我国的利益集团及其治理

改革开放以来,我国出现了政治的、商业的、社团的和潜在的四种类型利益集团,它们对社会具有利、害的双重影响。需要国家的介入对之进行扬抑。     

GOVERNMENT FRAGMENTATION AND BUDGETARY POLICY IN "GOOD" AND "BAD" TIMES IN FLEMISH MUNICIPALITIES

Using a panel of budgetary data over the period 1989–1996, we analyse how political fragmentation of Flemish local governments affects their reactions in the context of a major reform of the grant system. This reform reallocated grants among municipalities and thus unavoidably created "winners" and "losers". Thus, it is possible to distinguish between political reactions in good and bad times. The presence of a balanced budget requirement implies that in bad times municipalities have to react whereas in good times the decision to react is endogenous to the government. The results are in line with the hypotheses, if not the findings, of Kontopoulos and Perotti (1999) in that we find that fragmentation is important both in good and in bad times. Coalition size – the number of political parties – plays a crucial role when the budgetary shock is endogenous (in "good times" when grants increase). In this case, we find that more-party governments spend more of the additional funds. On the other hand, cabinet size – the number of spending ministers (aldermen) – is the relevant dimension of fragmentation when the reaction is exogenous (in "bad times"). When grants are cut back, expenditures are cut back more in municipalities with fewer ministers.     

Insider trading returns and dividend signals

The literature shows that insider trading activities and dividends contain information content and serve as signals to firm value. If insider return is a proxy for information asymmetry, we should expect a positive relation between dividends and insider returns. Using a sample of unambiguous (good and bad) news concerning earnings and dividend announcements from Hong Kong firms, we show that information asymmetry is stronger for bad news firms with insider sales than good news firms with insider purchases. In addition, we improve the methodology of Khang and King [Khang, K., & King, T. H. D. (2006). Does dividend policy relate to cross-sectional variation in information asymmetry? Evidence from returns to insider trades. Financial Management, 35, 71–94] and provide evidence that dividend is a credible signal for measuring information asymmetry.     

Is fiscal expansion more effective in a financial crisis?

After the Great Recession, the Keynesian expansionary policy has been regarded as an effective measure, especially under imperfect financial market conditions. Among literature related to fiscal policy in financial crises, Fernández-Villaverde (2010) suggests that the fiscal policy multiplier increases in a financial crisis through the Fisher effect. However, we should note that the author simply compared the multiplier computed in the standard new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) with that in the DSGE with financial accelerator settings. As the financial accelerator is considered effective during both financial crises and normal financial conditions, the author’s comparison should be considered insignificant for showing a greater multiplier in the financial crisis. In this study, to make the exact comparison, we first estimate parameters regarding the Fisher effect under each regime separately and then compute and compare the estimated fiscal multipliers using these 2 estimates in the same DSGE model. Using Japanese financial data that provide enough observations under the good and bad regimes of financial conditions, we find that fiscal multipliers are smaller in the bad regime than in the good regime.     

Cyclicality of taxes and external debt

In their work, Vegh and Vuletin have shown that statutory tax rates are acyclical in developed economies and procyclical in developing ones. This article extends their analysis by checking the interaction of statutory tax rates with countries’ external public debt. In general, we found that the value added tax rates are changed procyclically in both developed and developing countries (i.e. taxes are raised in bad times and reduced in good times). However, when the external debt is high, in the developing countries the procyclicality increases, while the opposite result holds for developed economies. This pattern occurs mainly in times of recession, when the need for loans is the highest. Although we found that there was a reduction in procyclicality after the 2000s, these findings pose a challenge to policy-makers, who should think of ways of dealing with lack of foreign funds in difficult times.     

The effects of insider trading on insiders effort in good and bad times

We analyze the effects of insider trading on insiders' effort decisions and on the value of firms. We consider a situation in which the final output of a firm and the productivity of managerial effort will depend on whether the firm is in a good or a bad state. When the state is not verifiable, the managerial contract cannot be made explicitly contingent on it: consequently, a contract that does not allow for insider trading would lead to the insiders' facing the same incentive scheme in good and bad times. Under a contract that allows for insider trading, however, insiders will buy shares on receiving (ahead of the market) good news and will sell shares on receiving bad news; consequently, they will end up facing different incentive scheme in good and bad times. Whether this effect is desirable depends on how the marginal productivity of managerial effort in good times compares with that in bad times. In particular, we show that allowing insider trading may improve managers' effort decisions and consequently may increase corporate value and benefit shareholders.     

Nonparametric measures of efficiency in the presence of undesirable outputs: a by-production approach

In empirical research on productivity measurement adjusted for undesirable outputs on the side, the good and the bad outcomes are treated as joint products of the underlying production process. In the present paper, following Murty, Russell, and Levkoff, we conceptualize the good output as technologically separable from the bad output. Joint disposability is assumed between the bad output and the polluting input, rather than weak disposability and null jointness between the good and bad outputs. Moreover, we set up an integrated DEA optimization problem over the intersection of these two subtechnologies to measure the efficiency of a firm that produces a bad output alongside the good output. In an empirical illustration of our methodology, we use country-level data for an unbalanced panel of 64 countries over the years 1986 through 2011 where per capita GDP is the good and per capita \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) emission is the bad output. We then utilize our DEA results to compute opportunity costs of a targeted reduction in \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) emission in terms of required dollar amounts of reduction in per capita GDP for the individual countries in selected years.     

