...Microeconomics 200 Essay Semester 3, 2012 Student’s Name: Lam Chung Him Michael Student’s ID: 14634820 Unit Name: Microeconomics 200 Tutorial Day and Time: Thursday 5-6pm Tutor’s Name: Lee Thiam Soon Introduction The reason of writing this essay is that nowadays people purchase real estate mainly for making money. Therefore, this essay will apply standard consumer theory to the housing market and clarify the differences of the decision-making process in purchasing a residential dwelling between standard consumer choice theory and behavioral economics. Moreover, the specific characteristics of speculative bubbles in the real estate market in Spain before and during 2008-2012 will be examined. Part 1: Applications of Traditional vs. Behavioral Economics Explanations Consumer choice is about maximizing their satisfaction by using the limited incomes to fulfill their preference (Silberberg and Suen 2001, 252). There are few general assumptions about consumer’s preferences. Firstly, consumer can rank and compare their choices according to their preference. For example, they can decide to prefer residential dwelling to holiday activity, holiday activity to residential dwelling or indifferent between both choices. This is the assumption called completeness (Isaac 1998, 9). Secondly, preferences are transitive. It means that if a consumer prefers residential dwelling to holiday activity and holiday activity to car, then the consumer also prefers...
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...Dot-Com Bubble Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 4 Causes ..................................................................................................................................................... 4 Effects ..................................................................................................................................................... 5 Lessons learnt.......................................................................................................................................... 7 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 7 Appendix ................................................................................................................................................. 8 Reference List ......................................................................................................................................... 9 Abstract This report presents an analysis of a stock market bubble, well known as “dot-com bubble”, which developed roughly during a period from 1995 to 2000, and ended up in 2001. The report discusses...
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...not to be equal to the true value at every point in time * Equal chance that stocks are under or over valued * No group of investors should be able to consistently find under or over valued stocks * Self-correcting mechanism * Information and competition are the essential principles guiding market efficiency * Market participants behave rational - irrational optimists buy a stock, smart money sells, and when irrational pessimists sell a stock, smart money buys, thereby eliminating the effect of the irrational traders on market price. * Prices are not predictable Issues with EMT * For example, efficient markets theory may lead to drastically incorrect interpretations of events such as major stock market bubbles. * The first was that the anomalies that were discovered tended to appear to be as often under-reaction by investors as overreaction. * The second was that the anomalies tended to disappear, either as time passed or as methodology of the studies improved. - the mere fact that anomalies sometimes disappear or switch...
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...The Dot.com Bubble The mid-1990s marked the beginning of a new form of market environment that one could do business through the Internet. This was also the beginning of the so-called dot.com boom in the Spring of 1995 and it would later go bust in the fall of 2000. A year after the bubble burst, 327 companies remained but every one of them experienced the stock price slide beginning in September of 2000 (Becker, 2006, p.34). Amazon.com is the first major company that attempted to use the Internet to offer and sell products. In addition to the companies that sell online, companies that provided telecommunications and Internet support were also born such as Cisco Systems and Lucent Technologies (p.34). Other companies entered the market to provide web browsers such as Netscape. Another segment in this market is the service providers that provided users access to the Internet such as America Online and CompuServe (p.34). Finally, there are websites that offer web content and information for sale (p.35). These online companies, in order to raise capitalization either approached venture capitalists for financing or offer their stocks to the public. Becker (2006) cited that nature of these IPOs from online companies as “examples of speculative bubble” (p.41). A bubble or boom results from assets being over valued and they continue to rise for an extended period (p.41). In bubbles or booms, there is also the element that involves behavior – crowd or herd. Although many were initially...
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...Trigger, Aggravator, or Rescuer? Criticisms on the controversial roles of IMF in East Asia Financial Crisis Introduction Now and then, nation to nation, financial crises are inevitable: Mexico in 1994, the whole East Asia region in 1997, Brazil in 1999, and the most recently Argentina in 2001. Looking back to the victims of such financial crises, we found that most of them are labeled as the developing countries, whose financial sectors were still weak at that time yet were impetuously exposed to the advocated ‘Liberal financial market’ which was supported by the Neoclassical Liberalism social economists. Among all these financial crises, the financial storm in East Asia, starting from the year of 1997, wreaked beyond doubt the greatest havoc on the Asia and the world economy as a whole, dragging down the ‘Asian tigers’ (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippine, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) from the peak of the glorious ‘Economic Miracle’ in the past few years. Because of the severity and contagion of the East Asia Crisis, important questions have been raised such as the causes of the crisis, the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the financial architecture of international capital markets. As one of the most important international organizations, IMF has its great impact on the world economy. In this paper, the influence of IMF before the eruption of the crisis and its role in the...
