Since September 1, 2014, the renminbi (RMB) offshore market in Taiwan has been started on according a cross-strait MOU. A completed RMB market in the Chinese Economic Area therefore has been established. Due to political and economic disruptions, such as the aftermath of the global tsunami, mainland China’s stock market crash and RMB exchange rate reform in 2015, as well as failure of the Service Trade Agreement between Taiwan and mainland China in 2016, the arbitrage opportunities among the three RMB markets can be explored. This paper evaluates the convergence and divergence of RMB market returns by the sigma-convergence (or log t) test, which provides a more precise indication for market return convergence than does the traditional unit root test. Policy implications for the RMB arbitrage are also provided.

In this paper we use the new developed Markov Switching Unit Root test to examine the status of real and financial integration of China, Japan, the European Union, and the United States based on the empirical validity of real interest parity, uncovered interest parity, and relative purchasing power parity. We found strong evidence in favour of those parity conditions and hence concluded that real and financial integration between China and other four countries was well established.

This letter applies the endogenous structural break Minimum Lagrange Multiplier unit root test to re-examine the stationarity of Chinese stock market indices. The main result is consistent with Yan and Felminghan (Applied Economics Letters, 13, 605-608, 2006) who use the ADF-type structural break unit test, and the break we found is more in line with the reality.

According to the theory of unit root test, Lee-Carter model and generalized linear model, which are widely used in mortality projection, impose key implicit assumptions respectively which are inconsistent with each other. Log mortality rate (the force of mortality or the central mortality rate) is described as a unit root process in Lee-Carter model, while it is modeled as a deterministic trend process in generalized linear model. We use panel LM unit-root tests with level shifts to test the assumptions in above models, based on mortality data of the 7 most developed countries(G7) and Nordic countries(Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden). The test results show that a mortality projection model, whatever it is Lee-Carter model or generalized linear model, is not always appropriate to predict dynamic mortality rates of different countries. Further, we explain period effect and cohort effect of dynamic mortality according to the results of structural break test. Based on the empirical results, we extend Lee-Carter model, which includes a special case of generalized linear model. To check the performance of the extended model, we use it to forecast USA and Sweden mortality and we find that the extended Lee-Carter model works better than the original Lee-Carter model.