The US-China Trade Imbalance: Will Revaluing the RMB Help (Much)?

The large US-China trade imbalance is a common cause for concern and regularly blamed on the undervaluation of the RMB. We estimate a simple model of the trade balance and simulate the long-run effects on the trade balance of RMB revaluations in the range of 10-50%. We find that improvements in the trade balance following plausible revaluations are likely to be modest.

Collaboration based Multi-Label Learning

It is well-known that exploiting label correlations is crucially important to multi-label learning. Most of the existing approaches take label correlations as prior knowledge, which may not correctly characterize the real relationships among labels. Besides, label correlations are normally used to regularize the hypothesis space, while the final predictions are not explicitly correlated. In this paper, we suggest that for each individual label, the final prediction involves the collaboration between its own prediction and the predictions of other labels. Based on this assumption, we first propose a novel method to learn the label correlations via sparse reconstruction in the label space. Then, by seamlessly integrating the learned label correlations into model training, we propose a novel multi-label learning approach that aims to explicitly account for the correlated predictions of labels while training the desired model simultaneously. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts.Comment: Accepted by AAAI-1

Differences in Opinion and Risk Premium

When people agree to disagree, this paper examines the impact of the disagreement among agents on market equilibrium and equity premium. Within the standard mean variance framework, we consider a market of two risky assets, a riskless asset and two (and then a continuum of) agents who have different preferences and heterogeneous beliefs in the means and variance/covariances of the asset returns. By constructing a consensus belief, we introduce a boundedly rational equilibrium (BRE) to characterize the market equilibrium and derive a CAPM under heterogeneous beliefs. When the differences in opinion are formed as mean-preserving spreads of a benchmark homogeneous belief, we analyz eexplicitly the impact on the market equilibrium and risk premium, showing that the risk tolerance, optimism/pessimism and con?dence/doubt can jointly generate high risk premium and low risk-free rate. JELClassi?cation:.Assetprices;heterogeneousbeliefs;boundedlyrationalequilibriuasset prices; heterogeneous beliefs; boundedly rational equilibrium; zero-beta CAPM; risk premium

Portfolio Analysis and Zero-Beta CAPM with Heterogeneous Beliefs

With the standard mean variance framework, by assuming heterogeneity and bounded rationality of investors, this paper examines their impact on the market equilibrium and implications to the portfolio analysis. By constructing a market consensus belief, we establish market equilibrium prices of risky assets and show that the standard Black’s zero-beta CAPM under homogeneous beliefs holds under the heterogeneous belief. We demonstrate that the biased belief (from the market consensus belief) of investors makes their optimal portfolio not necessarily locate on the market mean-variance frontier. We show that the traditional geometric relation of the mean variance frontiers with and without the riskless asset under the homogeneous beliefs does not hold under the heterogeneous beliefs. The results shed light on the risk premium puzzle, Miller’s hypothesis, the lower market performance when the access to the riskfree asset is impossible, and the empirical finding that managed funds under-perform comparing to the market indices on average.asset prices; heterogeneous beliefs; portfolio analysis; zero-beta CAPM

Banking reforms, performance and risk in China

We investigate the impact of the banking reform started from 2005 on ownership structures in China on commercial banks’ profitability, efficiency and risk over the period 2000–2012, providing comprehensive evidence on the impact of banking reform in China. We find that banks on average tend to have higher profitability, lower risk and lower efficiency after the reforms, and the results are robust with our difference-in-difference approach. Our results also show that the Big 5 state-owned banks (SOCB) underperform banks with other types of ownership when risk is measured by non-performing loans (NPLs) over the entire study period but tend to have fewer NPLs than other banks during the post-reform period. Our results provide some supporting evidence on the ongoing banking reforms in China, suggesting that attracting strategic foreign investors and listing SOCBs on stock exchanges appear to be effective ways to help SOCBs deal with the problem of NPLs and manage their risk