Wednesday 17 October 2018 – Dr Panagiotis Tziogkidis (Plymouth Business School) – Evaluating countries’ innovation potential: an international perspective – 16:00–17:30, Cookworthy Building 404.
The paper proposes a novel two-step approach that evaluates countries’ innovation efficiency and their responsiveness to expansions in their innovation inputs, while addressing shortcomings associated with composite indicators. Based on our evaluations, we propose innovation policies tailored to take into account the diverse economic environments of the many countries in our study. Applying multidirectional efficiency analysis (MEA) on data from the Global Innovation Index, we obtain separate efficiency scores for each innovation input and output. We then estimate different sensitivities for each country, by applying partial least squares on explanatory and response matrices which are determined by the nearest neighbours of the country under consideration. The findings reveal substantial asymmetries with respect to innovation efficiencies and sensitivities, which is indicative of the diversity of national innovation systems. Considering these two dimensions in combination, we outline three policy directions that can be followed, offering a platform for better-informed decision-making.
MIC Seminars – Spring 2018
Details of the first MIC seminar in spring 2018 are below. The full Spring programme is currently in development but we will be posting further details shortly. For further details on the programme please contact Dr Fangya Xu.
Wednesday 23 May 2018 – Gianluca Marcato (Full Professor in Finance and Real Estate, Henley Business School, University of Reading) – Time to Homeownership and Mortgage Design (with Rafal Wojakowski) – 16:00–18:00, Cookworthy Building 505.
Accessibility to homeownership in western countries, especially for middle to low income earners has decreased over time due to several factors such as stringent covenants, pressure of rental growth on household income expenditure and a negative gap between wage and house price growth. Moreover, young households face higher accumulated student loans and, in a steadily rising and strong rental market, they are not able to generate enough savings to cover the initial deposit necessary to become homeowners. We design an income sharing mortgage product where borrowers accept to pledge a portion of their future income to anticipate the time necessary to become homeowners by obtaining a higher LTV (up to 100 per cent). Our analysis finds that this mortgage may be useful for lower income households in periods of higher uncertainty and that it may become less expensive in a high interest rate environment. Finally, this product also embeds an incentive to save, with potential benefits for the overall systemic risk of the banking sector. As a consequence we find that the default risk is not higher than a plain vanilla mortgage with lower LTV.
Wednesday 2 May 2018 – Dr Chunping Liu (Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University) – What determines China’s housing price dynamics? New evidence from a DSGE-VAR – 16:00–17:30, Cookworthy Building 401.
We investigate what determines China’s housing price dynamics using a DSGE-VAR estimated with priors allowing for the featured operating of normal and shadow banks in China, with data observed between 2001 and 2014. We find that the housing demand shock, which is the essential factor for housing price bubbles to happen, accounts for over 80 per cent of the housing price fluctuation. We also find that a prosperous housing market could have led to future economic growth, though quantitatively its marginal impact is small. But this also means that, for policy-makers who wish to stabilise the housing market, the cost on output reduction would be rather limited.
Wednesday 14 March – Professor Max Munday (Cardiff Business School) – How serious is a devolved data deficit? – 16:00–17:30.
Professor Max Munday discusses whether there is appropriate economic intelligence available at the sub-national level to inform decisions on economic policy making. More information can be found on our spring programme page.
