Yihui Lan

World Fibers Demand

This paper analyses the world demand for fibers using the system-wide approach with three dimension—product X space X time. We investigate to what extent differences in international consumption patterns of fibers can be explained by differences in incomes and prices faced by different consumers. A novel approach to cross-country consumption comparisons is employed to avoid the troublesome problem of what exchange rates to use when converting data into a common currency unit. We use data from the ten largest consuming countries to estimate demand systems and then examine how they perform in predicting consumption patterns in a large number of out-of-sample countries.

Exchange rates, productivity, poverty and inequality

This article analyses differences in the wealth of nations by comparing PPP-based cross-country incomes from the Penn World Table with those derived from prevailing exchange rates. Using the Balassa (1964)–Samuelson (1964) productivity-bias framework, we introduce the ‘international poverty line’ and illustrate the implications for cross-country income inequality. We demonstrate that our results are not inconsistent with the previous literature when appropriately interpreted.

A Stochastic Measure of International Competitiveness

Government agencies produce indexes that purport to measure international competitiveness. The most common version is the real effective exchange rate, which is some form of weighted average of the real exchange rates of the countrys trading partners. Such indexes convey a false sense of accuracy as they ignore the volatility among the component real exchange rates of the partners. As long as all real rates do not move in an equiproportionate fashion, in a fundamental sense real effective exchange rates are subject to estimation uncertainty. We demonstrate how this uncertainty can be measured and used to enhance current practice.

Uncertainty in currency mispricing

ABSTRACT Declaring a currency to be mispriced is fraught with uncertainties. In this article, these uncertainties are explicitly recognized in a model of pricing a homogeneous commodity around the world. This allows for a common driver of prices, due to a base-currency effect, and country-specific factors that lead to departures from absolute PPP on account of income differences, local taxes and charges, etc. This approach leads to estimates of currency mispricing whose significance can be tested in the usual way. Using Big Mac prices, we show that the approach has advantages over the popular Big Mac Index to currency valuation.

Volatility and Stock Price Indexes

The stochastic approach to index numbers has been successfully applied to the estimation of inflation, the world interest rate and international competitiveness. One distinct advantage of this approach is that it provides the whole distribution of the index, not simply one value. In this article, we extend the stochastic approach to the estimation of a stock market index. We demonstrate how this approach can be used to identify ‘redundant stocks’ that do not contribute significantly to the overall index. For index tracking purposes, these stocks can be safely excluded.

Are Co-Skewness and Co-Kurtosis Factors Priced?

This paper investigates whether co-skewness and co-kurtosis are priced in US stocks over the period from July 1963 to December 2010, using the Fama and Macbeth (1973) method. The results in this paper suggest that these moment based variables are subsumed by the Fama and French (1992, 1993) three-factor model. We also include a momentum factor in our analysis but find little support for this factor except in the earlier part of our study period (July 1963 to December 1990). Our findings reaffirm the importance of size and book-to-market factors in the US stock market.