Outside Blockholders' Monitoring of Management and Debt Financing

Corporate governance mechanisms designed to alleviate manager‐shareholder agency conflicts can worsen shareholder‐bondholder conflicts. This study examines how one such corporate governance mechanism, monitoring by large outside shareholders, influences the choice between public and private debt. I conjecture and find that firms with higher outside blockholdings are inclined to choose bank loans over public debt when they borrow, consistent with the notion that banks are better monitors than public debt markets. I also find that bank loans carry less price protection than corporate bonds against increased agency risk associated with outside blocks. Corroborating the monitoring story, I document that bank loans contain more accounting‐based covenants and dividend restriction provisions for firms with higher outside blockholdings than for those with lower blockholdings. I find no such relation for public debt covenants. This supports that banks' monitoring of their loans counters the agency risk caused by blockholders. This study extends prior research that associates governance mechanisms with agency costs of debt, by incorporating lenders' differential monitoring mechanisms in the overall corporate governance system.     

Deciding to Peg the Exchange Rate in Developing Countries: The Role of Private-Sector Debt

We argue that a higher share of the private sector in a country’s external debt raises the incentive to stabilize the exchange rate. We present a simple model in which exchange rate volatility does not affect agents’ welfare if all the debt is incurred by the government. Once we introduce private banks who borrow in foreign currency and lend to domestic firms, the monetary authority has an incentive to dampen the distributional consequences of exchange rate fluctuations. Our empirical results support the hypothesis that not only the level, but also the composition of foreign debt matters for exchange-rate policy.     

External balance sheets as countercyclical crisis buffers

The external balance sheets of many emerging market countries are distinguished by their holdings of assets primarily in the form of foreign debt and foreign exchange reserves, while their liabilities are predominantly equity, either foreign direct investment or portfolio equity. We investigate the claim that this composition served as a buffer for the emerging markets during the global financial crisis of 2008–09. We use data from a sample of 67 emerging market and advanced economies, and several indicators of the crisis are utilized: GDP growth rates in 2008–09, the occurrence of bank crises and the use of IMF credit. Our results show that those countries that issued FDI liabilities had higher growth rates, fewer bank crises and were less likely to borrow from the IMF. Countries with debt liabilities, on the other hand, had more bank crises and were more likely to use IMF credit. We conclude that the “long debt, short equity” (hold debt assets, issue equity liabilities) strategy of emerging markets did mitigate the effects of the global financial crisis.     

Credit rationing and crowding out during the industrial revolution: evidence from Hoare’s Bank, 1702-1862

Crowding out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the 18th- and early 19th-century private loan market balanced through quantity rationing. Using a unique set of observations on lending volume at a London goldsmith bank, Hoare’s Bank, we document the impact of wartime financing on private credit markets. We conclude that there is considerable evidence that government borrowing, especially during wartime, crowded out private credit.     

Growth opportunities,collateral and debt structure: the case of the Japanese machine manufacturing firms

We explore the determinants of debt structure by analyzing the Japanese machine manufacturing firms’ data from 1990 through 1996. We find that firms with abundant growth opportunities and scarce collateral are likely to borrow from banks rather than to issue bonds. This is robust even if we consider the simultaneous decision of the debt composition and leverage or managerial incentive. We also find that firms with abundant growth opportunities or collateral tend to depend on equity rather than on debt. Though banks reduce the agency costs of debt for growing firms, equity costs less than bank loans for them.     

我国民营银行发展的制度缺失研究

制度缺失已经成为制约我国民营银行发展的主要因素,因此有必要对我国民营银行的准入制度、运行环境制度和监管制度存在的问题进行分析,利用国家效用函数、制度变迁等理论解释其原因,并提出相应的建议。     

Interdependent bank runs under a collapsing fixed exchange rate regime

This paper provides a framework for simultaneous multiple bank runs in a country experiencing a currency crisis. The correlation of bank runs increases as the proportion of debts from foreign creditors (indexed to the dollar) to domestic creditors (indexed to the domestic currency) increases. Moreover, when the share of dollar debt is sufficiently high, this interlinkage is perfect; that is, runs occur in all banks or not at all. Consequently, a situation exists where even a solvent bank cannot borrow in the interbank market. These findings imply that as the domestic banking sector becomes increasingly dependent on dollar debt, there is a heightened requirement for dollar reserves and a lender-of-last-resort facility.     

