The following hybrid research seminar is organised by The Institute of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability (PEGFA) at the University of Greenwich.

Wednesday, 2 Nov, 1-2:30 PM (GMT) – Speakers: Kefei You and Ben Tippet

Location: Room SL011, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, London SE10 9LS (and via Microsoft Teams with this link)

For more information see: https://www.gre.ac.uk/research/pegfa#events

1-1:45 PM: Kefei You – Financial Development and Technological Progress: Does the Financing Channel Matter? Evidence from Spatial Analysis for Chinese Provinces

We examine the relationship between financial development and productivity growth by investigating the impact of total social financing and, more importantly, the four financial channels underneath it (i.e., formal bank loans, corporate bond market, equity market and shadow banking) on technological progress in Chinese provinces during 2013-2020. We first separate structural change from total factor productivity (TFP) to obtain the net factor productivity (NFP) series. We then employ spatial models to account for spatial dependence in technological progress; the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) is shown to best describe our data. We find that, first, both structural change and NFP have contributed positively to TFP in China. Thus, the latter captures the pure technological progress more accurately than TFP does. Second, while TSF overall does not seem to affect technological advancement in China, three of its four components do. Specifically, corporate bonds and formal bank loans promote technological progress across Chinese provinces, with the former producing stronger effects than the latter. Shadow banking also shows a positive impact but at a weaker magnitude than the above two. Conversely, equity financing does not foster technological progress in China. Finally, we observe positive spatial technological dependence, implying a cooperative relationship between Chinese provinces.

1:45-2:30 PM: Ben Tippet – House price cycles and speculative demand: understanding how the returns to capital gains and rent extraction drive the intensity of house price booms and busts

Why do some countries have stable house prices, while others have intense booms and busts? The existing literature in Comparative Political Economy (CPE) has argued that house price booms are caused primarily by domestic mortgage-credit encouraging institutions (and their interactions with a strong welfare state). Building on heterodox economic theories of house price cycles, this paper instead argues that intense house price booms and busts are driven by speculative demand, which in turn is shaped by institutions increasing the returns to housing via capital gains and rent extraction. Using turning point analysis, we demonstrate significant cross-country differences in the intensity of booms and busts across 26 OECD countries. We build a dataset of what we call “speculation encouraging institutions” and estimate their relationship to the intensity of house price cycles. We find that countries with speculation encouraging institutions are significantly more likely to have intense house price booms and busts. Once we control for speculative demand, mortgage-credit encouraging institutions no longer has a significant effect on house price cycles. This paper is a part of the Leverhulme grant “The Political Economy of growth models in an age of stagnation” Leverhulme, RPG-2021-045.