The Diversification and Performance of Self-Managed Superannuation Funds

In this article we examine the diversification and performance of a small preliminary sample of Australian self‐managed superannuation (retirement) funds (SMSFs). Using the single index model and traditional (risk‐adjusted) performance measures within the context set by modern portfolio theory we find that the SMSFs in our sample exhibit considerable under‐diversification. In addition, we find that the SMSFs do not appear to be benefiting from even naive diversification and, unsurprisingly, perform poorly on a risk‐adjusted basis vis‐à‐vis the unmanaged S&P/ASX300 index. This empirical investigation contributes to economists' understanding of the microeconomic structure of this increasingly important component of Australia's retirement income stream.     

Where Do Australians Invest?

In this article, we analyse the geography of Australia's international portfolio investment using the International Monetary Fund's Co‐ordinated Portfolio Investment Survey dataset. Preliminary results suggest that Australia's external holdings of equity and debt as a percentage of national income almost doubled between 1997 and 2001. However, Australia's international investment position as a percentage of national income is one of the lowest amongst the major OECD countries. In 2001 approximately two‐thirds of Australia's total investments were in the United States and the United Kingdom. By contrast Australia's trade share (exports plus imports as a percentage of Australia's total world trade) with these countries was approximately 20 per cent in the same year. The major determinants of Australia's geographical allocation of portfolio investment indicate a broad correspondence between stock market capitalisation of destination countries and the allocation of Australian financial investments but with some deviations from that baseline, where the deviations are correlated with Australian trade patterns.     

金融制度变迁、银行组织模式与我国商业银行成长

本文通过对金融制度变迁的理论分析和历史考察,揭示了综合化经营制度是金融制度的基本制度安排,对商业银行的成长和发展具有重要的推动作用,我国已经具备了实施商业银行综合化经营的制度基础和条件.本文认为,金融控股公司是我国商业银行实施综合化经营的目标模式.基于目前我国的制度、体制和法律现实,我国商业银行综合化经营的实现必须分步实施,走渐进之路.同时,必须加强制度基础的塑造和建设.     

Bank Ownership and Efficiency in the Aftermath of Financial Crises: Evidence from Indonesia

This paper examines the relationship between types of ownership of banks and their efficiency in the aftermath of a financial crisis using Greene's “true” panel data stochastic frontier model, which takes into account unobserved heterogeneity among banks. The Indonesian banking sector is analyzed using financial data of 144 banks operating in Indonesia over the period of 2000Q4–2005Q2. In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the cost efficiency of all banks improves over time on average. However, there is some evidence that, as these banks improve their efficiency, state‐owned banks are the least efficient banks while joint‐venture and foreign‐owned banks are the most efficient.     

Do insurance activities enhance the performance of financial services holding companies?

Stiroh and Rumble (2006) and Yeager et al. (2007) have argued that extension of banks into nonbanking activities produces no diversification benefits for financial services holding companies (FSHCs) eligible to consolidate banking and insurance products. We investigate the effect of aggregate nonbank activities, as well as two main areas of insurance business, namely agency and underwriting enterprise, on the risk-adjusted performance of FSHCs. Our sample includes a quarterly panel data of FSHCs over the period 2003–2011. We find that the effect of FSHCs’ entry into agency insurance activities on their risk-adjusted returns is dependent on their size; it is positive for FSHCs in the top quartile of our sample (assets greater than $4.495 billions), but negative for smaller and mid-size FSHCs. The effect of underwriting insurance activities on risk-adjusted returns is generally negative or statistically insignificant, except for some of the largest-size firms.     

Beliefs, Bailouts and Spread of Bank Panics

This article highlights the spread of bank panics across countries, as the public reassesses governments' propensity to bailouts. Policymakers decide whether to save collapsing banking systems by weighing social costs of crises against the costs associated with raising taxes to finance rescue packages. Policymakers know those social costs of bank liquidation whereas the public does not. In this setup, financial crises may result from the public's self‐fulfilling prophecies about equilibrium outcomes, as lenders' expectations impinge on the taxation cost of bailouts. It follows that a banking crisis in a country leads creditors to reexamine policymakers' willingness to bailouts in other countries, which eventually makes their banks more vulnerable to self‐confirming depositors' runs.     