Loan Sales and Borrowers’ Accounting Conservatism

We examine whether initial loan sales in the secondary loan market relate to borrowing firms’ accounting conservatism. We find that borrowing firms exhibit a significant decline in accounting conservatism after the initial loan sales. We show that the decline in borrower conservatism is more pronounced for firms that borrow from lenders with lower monitoring incentives and for firms that have lower incentives to supply conservatism. The baseline results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. Collectively, we provide corroborative evidence that lead lenders’ monitoring incentives enforce accounting conservatism in the private debt market, and that lead lenders play a more prominent role than secondary loan market participants in shaping corporate (conservative) reporting.     

Assessing central bank independence in developing countries: do actions speak louder than words?

My fiscal dominance hypothesis of central bank independenceposits that the size of the government's deficit and the methodsby which it is financed determine central bank independencem developing countries. I measure central bank independenceby the extent to which a central bank neutralises the effectsof increased credit demands by the government on the money supplyby reducing credit to the private sector My estimates show thatlarger deficits and greater government reliance on the domesticbanking system are associated with less central bank neutralisationof mcreased government borrowing from the banking system.     

THE NATIONAL DEBT1

To finance its expenditure, the state can tax, borrow and print money. Each of these methods has a different effect on private spending, so the combination selected should depend on the pressure of demand upon resources. It should depend too on the pattern of private spending the state wants to encourage, and its division between consumption and investment.     

Bailouts,Inflation, and Risk-Sharing in Monetary Unions

This paper presents a new rationalization for bailouts of sovereign debt in monetary unions, such as those observed during the recent Euro crisis. It introduces a model where member countries of the monetary union are ex-ante identical, and each derives utility from consumption and disutility from the union-wide inflation rate. The union’s central bank is utilitarian and lacks commitment. Countries borrow or save in a market for nominal sovereign debt in response to idiosyncratic income shocks, with countries that receive positive income shocks saving and countries that receive negative income shocks borrowing. Ex post, the monetary union’s central bank will attempt to devalue sovereign debt through surprise inflation, as this will redistribute income from rich creditor countries to poor debtor countries. Creditor countries choose to bailout debtor countries because bailouts will weaken the redistributive motives of the central bank and forestall surprise inflation. As bailouts in this environment constitute a payment from lucky creditor countries to unlucky debtor countries, they mimic a risk-sharing arrangement that insures against income shocks. The payments made by creditor countries are incentive-compatible due to the shared currency and inflation rate in the monetary union. This ability of countries to provide each other with incentive-compatible insurance constitutes a novel theory of optimal currency areas. This insurance benefit of the monetary union is largest for countries with negatively correlated income shocks, in contrast to the classic Mundell-Friedman optimal currency area criterion.

     

Heterogeneous private sector information,central bank disclosure,and stabilization policy

Conventional wisdom has it that a central bank that uses an informational advantage to undertake active policy intervention can do as well, at least so far as real outcomes are concerned, by making its information publicly available and abstaining from stabilization. This notion is examined using a framework incorporating heterogeneous private sector information concerning aggregate demand shocks. An activist regime, in which the central bank exploits its own information to engage in stabilization, is found to be unambiguously superior to a noninterventionist regime, where the central bank maintains a constant setting of policy but publicly discloses its own information.     

THE SENSITIVITY OF SOUTH AFRICAN INFLATION EXPECTATIONS TO SURPRISES

Price stability is widely recognised as the primary goal of modern monetary policy, and the management of private sector inflation expectations has become an essential channel through which this goal is achieved. This evaluation aims to improve the understanding of how the sensitivity of private sector inflation expectations to macroeconomic surprises in South Africa compares internationally, as this provides an indication of the contribution of monetary policy in South Africa to anchoring inflation expectations. If a central bank is credible, the financial markets should react less sensitively to macroeconomics surprises, because they trust the central bank to manage these incidents and achieve the objectives they communicated over the medium to long term. In this paper, the methodology of Gurkaynack et al. is adopted in order to measure the sensitivity of South African inflation expectations to surprises. A comparison of South Africa's results with those of countries in the original studies supports the contention that the SARB (South African Reserve Bank) has encouraged inflation expectations to be relatively insensitive to macroeconomic surprises, and offers support for the inflation-targeting framework as a means to help anchor inflation expectations.     

