Reconsidering bank capital regulation: a new combination of rules,regulators, and market discipline

Despite revisions to bank capital standards, fundamental shortcomings remain: the rules for setting capital requirements need to be simpler, and resolution should be an essential part of the capital requirement framework.We propose a revised system of capital regulation that addresses these needs by making changes to all three pillars of bank regulation: only common equity should be recognized as regulatory capital, and risk weighting of assets should be abandoned; capital requirements should be assigned on an institution-by-institution basis according to a regulatory (s, S) approach developed in the paper; a standard for prompt, corrective action is incorporated into the (s, S) approach.     

Financing,reputation and information disclosure quality in the Chinese market

In this article, we propose a theoretical model based on the reputation theory and hypothesize a positive relation between the information disclosure quality and the company’s refinancing decision. We collected data from the listed companies, which refinances in Shenzhen main board and SME board during 2006–2012, as a panel sample, and tested the hypothesis empirically. The results indicate that there exists a significant positive correction short-term relation between refinancing decision and the information disclosure quality, but in the long term the relationship between the information disclosure quality and refinancing decision is not significant.     

Firm location,political geography and environmental information disclosure

As the subjective and objective factors that influence corporate behaviours, political region and firm location are of great importance to environmental information disclosure (EID). With spatial and political geography as a research perspective, this article makes a study by using the samples of manufacturing listed companies from 2009 to 2011. As a result, we determine that regulatory distance and political geography had negative effects on EID, while political geography weakens regulatory distance’s function. After considering an enterprise’s administrative rank, we determined that when the rank is higher, regulatory distance has negative effects on EID; when the rank is lower, the effects are the opposite. Regarding political geography, it always weakened the regulatory distance’s function. Moreover, the effects are significant only when the enterprises had low governmental regulation. The study shows the effects that firm location and political geography have made on EID. At the same time, this study also gives theoretical and empirical evidence to the necessity of raising governmental regulatory effectiveness.     

Environmental information disclosure in capital raising

In 2010, the Chinese Government issued a policy to require enterprises to disclose environmental information. Using the environmental disclosure information of 204 Chinese listed companies in 20 polluting sectors over the period of 2011–2015, we find that managers tend to withhold environmental information and selectively disguise sensitive environmental information in the face of financial pressure, and where the disclosure of sensitive environmental information would significantly increase the cost of debt financing. Furthermore, agency conflicts and information asymmetry between managers and outside investors promote the managers' tendencies to withhold environmental information when facing financial pressure.     

The impact of the French financial transaction tax on HFT activities and market quality

Based on the first results, the French government estimates that the tax on cancelled orders, considered as tax on High Frequency Trading (HFT), generated no revenue in 2012. Our paper question the effectiveness of a modified cancelled order tax with no exemptions, all orders cancelled or modified within half-second time span are taxed. Our study has important implications for the regulation of HFT; we provide recommendations for regulators in relation to market rules which have yet to be introduced, using an artificial market framework. This paper addresses the question of whether this tax leads to a reduction in HFT activities and, as a result, to deterioration or amelioration of market quality. The evidence we provide should help market regulators to better understand the role played by HFT firms as liquidity suppliers. We show that HFT liquidity is short-lived. With the implementation of tax, decreased HFT activities do not have a statistically significant impact on market volatility and market liquidity measured by bid/ask spreads, but decrease dollar volumes as a liquidity measure. In addition, reduced HFT activities lead to less efficient markets as the deviation from fundamentals increases.     

The product market opportunity loss of mandated disclosure

In the interests of protecting decision makers in the financial markets, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly traded companies to publicly disclose certain accounting information. Such disclosure requirements however create a potential opportunity loss. They may destroy firms’ opportunities for implementing an alternative information acquisition and exchange regime – one that would optimize the firms’ product market profits. Nevertheless, we show that despite the previous imposition of an opportunity loss, firms may still favor future increased disclosure requirements. Finally, when information cost declines, although firms’ welfare may decrease, their desire for increased disclosure requirements always strengthens.     

The impact of the market transparency unit for fuels on gasoline prices in Germany

Increasing horizontal as well as vertical transparency in oligopolistic markets can be advantageous for consumers, due to reduced search costs. However, market transparency can also affect incentives to deviate from collusive agreements and the punishment by rival firms in the market. Using a panel of 27 European countries, we analyse the impact of increased market transparency via the introduction of a market transparency unit for fuels in Germany. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence that both gasoline and diesel prices have increased. While consumers may be better off using a retail price app for fuels, gas stations are also able to compare prices at almost no cost.     

浅谈财务信息公开与商业秘密的保护

揭示了企业信息公开的必要性与企业商业秘密保护的重要性。财务信息的公开与商业秘密的保护表面上看是矛盾的,但如能正确处理好这两者之间的关系,就能促使企业实现规范化管理,促进企业健康有序的发展。     

The impact of expenditure rules on budgetary discipline over the cycle

We study the impact of expenditure rules on the propensity for governments to deviate from their expenditure plans in response to surprising cyclical developments. Theoretical considerations suggest that due to political fragmentation in the budgetary process expenditure policy might be prone to a procyclical bias. However, this tendency may be mitigated by strictly enforced expenditure rules. These hypotheses are tested against data from a panel of EU Member States. Our key findings are that (1) deviations between actual and planned government expenditure tend to be positively related to output gap surprises, and (2) expenditure rules reduce this procyclical bias. These results are particularly pronounced when the analysis is confined to spending items with a high degree of budgetary flexibility.     

