existence of inflationary bubbles during the inter-war European hyperinflation for Germany, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that the residual-based threshold cointegration methodology of Caner and Hansen (2001) is better able to detect periodically collapsing bubbles. Moreover, this methodology possesses greater power against nonlinear stationary alternatives in a finite sample than several commonly used cointegration tests that do not allow for multiple regime shifts. The empirical results of the threshold cointegration tests provide evidence of stationary, regimeswitching processes in money demand dynamics, but suggest that there are no inflationary bubbles in any of the countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of rationing on firm behavior. A virtual price approach is adopted to derive the rationed elasticities of variable input demands and output s...

This study aims to empirically examine the changes in production efficiencies of China's township and village enterprises (TVEs) between 1988 and 1993 with particular reference to the spatial disparity of these changes. The stochastic frontier production model, which incorporates inefficiency effects, is adopted in the study. Findings of this study indicate that the technical production efficiency of China's TVEs had, on average, declined between the six years under study. Furthermore, the findings also suggest that the industrial performance of China's TVEs (in terms of production efficiency), like the development.

This paper attempts to conduct an empirical study for detecting misspecification errors and rational bubbles in the residential housing markets of Hong Kong. We focus on a fundamental model that defines market fundamental price as a sum of the expected present value of rental income, discounted at a constant rate of return. Testable implications for detecting misspecification errors and/or price bubbles are explored through the flow and stock approaches. In addition, the paper attempts to identify the amount of misspecification and bubble components in the property price data of Hong Kong.

Rural regional disparity has now become one of the most concerning problems in China. This paper attempts to show that the inequality is mainly caused by the uneven development of rural collectively owned enterprises (COEs). In the early 1990s, COEs accounted for more than 70% of rural regional inequality. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of current government policies for lessening regional disparity, we use a data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of COEs in the rural areas. The analysis shows that COEs in the eastern region are relatively more efficient than those in the central and western regions. To explain this, the potential sources of the COEs’ production efficiency in different provinces are examined in detail. The production efficiency of Chinese COEs is found to be closely related to the employment of a shareholding cooperative system, foreign investment, skilled workers, and a bonus incentive scheme.

In contrast with developed countries, coal is the major energy source of China. In view of its importance, this paper attempts to analyse and forecast the country's demand for coal as it moves towards the next century. To do this, we have applied three different methods to contrast their performances in fitting the Chinese data: Engle-Granger's error correction model, Hendry's error correction model and Hendry's general-to-specific approach. It is found that the Engle-Granger approach outperforms the other two in terms of having the smallest ex post forecast errors. Using the Engle-Granger approach, the model predicts that the Chinese economy will experience a 5% shortage in the year 2000.

Details how, in a bid to invigorate its state‐owned enterprises, the Chinese government allows some of its large state‐owned enterprises to list on the stock exchanges of Hong Kong and New York. Reports that, although at the beginning the stocks were very well received, the H‐share prices started to experience a free fall when the companies reported poor earning results in the summer of 1995. Looks at several arguments which have been put forward to explain this drastic change, but observes that most of these theories miss one important dimension, namely, the institutional factor. By using this particular point of view, argues that the H‐shares are poorly designed, noting, in particular, that the concerns for agency cost and asymmetric information problems have not been dealt with properly. Analyses the institutional problems of the H‐share companies and, based on this analysis, outlines some preliminary recommendations on how the H‐share companies can be reformed.

In this paper we use a cointegration and vector error-correction model to analyze the energy consumption behavior of China. Informulating a model Z suitable to China, it is found that not only conventional variables such as energy price and income are important, but the share of heavy industry output in the national income is also a significant factor. With the help of a vector error-correction model, we predict that China will need approximately 1.42 billion tons of standard coal equivalent by the end of this century, representing a 44 percent increase compared with 1990.