经济增长模式、银行类型与盈利优势

文章从经济增长模式对金融服务的需求和不同类型银行提供金融服务的比较优势出发,分析了中国六类银行的盈利优势。文章将财务分析思想贯穿于实证模型的设计、检验和分析中,在保证模型结果可靠性的同时丰富了实证分析的内涵。研究发现,大型商业银行盈利优势受益于投资拉动型经济增长模式和规模优势,但成本和风险控制能力不足;股份制商业银行受经济增长模式影响不显著;城市商业银行受益于居民消费水平的提高;农村建设推动了农村金融发展,利差升水补偿了农村金融机构经营的高成本、高风险;外资银行风险管理能力突出。     

Inflation-Plus Targeting at the Reserve Bank of Australia

This article first outlines the dynamics of what appear to be increasingly prevalent cycles of asset price inflation in liberalised financial systems, as well as the difficulties entailed in successful monetary policy responses. The article then analyses the Reserve Bank of Australia's policy responses to recent rises in credit growth and asset price inflation in the property sector. The Bank's responses are characterized in terms of an inflation‐plus targeting framework which has subtly redefined the Bank's approach to inflation targeting to include vaguely defined factors such as mediumterm‘risks’, as well as extending the time frame of such risk assessment. The article explains why, for a variety of reasons, the Bank has been reticent to fully declare its hand.     

If the Banks are Doing So Well,Why Can't I Get a Loan? Regulatory Constraints to Financial Inclusion in Indonesia

Indonesia's financial sector has two paradoxes: (i) Indonesia has been a global leader in microfinance for the past 25 years, but access to microfinance services is declining; and (ii) Indonesia's commercial banks are liquid, solvent, and profitable, and the Indonesian economy has been doing well over the past decade, but small and medium enterprises are facing a credit crunch. Although Indonesia is underbanked, most commercial banks have been unresponsive to unmet effective demand. The behavior of banks has been in their own short‐term best interests, primarily because of the unintended consequences of Indonesia's financial sector reregulation after the East Asian crisis and contradictory monetary policies, which have produced a prudentially sound but inefficient, narrow, and homogenized banking oligopoly. Indonesia should not respond to financial exclusion by artificially pumping out and administratively allocating more credit. Instead, it should promulgate smart regulation so that banks maintain their sound risk management without pursuing noncompetitive and noninclusive business practices.     

Private bureaucracies,organizational efficiency,and Australia's manufacturing trade structure: a comparison with Japan

This study tests the hypothesis that use of in-house information services, which are approximated by the relative size of private bureaucracies or the ‘management sector’, is a statistically significant determinant of Australia's manufacturing trade structure. Large private bureaucracies are a feature of industrialized economies. Their growth, and concomitantly huge resource use, suggest that informational and organizational efficiency have become of paramount importance for economic development. However, variables trying to capture these phenomena are neglected in mainstream trade analysis. The study is conducted for a cross-section of Australian industries and the results are compared with those obtained from a similar study for Japan. The empirical results confirm the importance of private bureaucracies as a trade determinant. Moreover, they seem to dominate some major conventional factors. In the Australian case, the new variables capture an increasingly important aspect of ‘human capital’, i.e., its potentially inefficient use due to lack of organizational innovation. Comparison with Japan indicates major structural weaknesses of Australian manufacturing which hinder the development of a revealed comparative advantage and exports. The paper also comments on the controversial debate concerning Australia's current account deficit, and on the broad implications of the study's findings for economic policy. It concludes with suggestions for further research.     

Bank overall financial strength: Islamic versus conventional banks

A number of recent studies compare the performance of Islamic and conventional banks with the use of individual financial ratios or efficiency frontier techniques. The present study extends this strand of the literature, by comparing Islamic banks, conventional banks, and banks with an Islamic window with the use of a bank overall financial strength index. This index is developed with a multicriteria methodology that allows us to aggregate various criteria capturing bank capital strength, asset quality, earnings, liquidity, and management quality in controlling expenses. We find that banks differ significantly in terms of individual financial ratios; however, the difference of the overall financial strength between Islamic and conventional banks is not statistically significant. This finding is confirmed with both univariate comparisons and in multivariate regression estimations. When we look at the bank financial strength within regions, we find that conventional banks outperform both the Islamic banks and the banks with Islamic window in the case of Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council; however, Islamic banks perform better in the MENA and Senegal region. Second stage regressions also reveal that the bank overall financial strength index is influenced by various country-specific attributes. These include control of corruption, government effectiveness, and operation in one of the seven countries that are expected to drive the next big wave in Islamic finance.     

The role of price and nonprice factors in predicting Australia's trade performance

This article investigates the role of price and nonprice factors in predicting Australia's trade performance. Results broadly suggest that Australia's trade performance is largely explained by the nonprice factors namely, R&D, reliability of domestic supply, aggregate world demand and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows in long run. Price factors such as, relative price of Australian exports and domestic prices are also important predictors of trade competitiveness. The policy implications of these findings are that there are dividends in terms of improved trade performance by encouraging R&D expenditure, attracting FDI, improving domestic supply and implementing appropriate policies to improve price competitiveness.     

