Mutual insurance for catastrophe hazards: Case of deposit insurance

Deposit insurance involves catastrophe risk because bank failures spike during a banking crisis. Although mutual insurance is ill-suited for catastrophe risk, the US government structures deposit insurance like a mutual company owned by policyholders. Furthermore, an intertemporal mispricing resulting from a dividend-surcharge arrangement produces several problems. Most importantly, it worsens moral hazard. Through dividends and surcharges, deposit insurance transfers the premium burden from high-risk banks to low-risk banks and in effect erodes the charter value of low-risk banks. In addition, high-risk banks taking catastrophe risk can outperform low-risk banks for many years in a row, putting pressures on managers of low-risk banks. Owing to these factors, an underpricing of catastrophe risk before its realization can ratchet up risk-taking by banks. Other problems with the intertemporal mispricing include making the banking business more procyclical, distorting the prices of banking products, and exposing taxpayers to asymmetric downside risk. To ensure fair competition and improve economic efficiency, the government should set the insurance premium based not on the realized loss but on the expected loss.     

Rating Agencies – An Experimental Analysis of Their Remuneration Model

Does it matter who pays for ratings? Yes, but not for the rating agencies’ behavior. These are the findings of our experiment where we analyze the effect of the remuneration model of rating agencies on their assessments as well as on investors’ and issuers’ behavior. First, we find that rating agencies’ assessments are comparable whether the agency is (partially) paid by issuers, investors or solely by the experimenter. Issuers, on the other hand, more often do not return investor's trust when they or investors pay for ratings. Further, investors more often act according to the agencies’ recommendations when they have to pay for this information.     

Moving toward risk-based deposit insurance premiums in the European Union: the case of Spain

This article provides a scenario-based analysis of how the European Union proposal for a new funding model for deposit insurance systems (DISs) would affect the Spanish banking sector. We examine the risk profiles of commercial banks, savings banks and credit cooperatives over the period 2007 to 2011 and compare the contributions to the deposit insurance fund (DIF) under the current flat-rate regime with those that would have occurred under the new risk-sensitive system. We find that a risk-based scheme could provide an incentive for sound management by reducing the premiums for credit institutions with better risk profiles. We also conclude that the proposed reform may help to mitigate the moral hazard associated with larger credit institutions.     

Banking on the FED: QE1-2-3 and the Rebalancing of the Global Economy

Growing income inequality in most countries in the 1990s and 2000s led to a global shortfall between supply and demand. The US economy bridged this shortfall domestically and globally by blowing successive equity market and housing bubbles, but these produced ever more severe financial crises. Rebalancing after the 2008 crisis required trade surplus countries to expand their non-traded sectors, but rebalancing is never immaculate. Instead, the Federal Reserve Bank's three rounds of Large-Scale Asset Purchases, or quantitative easing, shifted investment flows towards some developed and developing economies. As a matter of accounting, capital inflows led to shrinking trade surpluses in those countries. However, their relatively undeveloped securities markets mean that rebalancing largely occurred through rising housing prices, mirroring the same unsustainable phenomenon the USA experienced in the 2000s. In effect, the USA shifted part of its unsustainably large non-traded sector back to trade surplus countries by causing the real-estate part of the non-traded sector in surplus countries to expand. However, this is not a sustainable solution to global trade and financial imbalances in the long run, and risks producing the same kind of crises the USA experienced in 2008.     

Financial Crisis and the Lost Decade*

Japanese banks incurred heavy losses in the early 1990s due to the bursting of the bubble economy of the 1980s. Japanese regulators allowed undercapitalized banks to operate under a very lenient application of capital requirement rules. At first, the regulators did not have strong institutional mechanisms and budgetary funds to take care of weakened banks. Even after obtaining strong power and money in 1988 to tackle the banking problem, the regulators would not nationalize a large number of banks because they could not manage nationalized banks themselves. The recent recovery of the Japanese economy gives the Financial Services Agency a chance to make up for the lost decade of regulatory discipline.     

道德风险存在下董事责任保险市场的保费水平分析

本文通过对董事责任保险市场的介绍,指出在董事责任保险市场中存在着严重的道德风险问题,通过对市场中保险双方行为的博弈分析,得到在道德风险存在下的保费变动范围,并指出防止或减轻董事责任保险市场中道德风险的方法.     

