乡财“三管齐下”

随着社会主义新农村建设的推进和公共财政职能的不断加强,国家财政用于乡镇的资金大幅度增加。加强乡镇财政资金管理工作无疑成了基层财政人的新"课题"。为充分发挥乡镇财政职能,湖北省咸宁市咸安区农村财政管理局"三管齐下"大力推进乡镇财政资金监管,乡镇财政效能显著提高。     

Precautionary Reserves and the Interbank Market

Extreme disruptions in the interbank market severely hampered the broader financial system during the 2007–08 financial crisis. We use Fedwire data to estimate fed funds trades and track banks’ intraday balances. We show empirical evidence of banks’ precautionary holding of reserves and reluctance to lend linked to documented extreme fed funds rate volatility, including the fed funds rate spiking above the discount rate and crashing to zero. We develop a model of constrained banks that makes new predictions and provides a unified explanation for the stark anomalies during the crisis, our empirical findings, and previous stylized facts from normal times.     

Global Security Policies against Terrorism and the Free Riding Problem: An Experimental Approach

The World Trade Center attack has shed light on the urgent need to implement preventing measures against terrorism and to enhance cooperation in the global security system for all countries. However, international coordination cannot be taken for granted. It is often ineffective and likely to fail for several reasons. Perhaps the more prominent reason to explain failure in coordination is that collective actions against terrorism may suffer from the well‐known free riding problem. In this paper we experimentally investigate cooperation dilemma in counterterrorism policies by measuring to what extent international deterrence policy may suffer from free riding. In our game, contributions to the group account do not aim to increase the production of the public good but instead seek to decrease the probability that a stochastic event destroys the good. A country could choose to free ride by investing nothing in the international deterrence policy and instead invest all its resources in its own national protection or even choose to ignore totally terrorism by investing on alternative projects. We also look at the effects of institutions that allow sanctioning and rewarding of other countries to facilitate coordination on deterrence policy. We find that, in absence of institutional incentives and after controlling for risk aversion, most of countries defect by investing very weakly in collective actions against terrorism while largely investing to protect themselves. In contrast, the introduction of punishment/reward incentive systems improves significantly the contribution level to the collective security account.     

ANNOUNCEMENT,OBSERVATION AND HONESTY IN THE VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS GAME

In this paper, we study the effect of pre‐play announcements and ex‐post observation of decisions on voluntary public good provision. We find that requiring announcements, in conjunction with making contribution decisions public, has a significantly positive effect on the average level of contributions. Those treatments, in which announcements are elicited, permit the truthfulness of subjects' announcements to be measured. We find that high contributors are more honest, the truthfulness of others is reciprocated with greater honesty and announcements are more honest when contribution decisions are observable.     

RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN HEALTH-CARE UTILIZATION: ANALYSIS BY INTENSITY OF DEMAND

Health-care utilization is estimated for different subpopulations with respect to various measures of health status, which allows the classification of health-care consumers into groups with different intensities of demand. This specification allows us to determine whether racial differences vary between subgroups of consumers. In addition to blacks, we also consider utilization by Hispanics. The model is estimated separately for five measures of utilization: office-based physician visits, office-based nonphysician visits, outpatient department visits, emergency room visits, and hospital discharges using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Results across numerous specifications indicate that racial differences remain a serious public policy concern, both among healthy and unhealthy minorities. ( JEL I11, I12)     

COSTS AND BENEFITS OF REDUCING AIR POLLUTANTS RELATED TO ACID RAIN

The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments initiated a dramatic reduction in emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by electric power plants. This paper presents the results of an integrated assessment of the benefits and costs of the program. Dramatic uncertainties characterize the estimates especially with respect to the benefits of the program, many of which were modeled explicitly. The lion's share of benefits results from reduced risk of premature mortality, especially through reduced exposure to sulfates, and these expected benefits measure several times the expected costs of the program. Significant benefits also are estimated for improvements in health morbidity, recreational visibility, and residential visibility, each of which measures approximately equal to costs. Areas that were the focus of attention in the 1980s—including effects to soils, forests, and aquatic systems—still have not been modeled comprehensively, but evidence suggests that benefits in these areas are relatively small, at least with respect to "use values" for the environmental assets that are affected.     

Treasury Safety,Liquidity, and Money Premium Dynamics: Evidence from Debt Limit Impasses

Treasury securities enjoy a “money premium” because they are ultra-safe and liquid. However, during debt limit impasses, the safety and liquidity of Treasury securities temporarily deteriorate, eroding the money premium. Using past impasses, we find the money premium eroded by roughly six basis points across all Treasury securities and up to 50 basis points for the shortest maturities at the greatest risk of a delayed principal payment. Safety and liquidity each accounted for about half of the erosion. The deterioration of safety and liquidity also appears to interact, consistent with theories of default-driven liquidity risk and the information sensitivity of debt.     

Visibility Bias in the Transmission of Consumption Beliefs and Undersaving

We model visibility bias in the social transmission of consumption behavior. When consumption is more salient than nonconsumption, people perceive that others are consuming heavily, and infer that future prospects are favorable. This increases aggregate consumption in a positive feedback loop. A distinctive implication is that disclosure policy interventions can ameliorate undersaving. In contrast with wealth-signaling models, information asymmetry about wealth reduces overconsumption. The model predicts that saving is influenced by social connectedness, observation biases, and demographic structure, and provides new insight into savings rates. These predictions are distinct from other common models of consumption distortions.     

Naïve Buying Diversification and Narrow Framing by Individual Investors

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification, NPD) or, in contrast, equally balance the values of same-day purchases of multiple assets (naïve buying diversification, NBD). We find NBD in purchases of multiple stocks, and in mixed purchases of individual stocks and funds. In contrast, there is little evidence of NPD. Evidence suggests that NBD arises due to stock picking behavior and neglect of diversification. These findings suggest that behavioral finance theory should incorporate transaction, as well as portfolio, framing.