Journal of Economic Surveys最新文献

This paper presents a systematic review of research papers on nowcasting economic activity. The study summarizes the state-of-the-art nowcasting approaches and methods, describes the indicators used in this analysis, highlights the existing gaps, and proposes future research directions. Based on an analysis of 193 articles on nowcasting in economics that were published in the journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database, future research directions in nowcasting are described in this paper. This research indicates that the focus of economic activity nowcasting should rely on the use of real-time data and alternative indicators in order to enhance the predictive ability.

The Chinese stock market has a threefold segmented structure. Firstly, there is a division between floatable and nonfloatable shares, known as the split-share structure. Before 2005, more than two-thirds of the shares outstanding were nonfloatable. This structure limited shareholders’ ability to exercise governance rights through stock trading. While largely dismantled by the 2005 reform, the split-share structure has not been fully eliminated. Secondly, floatable shares can be issued in multiple currencies. However, shares denominated in the domestic currency often trade at a premium over those denominated in foreign currencies. This premium can be explained by the differences in target investors and the trading restrictions. Thirdly, stocks denominated in the domestic currency are sorted into different market tiers depending on the firms’ profitability and market capitalization. The limited mobility of stocks across different tiers engenders tier-specific characteristics, such as high family ownership and venture-capital backing, which have not been sufficiently studied. In this paper, we delineate the three aspects of market segmentation, offer critical comments on the caveats of the extant studies, and propose topics for future research.

We review the literature that investigates the causal effect of ethnic diversity on support for redistribution. The results indicate that ethnic diversity or an increase in the salience of ethnic minorities tends to reduce support for redistribution. Evidence is presented that this finding can be interpreted as an outcome of ethnic discrimination. Nonetheless, there is substantial heterogeneity, such that the effect of ethnic diversity on support for redistribution depends on the specific context. An important moderator of the effect is whether ethnic diversity is accompanied by interethnic contact.

There is growing awareness within the economics profession of the important role narratives play in the economy. Even though empirical approaches that try to quantify economic narratives are getting increasingly popular, there is no theory or even a universally accepted definition of economic narratives underlying this research. First, we review and categorize the economic literature concerned with narratives and work out the different paradigms at play. Only a subset of the literature considers narratives to be active drivers of economic activity. To solidify the foundation of narrative economics, we propose a definition of collective economic narratives, isolating five important characteristics. We argue that, for a narrative to be economically relevant, it must be a sense-making story that emerges in a social context and suggests action to a social group. We also systematize how a collective economic narrative differs from a topic and from other kinds of narratives that are likely to have less impact on the economy. With regard to the popular use of topic modeling, we suggest that the complementary use of other methods from the natural language processing (NLP) toolkit and the development of new methods is inevitable to go beyond identifying topics and move towards true empirical narrative economics.

The properties of money commonly referenced in the economics literature were originally identified by Jevons and Menger in the late 1800s and were intended to describe physical currencies, such as commodity money, metallic coins, and paper bills. In the digital era, many non-physical currencies have either entered circulation or are under development, including demand deposits, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, in-game currencies, and quantum money. These forms of money have novel properties that have not been studied extensively within the economics literature, but may ultimately determine which currencies prevail in the forthcoming era of currency competition. This review makes the first exhaustive attempt to identify and organize all properties of physical and digital forms of money. It examines both the economics and computer science literatures and categorizes properties within an expanded version of the canonical Jevons–Menger framework.

We examine whether estimates of hedge fund performance reported in prior empirical research are affected by publication bias. Using a sample of 1019 intercept terms from regressions of hedge fund returns on risk factors (the “alphas”) collected from 74 studies published between 2001 and 2021, we show that the selective publication of empirical results does not significantly contaminate inferences about hedge fund returns. Most of our monthly alpha estimates adjusted for the (small) bias fall within a relatively narrow range of 30–40 basis points, indicating positive abnormal returns of hedge funds: Hedge funds generate money for investors. Studies that explicitly control for potential biases in the underlying data (e.g., backfilling and survivorship biases) report lower but still positive alphas. Our results demonstrate that despite the prevalence of publication selection bias in many other research settings, publication may not be selective when there is no strong a priori theoretical prediction about the sign of the estimated coefficients.

Since their inception more than 15 years ago, social media have become a vibrant research topic in business and economics research. This article presents an integrative literature review taking stock of and showing the many faces of social media in extant research. Based on N = 1419 articles published in the leading peer-reviewed business and economics journals in the years 2008–2022, we identify and describe seven overarching research themes, namely, social media as a: (1) market-oriented interaction hub, (2) resource-oriented interaction hub, (3) information market, (4) innovation and business venturing hub, (5) societal challenge, (6) political hub, and (7) data source. Finally, we derive a research agenda to stimulate future research on this increasingly important topic.

Research on consumer financial vulnerability (CFV) was especially encouraged in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, becoming a phenomenon of global interest to academics and policy makers. This paper reviews the existing academic literature on CFV with the aim of mapping out four research fields (i.e., the concept, the measures, the methods, and the drivers of this phenomenon) and providing a roadmap for a future research agenda for this field. To this end, we review the last two decades of academic research on households’ financial vulnerability, thereby presenting a hybrid literature review. Evidence from a comprehensive analysis of 98 academic papers suggests that this is still an emerging and highly fragmented field and, therefore, a comprehensive future research agenda is offered, including concrete suggestions for research designs and measurements. The proposal of a homogeneous definition of financial vulnerability, the consideration of measures that include subjective aspects of the phenomenon, the use of qualitative methods, and the development of more detailed theoretical and empirical research on the drivers of CFV, are among the authors’ recommendations for future research.

We study how the financial literature has evolved in scale, research team composition, and article topicality across finance-focused academic journals from 1992 to 2021. We document that the field has vastly expanded regarding outlets and published articles. Teams have become larger, and the proportion of women participating in research has increased significantly. Using the Structural Topic Model, we identify 45 topics discussed in the literature. We investigate the topic coverage of individual journals and can identify highly specialized and generalist outlets, but our analyses reveal that most journals have covered more topics over time, thus becoming more generalist. Finally, we find that articles with at least one woman author focus more on topics related to social and governance aspects of corporate finance. We also find that teams with at least one top-tier institution scholar tend to focus more on theoretical aspects of finance.

Due to the strong nonlinearity and high complexity of foreign exchange rate data, how best to accurately analyze their trends and forecast them is regarded as a challenging research topic. While such research has developed rapidly and a large number of publications have appeared, few programmatic quantitative and qualitative overviews have been compiled in the field of exchange rate. By integrating bibliometric methods with network visualization based on CiteSpace software, this study analyzed 4999 publications of exchange rate research from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database during 1992 to 2021. The study summarizes the major development in exchange rate determination since Meese-Rogoff puzzle, from New Open-Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) and the Foreign Exchange Market Micro-Structure Hypotheses, to determination model based on relationship between exchange rate and commodity price. Through the study's statistical analysis, co-occurrence, co-citation, and co-keywords analysis, the influential authors, research institutions, countries and regions, journals, research hotspots, and future trends in the field of exchange rate are intellectually identified over the past 30 years. As a complement to existing literature, this paper provides theoretical and practical reference for researchers and practitioners in the field of exchange rate.