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...reviewed and investigated: 1. The pricing of financial assets; 2. The portfolio choice and trading decisions of investors; 3. The behavior of firm managers; 4.2 A “Bubble” is an episode in which irrational thinking or a friction causes the price of an asset to rise to a level that is higher than it would be in the absence of the friction or the irrationality; and, moreover, the price level is such that a rational observer, armed with all available information, would forecast a low long-term return on the asset (Barberis, 2010). 4.3 Two categories of theories explaining “Bubble Formation” (Why an asset class might become overvalued): 1. “Investor Beliefs Based” theories; 2. “Investor Preferences Based” theories; 4.4 Three “Belief-Based” theories of “Bubble Formation” (Barberis, 2010): First theory argues that a bubble forms when investors disagree sharply about an asset’s future prospects and there are short-sale constraints. Second theory argues that bubbles arise because investors extrapolate past outcomes – returns, earnings growth, or default rates – too far into the future. Third theory is based on overconfidence – specifically, on the idea that people overestimate the precision of their forecasts (overconfidence on reliability of favorable information). 1 4.5 Two “Preference-Based” theories in “Bubble Formation”: First theory argues that investors become less risk averse because of “House Money Effect”, which in short, means having experienced gains, they are less...
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...reinforces policy inaction. Here, for the first time, we construct a dynamic model that quantitatively agrees with food prices. The results show that the dominant causes of price increases are investor speculation and ethanol conversion. Models that just treat supply and demand are not consistent with the actual price dynamics. The two sharp peaks in 2007/2008 and 2010/2011 are specifically due to investor speculation, while an underlying upward trend is due to increasing demand from ethanol conversion. The model includes investor trend following as well as shifting between commodities, equities and bonds to take advantage of increased expected returns. Claims that speculators cannot influence grain prices are shown to be invalid by direct analysis of price setting practices of granaries. Both...
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...Dot com boom/bust An economic bubble exists whenever the price of an asset that may be freely exchanged in a well-established market first soars to levels that cannot be justified (Ironman, 2010). ‘Investors’ push the price of the asset up by irrationally purchasing it. Eventually, the market realizes that the asset price is unjustified and the bubble bursts. More often than not, the bust happens in an all-of-a-sudden manner resulting in people losing huge sums of money. At the same time, these boom/ bust cycle has its beneficiaries, institutions and individuals who make huge amounts of money by ‘surfing’ the bubble or by fuelling it. In the case of the dot com boom, the culprits were the investment banks and some venture capital firms. Events leading up to failure One of the issues that I believe to be partly responsible for the dot com boom happened when the Taxpayer Relief act of 1997 lowered the maximum tax rate on capital gains for individual investors from 28 percent to 20 percent for assets held for more than 18 months. This perspective, proposed by Zhonglan Dai, Douglas A. Shackelford and Harold H. Zhang. In “Capital Gains Taxes and Stock Return Volatility: Evidence from the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997“highlighted the fact that non- and lower dividend paying stocks experienced a larger volatility than high dividend-paying stocks. Stock volatility was substantially higher after 1997 and this may have contributed to the inflation of the bubble. It was not the main cause but...
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...Introduction …………………………………………………………………….....1 Analysis of the Financial Crisis and Emerging Markets………………………….1 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………..8 List of Tables and Figures…………………………………………………….......9 References……………………………………………………………………......10 Introduction In the last years we all heard about financial crisis, economic crisis or even strong words like recession or depression. The goal of this paper is to define these terms and to analyze the effects that they produce in the economy. Another objective is to understand the emerging markets and compare then with developed economies. The effects of the crisis are different from country to country but also have some similarities at a global level. I. Analysis of the Financial Crisis and Emerging Markets The term financial crisis is used when financial institutions or assets suddenly lose a large part of their value. This can result in a loss of paper wealth and not as a change in the real economy, unless a recession or depression follows which is the case here. So we can say that the recession is the result of the financial crisis that started in U.S in 2008 from the burst of housing bubble and the subprime lending. There are more types of financial crises: banking crises (bank runs – when depositors withdraw their money suddenly. This type of behavior can result in bankruptcy), speculative bubbles and crashes (when a financial asset price exceeds the present...
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...There has been widespread praise and critique of neo-liberal policies and their effect on the international economy, particularly with respect to widening inequality, suppression of developing economies and contribution to financial crisis due to destabilizing capital flows. This paper will contrast the implied positive effects of neo-liberalism from a Keynesian perspective against a Marxist analysis which suggests such economic liberalism merely changes the time intervals and severity of inevitable boom and bust cycles of capitalism and as such makes no permanent progression in the global economy. Displacement of the Keynesian welfare state policy approach was embedded in end of the long boom. Rising worker militancy and diminishing productivity gave way to severe cost-push inflation, compounded by oil price spikes leading to criticism of aggregate demand management as policy makers sought a structural solution. Neo-liberal policies, with theoretical origins in individual utility maximization (Mill and Bentham) and Adam Smith’s Laissez-Faire optimality imply a reduced role of government in reliance on the free market to provide the most efficient outcome. Development of a neo-liberal state would then encompass privatization of Government owned enterprises, deregulation of financial markets and redistribution of income from the poor to the rich in attempt to boost private investment and job creation through the trickle-down effect. A Marxist view of neo-liberalism would hold...