银行危机过程中的道德风险及其对银行危机成本的影响

本文从理论和实证的角度分析了处于危机状态的银行，为什么会产生严重的道德风险问题，以及道德风险是如何影响危机处理成本的，并提出我国中小金融体系重建必须重视先从根本上克服存在的问题。     

Repeated moral hazard with persistence

Summary. This paper considers the optimal contract when the current (hidden) action of an agent has a persistent effect on the future outcome. The optimal contract in a two-effort choice, two-period setting is characterized analytically and numerically. In particular, we show that persistence tends to make compensation less responsive to the first-period outcome. At the extreme, there are cases where the agent is perfectly insured against the first-period outcome: the agent obtains the same utility regardless of the first-period outcome. The model is extended to three periods. We also present a computational method to characterize an N-period model with two-period persistence.Received: 9 December 2003, Revised: 13 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D82, J31, J65. Correspondence to: Ayegül ahinWe are grateful to an anonymous referee, Jack Barron, Mark Bils, Hugo Hopenhayn, Per Krusell, Lance Lochner, Steve Williamson, and seminar participants at Concordia University, Purdue University, the applied theory meetings at University of Rochester, the Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory 2003, the Rochester Wegmans Conference 2002, and the Society for Economic Dynamics Meetings 2003 for their comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank Vera Brencic, Nancy Marmon, and Roxanne Stanoprud for excellent research assistance.     

我国地方性商业银行存款保险定价研究——基于预期损失定价模型的分析

随着我国经济和金融的不断发展,建立适合国情的存款保险制度已非常迫切。虽然存款保险制度存在逆向选择及道德风险,但是研究表明:合适的存款保险定价可以减少自身存在的问题,给金融机构的稳健经营带来更大保障。选择地方性商业银行作为研究样本,采用BP神经网络及D-S证据理论相结合的方法,用预期损失定价模型来计算存款保险费率,对这些金融机构的信用等级进行简单评定,并结合国内外相关经验给出预期损失率,从而得出存款保险费率。     

The persistence of profits in banking: an international comparison

This article examines the dynamics of bank profitability in the USA, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and Switzerland over the period 1993–2014. We find long-run bank profit persistence in all six countries in the period before the financial crisis in 2008. Banks with large capital ratios are persistently more profitable, and there is little evidence of a link between bank size and the persistence of bank profits. Commercial (saving) banks are persistently more (less) profitable in four of the six countries. The effects of the financial crisis in 2008 differed dramatically across countries as well as across ownership types. While US banks experienced dramatic declines in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, they recovered much faster than their European counterparts and essentially retain their long run profit potential by the year 2014.     

The impact of private hospital insurance on the utilization of hospital care in Australia

We use the Australian National Health Survey to estimate the impact of private hospital insurance on the propensity for hospitalization as a private patient. We account for the potential endogeneity of supplementary private hospital insurance purchases and calculate moral hazard based on a difference-of-means estimator. We decompose the moral hazard estimate into a diversion component that is due to an insurance-induced substitution away from public patient care towards private patient care, and an expansion component that measures a pure insurance-induced increase in the propensity to seek private patient care. Our results suggest that on average, private hospital insurance causes a sizable and significant increase in the likelihood of hospital admission as a private patient. However, there is little evidence of an expansion effect; the treatment effect of private hospital insurance on private patient care is driven almost entirely by the substitution away from public patient care towards private patient care. We discuss the implications for policies that aim to expand supplementary private insurance coverage for the purpose of reducing excess demand on the public healthcare system.     

The difficult construction of a European Deposit Insurance Scheme: a step too far in Banking Union?

The German Government refused to accept the development of a European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS) for Banking Union member states. Publicly, the German Government was preoccupied with the creation of a moral hazard that common funds would create for banks in those participating countries that had weak banking systems. This paper argues that to understand German moral hazard concerns it is necessary to look beyond the ideational – notably concerns stemming from German Ordo-liberalism – and focus on the existing national institutional arrangements that the German Government sought to protect. German moral hazard concerns stemmed from the fear that well-funded German deposit guarantee schemes (DGS) – especially those of small savings and cooperative banks – could be tapped to compensate for underfunded (and largely ex post funded) DGS in other member states. We thus demonstrate that the difficulties facing the construction of an EDIS owe to the weakness of the previously agreed harmonization of national DGS. This failure to harmonize schemes beyond a low minimal standard can be explained through an analysis focused on national systems. Different existing national DGS stem from the different configuration of national banking systems, the longstanding relationships among national banks and well-entrenched regulatory frameworks.     