Australia's Foreign Debt: 1975 to 1985

This article analyses Australia's debt accumulation since 1975 and comments on possible future paths of adjustment. In Section 2 we derive a formula describing the dynamics of debt accumulation. In Section 3 we apply the formula with Australian data for the period 1975 to 1985. A detailed analysis of developments in Australia's goods and services account is provided. Section 4 presents concluding remarks and reviews policy options available to Australia in the light of its external economic position. The article includes two appendices. The first contains some forecasts for the next year of developments In Australia's external accounts. The second gives data details and sets out the algebra underlying various computations in the article.     

刍议居民金融行为变化与商业银行个人金融业务改革

随着人民生活水平的不断提高,居民金融行为由单一储蓄型转变为综合金融型,由存款获息型转变为投资理财型,由单纯生活型转变为混合经营型,由积累消费型转变为贷款消费型,由网点的存取型转变为网络的划转型.但目前,我国商业银行个人金融业务还不适应居民金融行为的变化,商业银行必须采取深化体制改革,加快品种创新,实施流程再造等措施以适应居民金融行为的变化.     

Trade and Investment Linkages and Stock Market Long‐Run Relationship

This paper aims to examine whether the intensity of trade and investment linkages among the countries matter for their stock market long‐run relationship. To achieve this, we classify Australia's bilateral trade and investment partners into major, medium and minor. Empirical findings of an asymmetric generalised dynamic conditional correlation generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model show that correlations are time varying and increased significantly during the global financial crisis (GFC). Results of multivariate cointegration test confirm the long‐run equilibrium relationship between the stock markets of Australia and its major partners in the pre‐GFC and during GFC. Based on the full‐sample results, it indicates that the GFC has segmented the stock markets from the long‐run equilibrium relationship. Granger non‐causality test results on full sample show that Australian stock market causes only the New Zealand market while the USA, the UK, Germany, Canada, Switzerland and Italy drives the Australian market. Our results therefore suggest that the intensity of bilateral trade and investment linkages among the countries matter for their stock markets' long‐term relationship.     

“Interest Rate Trap”, or Why Does the Central Bank Keep the Policy Rate Too Low for Too Long?

In this paper, we provide a framework for modeling one risk‐taking channel of monetary policy, the mechanism whereby financial intermediaries' incentives for liquidity transformation are affected by the central bank's reaction to a financial crisis. The anticipation of the central bank's reaction to liquidity stress gives banks incentives to invest in excessive liquidity transformation, triggering an “interest rate trap” – the economy will remain stuck in a long‐lasting period of suboptimal, low interest rate equilibrium. We demonstrate that interest rate policy as a financial stabilizer is dynamically inconsistent, and the constrained efficient outcome can be implemented by imposing ex ante liquidity requirements.     

Policy Uncertainty about Australia's Carbon Price: Expert Survey Results and Implications for Investment

Australia's carbon‐pricing policy remains in doubt due to a lack of bipartisan political support. A survey of Australian‐based carbon‐pricing experts demonstrates profound policy uncertainty: 40 per cent of respondents expect the current carbon‐pricing mechanism to be repealed, but 80 per cent expect that there will be a carbon price in 2020. The forward price curve is U‐shaped and has great variance, with the 60 per cent confidence interval spanning from zero to A$25/t in 2020. Carbon policy uncertainty causes large excess costs in Australia's energy sector and may result in delay and diversion of investment.     

Bank ownership type and temporal evolution of long‐term bank funding in the period 2005–2017

This study uses a large panel dataset of Western European banks to examine the determinants of bank funding stability. Banks are divided into three categories by bank ownership type; the ownership types in this study are commercial banks, cooperative banks and savings banks. Three sources of stable bank funding are investigated: customer deposits, equity, and long‐term liabilities. Furthermore, the sum of these funding components is used as a proxy variable for a bank's total available stable funding (ASF). A special focus is on the temporal evolution of these funding types. The regression results show that commercial banks’ funding became much more stable in the period 2005–2017. However, that funding remains, on average, less stable than does cooperative and savings banks’ funding. In addition, funding stability has remained at the pre‐crisis level in cooperative and savings banks, despite a steep dip in cooperative banks’ ASF during the sovereign debt crisis. Furthermore, banks substantially decreased financing from long‐term liabilities after the financial crisis, replacing it with customer deposits and equity.     

Bank diversification and monetary policy

Using bank-level data in Asia, we examine the relationship between the effectiveness of monetary policy and the business diversification of banks. We find that bank diversification enhances the effect of monetary policy.     

非利息收入对银行业绩效影响的实证研究——基于中国银行业2000—2010年面板数据分析

本文将非利息收入种类数和非利息收入占营业收入比作为非利息收入的两个衡量指标,并将其纳入非利息收入对银行绩效影响的模型中。基于我国14家股份制商业银行2000-2010年财务数据的实证研究发现,无论是非利息收入种类数,还是非利息收入占营业收入比,都与银行业绩效显著负相关。银行业绩效的提升更多的来自于银行规模的增大、股东权益资产的增加以及银行的上市。