我国商业银行私人银行业务的发展现状与对策

随着我国富裕阶层队伍的不断壮大,我国私人银行业务显示出巨大的市场潜力,中外银行因此展开了激烈的竞争。但是,我国商业银行发展私人银行业务也面临着诸多制约因素。因此,我国商业银行应在市场细分、产品的研发与创新、品牌建设、组织架构、专业人才的培养、外部环境建设等方面采取切实措施,以促进私人银行业务的发展     

A Macroeconomic Policy Game for a Monetary Union with Adaptive Expectations

We consider a dynamic game model of a two-country monetary union. Governments (fiscal policies) pursue national goals while the common central bank’s monetary policy aims at union-wide objectives. For a symmetric demand shock, we derive numerical solutions of the dynamic game between the governments and the central bank. We consider conflicting (non-cooperative Nash equilibrium) and coordinated policy-making (cooperative Pareto solutions). We show that there is a trade-off between the deviations of instruments and targets from desired paths; the volatility of output and inflation increases when private agents react more strongly to changes in actual inflation.     

外商直接投资如何影响了民营企业的融资约束？——来自中国企业层面的证据

本文首先从理论上阐述了外商直接投资缓解民营企业融资约束的微观机制,并运用企业层面的统计数据验证了上述机制的存在性,接下来基于面板数据就外商直接投资对民营企业的融资效应进行计量估计。实证研究发现：外商直接投资通过产业集聚效应缓解了民营企业的融资约束,其融资效应由合资企业、处于产业集聚区的非合资企业和未处于产业集聚区的非合资企业依次递减;而在信贷市场上,FDI对不同类型民营企业却起到截然相反的融资效应,对于合资民营企业起到明显的融资缓解效应,却加剧了非合资企业原本的融资困境。     

Financial Statement Quality and Debt Contracting: Evidence from a Survey of Commercial Lenders

We survey commercial bank lenders to better understand how they evaluate and react to variation in financial statement quality and how they view recent changes in accounting standards. A unique aspect of this study is that our respondents focus on medium‐size loans to private companies. In fact, more than 90 percent of the survey respondents primarily make credit decisions on loans between $250 thousand and $50 million. This is in contrast to prior archival research, which focuses primarily on very large loans to public firms or very small loans to private firms. We find that lenders in our sample distinguish among financial statements in terms of quality, including conservatism, primarily on the basis of accrual patterns and restatements. While this general result holds throughout our sample, financial statement quality is substantially more important for lenders making larger loans (over $10 million) as compared to very small loans (under $1 million). In addition, bank lenders are much more likely to respond to low‐quality reporting with collateral and guarantee requirements than with an increase in the interest rate charged. This finding is consistent for lenders making both larger and smaller loans. Finally, despite concerns in the academic literature, bank lenders in our sample actually hold a neutral‐to‐positive view of recent changes in accounting standards. In addition, most do not support current efforts to exempt private companies from some accounting standards.     

Regulatory Pressure,Market Discipline,and Bank Spreads in India: An Empirical Exploration

Abstract

Employing data on commercial banks for 1992 to 2006, the paper examines the factors influencing bank spreads in India. The findings indicate that variations in bank size, composition of loan portfolio and bank liquidity are important determinants of bank margins. Second, the evidence is strongly supportive of the relative market power hypothesis. Finally, the evidence reveals that state-owned, de novo private and old private banks exhibit lower spreads as compared to their foreign counterparts. The analysis concludes with the policy implications of the aforesaid findings.     

Structural Reform and Transparency in a Monetary Union

We assess how central bank transparency affects the incentives for labour market reform in a monetary union. We introduce transparency as affecting unemployment forecasts that provide information that the central bank has to the private sector and the governments. Under conditions of monetary policy opaqueness and inflation bias, we show that monetary union may induce more reform (as governments mitigate inflation surprises under idiosyncratic shocks), albeit to a lesser extent when inflation bias is only present at the national level. In the absence of inflation bias, central bank transparency, by eliminating inflation surprises in the face of idiosyncratic shocks, induces less reform in a currency union relative to monetary autonomy. Altogether, these results point to the need for a strong political commitment to reform so that member states benefit most from the combination of a credible and transparent single monetary policy with measures aimed at improving competitiveness and enhancing long-term growth.     

外资银行进入对信贷资源配置的影响——以新欧盟成员国为例

本文从信贷规模、信贷结构变化两方面分析了外资银行进入新欧盟成员国后,大大提高了东道国的信贷资源供给,使得东道国信贷规模扩大;随着外资银行对东道国渗透程度的增加,其业务重点将逐渐从对优质客户资源的争夺转为向中小企业拓展信贷业务。随着信贷评估制度和技术的改善,家庭部门信贷比例也不断上升。外资银行进入对提高东道国信贷资源配置效率有着重大意义。