An Economic Model of Faculty Grading Practices

The statistical evidence examined by the author indicates that faculty members with relatively few students tend to assign higher grades than would be expected otherwise. In evaluating student achievement and faculty performance, therefore, one must not only be aware of this association, but also be able to assess its significance.     

以资本结构理论分析寿险公司财务风险

论述了以资本结构理论分析寿险公司财务风险的重要性及可行性,并对资本结构的度量——财务杠杆进行了描述统计分析。通过完善股东收益模型,确立了明确可计算的资本结构度量——财务杠杆的表达方式。以此为基础,选取了2003—2009年间十家寿险公司的财务数据,对目前中国寿险公司的财务杠杆状况进行了描述统计分析;结合各个公司的相关重大事项阐述了统计结果的原因。分析结果显示,各公司财务杠杆差异性主要由公司规模、成长性差异、公司发展阶段、公司发展战略、某年政策导向等原因造成;各公司财务杠杆具有波动性,但都趋于稳定。较小波动的财务杠杆才能使寿险公司的财务风险处在可控之下,才能保障投保人的利益及保险市场的稳定。     

Adverse Selection in Health Insurance Markets: A Classroom Experiment

Adverse selection as it relates to health care policy will be a key economic issue in many upcoming elections. In this article, the author lays out a 30-minute classroom experiment designed for students to experience the kind of elevated prices and market collapse that can result from adverse selection in health insurance markets. The students should come away from the experiment understanding why adverse selection leads to high prices on good quality insurance and why it forces healthy individuals into low quality plans. Additionally, the experiment helps students think about the market characteristics that make health insurance particularly vulnerable to problems of asymmetric information. Finally, the experiment connects the adverse selection problem with key features of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.     

The effect of copayments on primary care utilization: results from a quasi-experiment

This article analyses how health-care utilization is affected by copayments in a tax-financed health-care system. The article utilizes a natural experiment in which a health-care region in Sweden changed the price of healthcare in such a way that primary care general physician prices increased by 33%. We use daily visit data in the treatment region and a neighbouring control region where no price change took place and analyse the effect using differences-in-differences as well as differences-in-differences-in-differences models. The results from the preferred models indicate no effect on health-care utilization due to the price change, a result that also holds across different socio-economic subregions in the treatment region.     

The Workout of Banking Crises: A Macroeconomic Perspective

This paper provides a macroeconomic perspective for governmentinterventions in banking crisis. Such crisis occur when a largenumber of banks fail to meet capital requirements or are insolvent.Using a macroeconomic model with financial intermediation, ouranalyis suggests that strict enforcement of capital-adequaterules suffices in prosperous periods. Capital requirements serveas an indicator for crises interventions in critical stateswhich may require interest rate intervention and restructuringof the banking industry. These policies can be reinforced byrandom bailouts and temporary financial relief, with a largepercentage of the costs being covered by current and futureowners of banks. (JEL D41, E4, G2)     

信贷紧缩:全球性的深度解剖

美国次贷危机不仅引起了世界著名金融机构的巨额亏损,而且还导致了发达国家金融市场中漉动性短缺;同时,受通货膨胀的影响,全球绝大部分中央银行开始了周期性的加息政策安排.信贷紧缩已经构成了对全球经济增长的曩重大威胁.为此,加强贴现窗口、拍卖贷款权和引进外部资金已经成为国际范围内主要固家金融管理层的共同选择.     

智能虚拟资本品动态估值:一个整体化模型

现有智能虚拟资本品的估值与测度模型众多,主要存在如下问题:一是关于智能资本品的定义和分类标准尚不统一;二是模型所要针对解决的问题的客观特征也难以清晰,多数模型都缺乏动态分析;三是评估模型对智能品的价值创造过程还缺乏深入的解析.本文试图针对研究现状中所存在的上述问题作进一步的探讨:首先是对现有代表性评估模型进行综合性分析...     

European financial crisis and bank productivity: evidence from Eastern European Countries

The paper examines the productivity levels of the largest banks operating in the Eastern European countries over the period of the ongoing European financial crisis. Specifically, the analysis covers the periods of U.S. subprime crisis, the global financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. By adopting a fully nonparametric framework, it provides a probabilistic version of a directional input-oriented Malmquist productivity index alongside with its main decomposition. The results from the analysis suggest that banks have faced a deterioration of their productivity levels between the examined periods. It is evident that during the initiation of European sovereign debt crisis, the banks have weakened their ability to utilize efficiently their inputs of production and their ability to realize scale economies.