Selection in asset markets: the good, the bad, and the unknown

In this paper, we use a series of simple examples to illustrate how wealth-driven selection works in a market for Arrow securities. Our analysis delivers both a good and a bad message. The good message is that, when traders invest constant fractions of their wealth in each asset and have equal consumption rates, markets are informationally efficient: the best informed agent is rewarded and asset prices eventually reflect this information. However, and this is the bad message, when asset demands are not constant fractions of wealth but dependent upon prices, markets might behave sub-optimally. In this case, asymptotic prices depend on preferences and beliefs of the whole ecology of traders and do not, in general, reflect the best available information. We show that the key difference between the two cases lies in the local, i.e. price dependent, versus global nature of wealth-driven selection.     

Cournot-Nash and Lindahl equilibria in pure public “bad” economies

Summary. Using a general equilibrium framework, this paper analyzes the equilibrium provision of a pure public bad commodity (for example pollution). Considering a finite economy with one desired private good and one pure public “bad” we explicitly introduce the concept of Lindahl equilibrium and the Lindahl prices into a pure public bad economy. Then, the Lindahl provision is analyzed and compared with the Cournot-Nash provision. The main results for economies with heterogeneous agents state that the asymptotic Lindahl allocation of the pure public bad is the null allocation. In contrast, the asymptotic Cournot-Nash provision of the public bad might approach infinity. Other results were obtained in concert with the broad analysis of the large finite economies with pure public bad commodities. Received: July 26, 2001; revised version: March 12, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are indebt to Nicholas Yannelis and anonymous referee for their valuable comments and suggestions. Correspondence to: B. Shitovitz     

The effects of workplace learning in higher education on employment and match quality: is there an early-career trade-off?

We investigate whether the choice for a higher education program with a substantial workplace learning component entails an early-career trade-off between on the one hand higher employment chances and better initial matches (when opting for a program with workplace learning) and on the other hand a lower risk of bad match persistence (when opting for a program without workplace learning). To this end, we rely on longitudinal data of Belgian graduates that track their careers up until the age of 29. We model the program choice, the transition to a good match and the preceding transition to a bad match simultaneously. To account for non-random selection into programs and into bad matches, the Timing of Events method is combined with an exclusion restriction. After accounting for observed and unobserved heterogeneity, we do not find evidence for a trade-off. This result contributes to the debate about the efficiency of vocationalizing tertiary education programs through the implementation of workplace learning.     

中国股票市场对政策信息的不平衡性反应研究

本文将影响股票市场的政策信息区分为"好消息"和"坏消息"。通过 EGARCH 模型研究中国股票市场对"好消息"与"坏消息"的不平衡性反应,指出"好消息"对我国股票市场的影响大于"坏消息"的影响,这与国外股票市场的情况正好相反。根据这一结果本文创建了"信息效应曲线",具体分析我国股票市场对"好消息"与"坏消息"的不平衡性反应的特征,提出现有交易机制下的股价波动模式。     

中国问题银行退出路径研究——基于国际比较视角

完善的市场退出机制是一个成熟、高效金融市场应具备的特征之一。市场竞争的结果有好有坏，市场应该有进有退，劣汰才能优胜，银行业建立平稳有序的退出通道、纠错机制是完善市场的重要组成部分。相对于发达国家，中国问题银行市场退出还存在政府干预过多，政府主导行政色彩浓厚，处置手段和路径单一，规则不透明、不确定，法律不健全等问题，对此应采取救助、收购或兼并、重组、接管、解散、撤销、破产等路径选择。     

Some thoughts about referendums, representative democracy, and separation of powers

Referendums have experienced some sort of a comeback. Citizen involvement in political decisions is seen increasingly as a healthy add-on in democratic polities. While earlier writers on democratic theory often saw a danger in increased participation of citizens, more recently several authors suggest that this participation should be fostered. I argue in this paper that both sides in the debate neglect important aspects of referendums. Discussing whether direct participation by the citizens is a good or bad thing addresses only half the story. More precisely, we have to get a better idea about how referendums interact with the traditional institutions of representative democracy.     

