Institutions,moral hazard and expected government support of banks

We model the expected support of banks with credit ratings from Moody's and Fitch, taking explicitly into account the capacity and willingness of governments to provide support in case of need, as well as their concerns about moral hazard (i.e., that the expected support may induce banks to assume bigger risks). Our results suggest that moral hazard concerns are relatively weak. In addition, a substantial part of the expected support can be attributed to the quality of a country's institutions. These findings have important implications for the dynamics of banking crises, the value of the ‘fair’ insurance premium banks might be called upon to pay for the expected support, as well as for ways to reduce the resulting negative externalities.     

多重委托代理下医生最优激励模型设计探究

"过度医疗"即指超过疾病实际需求的诊断和治疗的行为。医疗服务的特殊性,使患者、医生、监督方之间存在信息不对称和多重委托代理关系。鉴于此,从政府的第三方监督职能出发,将政府和患者作为共同委托人,避免政府与医院之间道德风险的发生,构建医生作为代理人的最优激励模型,并得出相关结论与启示。     

基于SWOT分析理论的施工企业安全管理要点

针对近几年施工企业安全形势严峻,安全管理急需转型的形势完成本文。本文通过对企业安全管理的内部能力与外部因素运用SWOT分析,阐述了施工企业安全管理战略从过去突击式的安全大检查到以预防为主的危险源辨识管控的转变。     

The influence of auditor narcissism and moral disengagement on risk assessments of a narcissistic client CFO

Global capital markets rely heavily on independent and skeptical auditors as gatekeepers to provide assurance that corporate financial reports are free of material fraud. The rise of narcissism among the ranks of both client and audit professionals challenge this gatekeeper function. In addition, auditor moral disengagement may undermine auditor skepticism, further eroding public confidence in the integrity of financial reporting and the audit process. We conduct a quasi-experiment with 118 auditors from three international audit firms. In a simulated interview with a client CFO, we examine whether auditors underestimate risks of fraudulent financial statements due to the interactive effects of (1) client narcissism (manipulated verbally and nonverbally) and (2) auditor narcissism. We also examine the influence of auditor moral disengagement on client risk assessments. Results indicate that CFO verbal and nonverbal narcissism significantly influenced auditors’ assessment of management-related client risk. Moreover, auditor narcissism was found to interactively influence client risk inferences such that auditors higher in narcissism exhibited narcissistic tolerance (lower risk assessments) when the hypothetical CFO displayed high verbal narcissism. Auditor moral disengagement was negatively associated with client risk assessments. We discuss the implication of these findings on future audit judgment research, audit firm policy and training on maintaining auditor skepticism, and the audit oversight role of standard-setters.     

ADAM SMITH AND THE ROLE OF THE METAPHOR OF AN INVISIBLE HAND

Daniel Klein and Brandon Lucas's ‘In a Word or Two, Placed in the Middle: The Invisible Hand in Smith's Tomes’, following a vague hint by Peter Minowitz (2004) , offers original physical evidence that Smith ‘deliberately placed the phrase “led by an invisible hand”– at the physical centre of both his masterworks’. Further, it suggests that the invisible‐hand paragraphs are a response to Rousseau (1755 ); and that in ‘numerous and rich ways’, centrality holds ‘special and positive significance in Smith's thought’. This paper acknowledges the physical centrality of the invisible‐hand metaphor, but questions whether centrality alone gives weight to wider claims that the ‘invisible hand’ was Smith's ‘central idea’. It draws upon Smith's Rhetoric Lectures (1763), and argues that the invisible‐hand paragraphs in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations identify the actual objects of the invisible‐hand metaphor. This paper insists that Adam Smith is the most reliable source for revealing what he meant. In contrast, most modern attributions of special meaning to Adam Smith's use of the metaphor ignore Smith's teaching on the use of metaphors and, instead, make numerous, and often mutually exclusive, claims that Smith had a ‘doctrine’ of ‘an invisible‐hand’.     

道德哲学视域下的关公崇拜

在中国传统民间信仰之中,关公崇拜是俗文化兴起的产物,是社会道德情感社会潜意识孕育产生的一个道德模范,经典的三国演义为关公崇拜提供了有力的文本支撑,历代统治者的推波助澜也为这种崇拜发展起了重要作用。同时,关公崇拜背后有着深厚的道德内涵和社会价值,它所推崇的"义"是一种超越传统血亲关系的品德。这种品德即使在今天的商业社会也有着其存在发展的土壤,这也是关公崇拜得以延续至今的重要原因。     

金融创新如何缓解信任品市场失灵?——中国食品安全责任强制保险的自然实验

信任品市场(如食品、医药等)存在的问题一直困扰着中国和世界很多国家。关于产品和服务质量的信息不对称(道德风险和逆向选择)会导致信任品市场失灵。缓解信任品市场失灵,一种常见的解决方案是政府监管;而经济学家认为更加基于市场的解决方案(例如强制责任保险等金融创新)可能更为有效。在理论上,强制责任保险有两种相反的效应:保险公司的监督减少了道德风险 vs. 保险加剧了企业的道德风险,但一直亟待实证检验。幸运的是,中国食品安全责任强制保险的改革实验走在了世界的前列。本文利用了中国在不同地区、不同时间推行的这个自然实验,通过双重差分的方法识别出责任保险对于信任品市场的因果效应。本文的研究发现,强制责任保险能显著降低食品安全事故发生概率。这表明政府强制推行的金融创新可以成为信任品市场失灵的一种有效的替代性解决方案。     

Risk shifting in the US banking system: An empirical analysis

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on risk shifting. It proposes a method to find out whether risk shifting is present in the banking industry and, if so, what type. The type of risk shifting depends on the group of debt holders to whom risk is shifted. We apply this method to the US banking sector in 1998–2011. To study the relationship between risk shifting and the 2008 crisis, the sample is also split into pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis periods. Our results suggest that the same type of risk shifting is present in the entire sample and in the pre-crisis and crisis subsamples. We find no evidence of risk shifting after the crisis. Furthermore, holding capital buffers seems to disincentivize risk shifting. This finding appears to provide support for the conservative buffer included in Basel III.     

Repeated moral hazard and recursive Lagrangeans

This paper shows how to solve dynamic agency models by extending recursive Lagrangean techniques à la Marcet and Marimon (2011) to problems with hidden actions. The method has many advantages with respect to the promised utilities approach (Abreu et al., 1990): it is a significant improvement in terms of simplicity, tractability and computational speed. Solutions can be easily computed for hidden actions models with several endogenous state variables and several agents, while the promised utilities approach becomes extremely difficult and computationally intensive even with just one state variable or two agents.