Interest Rate, Inflation, and Housing Price: With an Emphasis on Chonsei Price in Korea

This paper discusses the relationship between interest rate and inflation rate on one part and the house price relative to chonsei price (up-front lump-sum deposit from the tenant to the owner for the use of the property with no additional requirement for periodic rent payments) on the other. The key point of the paper is that the relative price of sales to chonsei depends on the ratio of inflation to real interest rate, and thus even when the monetary authority maintains a pre-announced target level of inflation rate, the relative price of sales to chonsei rises if the real interest rate is lowered. This finding seems to help understand the recent hikes of the house prices despite the stabilizing chonsei prices. Recognizing this relationship, it may be sensible to lower the target inflation rate in an economy where real interest rates permanently decline, if the society wishes to reduce its adverse effect on the wealth distribution between house owners and chonsei tenants.

Liberalization of Capital Flows in Korea: Big-Bang or Gradualism?

Capital market liberalization has become an irreversible trend in Korea since 1992. With the current level of high interest rate in Korea, however, drastic full-scale liberalization would certainly attract a large amount of capital inflows and appreciate the Korean won. This would affect the price competitiveness of Korean products in international markets, which could bring about significant macro-instability in an economy like Korea which relies heavily upon external transactions. Through simulations using a macro-model based on the neoclassical long-run convergence and the Keynesian short-run dynamics, this paper attempts to provide some quantitative assessments of several alternative policy choices including the speed of liberalization.

The Predictive Ability of Several Models of Exchange Rate Volatility

We compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of univariate homoskedastic, GARCH, autoregressive and nonparametric models for conditional variances, using five bilateral weekly exchange rates for the dollar, 1973-1989. For a one week horizon, GARCH models tend to make slightly more accurate forecasts. For longer horizons, it is difficult to find grounds for choosing between the various models. None of the models perform well in a conventional test of forecast efficiency.