银行资产证券化的风险自留监管：作用机制和福利效果

本文首先建立了一个两期模型的理论框架,分析当银行将信息不透明的资产通过证券化卖给连续统个市场投资者时,风险自留监管的效果。基本模型的分析发现:首先,单一风险自留比例不具有普适性;最优风险自留比例与基础资产的风险收益特征、交易双方的风险态度都密切相关。其次,风险自留监管会降低差资产证券化数量的有效信息含量,从而加剧逆向选择程度;而对于好资产,又存在发信号成本。本文进而从道德风险的角度证明,银行的风险态度会影响单一风险自留要求是否能够提高银行监督贷款的激励。因此,在实施风险自留监管时,政府应当结合银行和投资者的风险规避程度等具体情况有针对性地进行,从而比单一风险自留监管更好地提高社会福利。     

Credit quality and technical efficiency in banking

We estimate banks’ technical efficiency using directional distance functions, a generalization of the radial distance functions that allow us to credit banks for their efforts to increase outputs and decrease resource use and bad loans. We find that once bad loans are considered, banks’ efficiency increases significantly. In addition, omitting bad loans may result in the underestimation of the performance of good credit quality banks. These results suggest that a significant aspect of banking production, credit quality, needs to be considered when evaluating banks’ performances for regulatory purposes.     

金融企业呆账处理宜采取的会计和税收政策

金融企业呆账处理的会计和税收政策,直接影响到企业的经营成果和税收负担.通过对我国金融企业现行呆账处理的会计和税收政策进行分析,就发现其存在的问题.应当根据我国国情,借鉴国际经验,在会计政策上进一步细化有关规定,以提高其可操作性;在税收政策上,宜用注销法代替准备金法确认和扣除企业呆账损失,以体现税收中性原则.     

Macroeconomic News and the Euro/Dollar Exchange Rate

This paper investigates to what extent daily movements in the euro/dollar rate were driven by news about the macroeconomic situation in the USA and the euro area during the first two years of EMU. We examine whether market participants reacted to news in different ways depending on whether the news came from the USA or from the euro area, and whether the news was good or bad. Furthermore, we investigate whether traders' reaction to news has changed over time. We find that macroeconomic news has a statistically significant correlation with daily movements of the euro against the dollar. However, this relationship exhibits considerable time variation. There are indications of asymmetric response, but to different extents at different times. Our results also provide evidence that the market seemed to ignore good news and remain fixated on bad news from the euro area, as often claimed in market commentaries, but only for some time. Finally, we find evidence that the impact of macroeconomic news on the euro/dollar rate was stronger when news switches from good to bad or vice versa.
(J.E.L.: F31).     

Shadow directional distance functions with bads: GMM estimation of optimal directions and efficiencies

Because of its greater flexibility, the directional distance function (DDF) has been employed with increasing frequency to estimate multiple-input and multiple-output production, where inputs and outputs can be good or bad. However, typically researchers make three restrictive assumptions. First, they assume a direction of movement of firm production toward the frontier. Second, they assume that actual quantities of inputs and outputs are allocatively or price efficient. Third, they assume exogeneity of all inputs and all outputs, except for the normalized one. The first contribution of this paper is to include parameters to estimate optimal directions which correspond to the firm’s profit-maximizing (PM) position. The second contribution is to generalize the DDF to a shadow-quantity DDF. This entails adding distortion parameters to each input and output quantity of the DDF, creating shadow quantities. To estimate the shadow quantities and the structural parameters, we form the shadow DDF system, which includes the shadow DDF and all the first-order price equations from the shadow-PM problem. These include prices for bad inputs and bad outputs, where we approximate their missing prices for use in their first-order price equations. The third contribution is that we estimate the shadow DDF system using a Generalized Method of Moments approach, where all variables are potentially endogenous. This approach is simpler than the Bayesian one employed in Atkinson et al. (Estimating efficient production with bad inputs and outputs using latent prices and optimal directions. Working paper, University of Georgia, Athens, 2016), which estimated shadow prices and optimal directions. Using the same data set, both sets of results are qualitatively very similar, although they differ somewhat quantitatively.     

Paying politicians

We consider a society that has to elect an official who provides a public service for the citizens. Potential candidates differ in their competence and every potential candidate has private information about his opportunity cost to perform the task of the elected official. We develop a new citizen candidate model with a unique equilibrium to analyze citizens' candidature decisions. Under some weak additional assumptions, bad candidates run with a higher probability than good ones, and for unattractive positions, good candidates free-ride on bad ones. We also analyze the comparative static effects of wage increases and cost of running on the potential candidates' entry decisions.     

企业融资中的控制权安排与企业家的激励

在企业融资中,企业家不仅关心项目的货币收益,而且关心非货币收益,而投资者仅仅关心货币收益。考虑到双方的融资合同是不完全的且企业家受到财富约束,一份初始的激励合同通常无法解决双方存在的潜在利益冲突。作为一个结果,控制权安排(即谁做出关键性决策)是金融合同的一个重要维度。Aghion-Bolton(1992)集中于事后有效率。他们证明了,条件控制在一些环境下是均衡的控制权安排。然而,Hart(2001)提出了一个质疑:他们的模型忽略了一个重要的变量,即努力。通过引入企业家的事前努力,本文解释了为什么控制权在坏状态而不是在好状态转移给投资者。更进一步,本文发现,金融约束的程度大小决定了项目的均衡控制权安排。