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...‘Cheap House Is Not Allowed’ Will China’s real estate bubble burst? Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007, China has faced some critical problems linked with the excess of liquidity in its internal market, due to the stimulus plan launched by the Government to soften the effects of the crisis. As a result China is now fighting against a high rate of inflation (especially food prices) and a high cost of property. While the inflation issue has been partially solved in the first term of this year, the fear for the real-estate market trend is still alive. This essay aims to critically analyse the real estate market in China, which is also strictly linked with the health of this country’s economy, by examining this issue from two different perspectives: from the point of view of those scholars who believe that the Chinese bubble will burst and from the point of view of those who believe that the Chinese market is still safe. First of all the essay will give the historical and economic background of the price rises in the Chinese real estate market, from the birth of this important economic sector to the global financial crisis. Secondly, in the core part, this paper will explain the main theory regarding the possibility of the real estate bubble burst and the counter argument. To better understand the actual situation in China there will be also a short comparison with the burst of the American bubble in 2007. In the conclusive paragraph some predictions...
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...house prices if this represents a change in their fundamental value. When the birth rate is positive, higher fundamental house prices driven by the housing demand of future generations will boost current consumption. There is a pure wealth effect on consumption from a change in house prices even in the representative agent model, if this reflects a change in the speculative bubble component of house prices. Two other channels through which a fall in house prices can affect aggregate consumption are (1) redistribution effects if the marginal propensity to spend out of wealth differs between those long housing (the old, say) and those short housing (the young, say) and (2) collateral or credit effects due to the collateralisability of housing wealth and the non-collateralisability of human wealth. A decline in house prices reduces the scope for mortgage equity withdrawal. For given sequences of future after-tax labour income and interest rates, a fall in house prices will then depress consumption in the short run while boosting it in the long run. JEL E2, E3, E5, E6, G1 Keywords Wealth effect; house prices; speculative bubbles Correspondence Willem H. Buiter, CBE, FBA, Chief Economist, Citigroup, Citigroup Centre, Canada...
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...Financial Crisis Introduction In recent decades, financial crises have stopped the momentum of economic development of many countries around the world. In some cases, they have destroyed almost completely different financial systems. The term financial crisis is applied broadly to a variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults. Financial crises directly result in a loss of paper wealth but do not necessarily result in changes in the real economy. Many economists have offered theories about how financial crises develop and how they could be prevented. There is no consensus, however, and financial crises continue to occur from time to time. The purpose of this study is to analyze the causes of financial crisis, the types of financial crisis and the impact caused in the countries that have experienced them. Explanation of financial crisis Financial crises have come in many forms although they have many common elements. A financial crisis is often associated with one or more of the following phenomena: substantial changes in credit volume and asset prices, severe disruptions in financial intermediation and...
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...represents how credit worthy you are which is based on factors such as the amount of money you earn, how much debt you hold, your record of paying back past debts…the higher the score the better your credit. It provides the analytics and completed history credit, helps financial institution to make decision; it’s a measure of credit risk. These are the measurements whether offer the loan or not, if analysis shows not good, then banks would refuse the request. This is the prime loan, but the subprime mortgage loan offers loan to someone who don’t have good credit, or lower reimbursement ability. This is a potential risk of this industry. Compare to the normal loan, it has high interest rate, so the repayment pressure is really high to someone has not such good credit, but to the bank, if lenders repay the loan, they would earn high interest return. The origin cause was the booming in real estate. The house price increase rapidly in last few years. The price in 2006 increases about 124% compare to the price in 1997. The US home ownership rate increases from 64% in1994 to 69.2% in 2004. Speculative borrowing in residential real estate is large part of the subprime mortgage loan; during 2006, 22% of homes purchased were only for investment, not for personal living, also there were 14% purchased for vacation. So totally 40% were not for...
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...Media, Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm ISSN 1104-4101 ISRN KTH/BFE/M-09/88-SE ISBN 978-91-977302-5-9 Abstract This thesis focuses on problems of prices and risks in the housing markets of urban China. What drives the dynamics of housing prices across regions is not only of great interest for academic researchers but also of first importance for policy makers. It is also interesting to pay attention to the issue of housing bubbles at a city level and risk allocations from an institutional view. To address the issues, the thesis applies both qualitative and econometric approaches in analyzing the urban housing markets of China. The first paper reviews articles mainly published in Chinese core journals. The existing studies are mainly concerned with such six topics as institutions, policy, land, finance, price and market. The first three topics involve the public housing allocation system reform, such fiscal and monetary tools as tax and interest rate, and the land reserve system. The housing finance treats such subjects of mortgages, bubbles and financial systems, while housing prices explore factors such as land prices, construction cost and exogenous forces like income. Finally, the housing market addresses housing circles and the relationship between housing demand and supply. In paper 2, the housing price dynamics is investigated at a national level and across regions by using the panel data with 30 provinces over 7 years (2001-2007). The empirical...
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