No abstract

In the procedure of China's market-oriented reforms of interest rates, the interest-rate risk becomes increasingly apparent. Analyzing the existing studies and the interbank offered rate trend, this paper finds that LS-SVM, which is short for Least Squares Support Vector Machines, is excel in nonlinear data approximation, which is suitable for interest rate forecasting. Firstly, the paper established a standard LS-SVM model. Secondly, Particle Swarm Optimization is introduced to optimize the parameters of LS-SVM. Thirdly, a standard SVM model optimized by PSO and a BP neural network are established for comparison. Then the experiment is conduct to forecast the offered rate in China's interbank market.The results show that the PSO-LS-SVM model outperforms any other approaches since its RMSE of testing is 0.04 and the relative errors between forecasting values and the actual ones are all below 0.18, which demonstrates the performance of the PSO-LS-SVM model in interest rate forecasting is promising.

Stock market trading restrictions directly affect stock prices and liquidity via constraints on investors' transactions. They also have indirect effects by altering the information environment. We isolate these indirect effects by analyzing the effect of stock market restrictions on the corporate bond market. Using the staggered relaxation of the restrictions on margin trading and short selling in the Chinese stock market as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that the relaxation of these restrictions on a firm's stock reduces the credit spread of its corporate bond. This effect is more pronounced for firms with more opaque information or lower credit ratings.

Abstract. Analyzing the impact of the interest rate policies performed by the China's central bank on the rate of return of China's stock market, this paper intends to test the effectiveness of the monetary policies. Based on the method of event study and nonparametric test, 24 events of interest rate adjustment from 1993 to 2014 are studied. The results demonstrate that the interest rate policies have no systematic and significant effect on the return rate of China's stock market, which also indicate that the mechanism of how monetary policy and the stock market affect each other is not perfect.

This paper discusses a factor influencing consumption in China that has not been widely addressed: the retirement age. Many previous studies on the relationship between retirement age and consumption are based on data from developed countries. Because of the many differences between China and the developed economies, this analysis relies on the Lau (2009) overlapping‐generations model. This model is more suitable for determining the relationship between consumption and retirement age in China, and for highlighting the positive relationship between consumption and retirement age. The empirical results reveal a causal relationship between retirement age and consumption and indicate that increasing the retirement age can stimulate economic growth. These results are specific to China and include gender differences and the varied impacts on low‐income and high‐income families.