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.     

银行控股公司——国有商业银行的必然选择

在我国当前金融分业经营体制下 ,国有商业银行改组成适宜多元化经营的组织形式—银行控股公司 ,已是必然选择。银行控股公司具有其它银行形式所不具有的优势 ,它是我国银行组织制度的重要创新 ,需要有相应的制度调整。     

State Capacity and the Economic History of Colonial India

The paper re-examines the role of the state in economic change in colonial India (1757–1947), by paying attention to fiscal capacity. This capacity was larger than that of the precolonial states, and based on different foundations, such as centralisation of finance and securitisation of public debt. Nevertheless, the effort to raise finance hit a barrier, which had owed to the separation of debt from revenue operations. Did the barrier matter? By keeping markets open, the colonial state served private enterprise, but its failure to sustain growth in fiscal capacity compromised public investment in infrastructure and social development.     

新型银企关系与国企改革

国有企业的改革和发展关系到我国经济体制改革进程和社会经济的持续发展,也与整个金融业的稳定健康发展息息相关。改革开放以来,银企关系从计划经济体制下的行政管理服务关系,逐步向市场化法人实体之间商业服务关系过渡,但与现代商业银行制度和现代企业制度的改革目标相比,银企关系改革尚未取得实质性突破。银企市场关系的信用基础脆弱,银行信贷资产的风险不断加大,国有企业依然面临经营困难、社会负担重等现实问题,迫切需要银行的支持。因此,应建立新型的银企关系,以强化银行对国有企业改革和发展的支持。     

J. Soedradjad Djiwandono,Bank Indonesia and the crisis

Soedradjad Djiwandono, Governor of Bank Indonesia during the critical early months of the Asian crisis, had already written extensively on the period (including in this journal), but this book brings a more comprehensive version of his story to a wider audience. His focus is on central bank issues—the exchange rate, interest rates, capital flows and the insolvency of the banking system—but as these are the defining issues of the crisis, the book provides a rare and valuable contribution to the still-incomplete history of this painful period. This review puts his account in context and offers some commentary on the issues.     

Exchange Rates,Domestic Prices,and Central Bank Actions: Recent U.S. Experience

Central banks that are primarily concerned with the behavior of prices will use monetary policy to try to insulate prices from exchange rate changes. Prices then appear unresponsive to changes in the exchange rate. The observed relationships between prices and the exchange rate will reflect central bank actions instead of the underlying relationship between exchange rates and prices. This paper explicitly recognizes the role that policy plays in determining the observable relationships between exchange rates and prices, and in so doing, it illustrates how the underlying relationships can be unraveled. Using three different empirical approaches, we examine the recent experience of the United States. We find that the prices of various nondurable goods, and even of some services, respond modestly to the exchange rate, and we find that the responses emerge most clearly when the role of monetary policy is explicitly considered. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the Federal Reserve acts to mitigate the effects of exchange rate fluctuations on domestic prices.