The impact of public and semi-public information on cotton futures market

This study estimated the impact of all major public and semi-public reports on the cotton futures market from 1995 through 2012. The estimation was based on the event study approach with the events measured by the release of five major reports: Export Sales, Crop Progress, World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) and Prospective Plantings (public reports from US Department of Agriculture) and Cotton This Month (semi-public report from International Cotton Advisory Committee). The best-fitting IGARCH(1,1)-t model that accounted for the day-of-week, seasonality and stock levels was used to measure the report effects on daily nearby cotton close-to-close futures returns. Prospective Plantings and WASDE reports appeared to be the most important sources of information in the cotton markets moving the conditional standard deviation of returns by an average of 14.4 and 9.6 percentage points, respectively. However, significant market reaction was not found for the other three reports. Our analysis revealed that, in the presence of clustering, ignoring the impact of other reports would have resulted in about 18% overestimation of WASDE impact.     

Information disclosure and price manipulation during the pre-closing session: evidence from an order-driven market

On 20 February 2012, the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation launched an order-matching simulation mechanism for five minutes during the start of the pre-closing session, in order to increase information disclosure during this period (13:25–13:30). Pre-closing information disclosure significantly reduces both trading costs and closing-price volatility, as well as price manipulation. The decrease in price manipulation found in this work is due to pre-closing information disclosure, not the behaviour of investors shifting to an earlier time. Further, if a stock price rises or falls by more than 3.5% in the simulation in the last minute during the closing session, trading of the stock will be suspended for two minutes from 13:31 to reduce volatility. However, this trading mechanism (suspended-closing) does not seem to have achieved the intended goals of the authorities, as it has not been able to significantly reduce closing-price volatility and price manipulation.     

Distance and government resource allocation: from the perspective of environmental information disclosure policy change

This article investigates the relationship between environmental information and government resources and focuses on the moderate effect of distance. The results show that (1) the promulgation and implementation of the Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information (MDEI) can improve the level and quality of environmental information and then increase resource allocation and (2), after the MDEI are issued, distance has a significant negative moderate effect on the positive impact of MDEI, and the negative moderate effect of distance is more significant in low GDP and marketization regions, high-polluting industries and firms audited by the non-Big 4 accounting firms.     

Incentives to (not) disclose energy performance information in the housing market

Disclosure of energy performance certificates (EPCs) is often incomplete, which hampers their effectiveness in relieving information asymmetries between landlords and tenants in the housing market. Even when a certificate is available, landlords do not always disclose it. This contradicts the unraveling result, according to which all landlords should disclose quality information unless it is costly to do so. We leverage a cross-sectional dataset of residential rental advertisements from the Belgian region of Brussels to empirically evaluate incentives to disclose an EPC. We find that two fundamental assumptions for the unraveling result are not confirmed in our setting: tenants do not necessarily value energy performance of rental property and do not appear to rationally adjust their expectations when faced with dwellings that withhold their EPC. The paper formulates specific policy advice for reforming EPC mechanisms to increase disclosure rates.     

The impact of foreign capital on the Chinese banking market

In China, the foreign capital share of banks was restricted to 25% until 2006. Does such a relatively low share of foreign capital have any impact on the banking sector? In this paper, we use panel data on 19 major banks during 1996–2004 to shed light on the impact of foreign capital participation on the Chinese banking industry. We find that although the operating performance of foreign-owned banks is basically worse than that of domestic banks, as the market share of foreign-owned banks rises, they improve. For domestic banks, non-interest income decreases, while interest income increases. Therefore, the net effect of the foreign-owned banks' share on the profitability of domestic banks is small.     

商业银行信息披露真实性监管的博弈研究

本文用博弈论方法研究分析在商业银行信息披露监管过程中存在的真实性问题,认为加强信息披露监管可以提高金融体系稳定性和效率。通过建立信息披露监管博弈模型,得出在多个监管者条件下,监管者即使接收到信号是虚假信息也认为是真实信息的概率增大的结论。针对我国银行信息披露中存在的问题,提出了完善惩戒机制、建立监管协调机制、加强市场约束和监管问责等政策建议。     

Impact of environmental information disclosure and real estate segments on cost of debt: Evidence from the Chinese real estate industry

The novel part of this paper is to examine the individual and joint effects of the real estate segments (RETs) and environmental information disclosure (EID) on the cost of debt (COD) in the real estate industry in China. Building on extant literature, using 1,250 firm‐year observations from 2006 to 2016 and applying both Feasible General Least Squares and Two‐stage Least Squares Instrumental Variable approaches, we provide evidence that the commercial RET leads to an increase in the COD, while EID leads to a decrease in the COD. The joint effects of the RETs and EID on the COD indicate a significantly positive relationship with the COD. This signifies that even with the increased levels of EID in commercial real estate sectors, its COD is higher than for residential real estate sectors. These findings have important policy implications for environmental risk assessments for real estate sectors, their lending institutions and wider stakeholder groups.     

上市公司社会责任信息披露:问题与对策

企业社会责任是企业与社会经济发展到一定历史阶段的产物。从长期来看,企业积极履行社会责任可以提高生产效率,增强企业凝聚力,有助于帮助企业避免风险,促进企业的持续发展。在国际大环境的推动下,我国越来越重视企业的社会责任。目前,在年报中披露企业社会责任信息已成为上市公司一项基本信息披露职责。本文分析了我国上市公司社会责任信息披露存在的问题、剖析问题的原因,并针对性提出改进建议。     

The role of short selling threat in corporate environmental disclosure strategies: Evidence from China

Using staggered deregulation of short sales constraints in the Chinese capital market, this study investigates how short selling threat related to corporate environmental disclosure strategies. Our study finds that pilot firms experience a larger increase in hard disclosures, and a larger decrease in soft disclosures after short selling deregulation. Specifically, the increase in hard disclosure is found primarily at good environmental performers, whereas the decrease in soft disclosure is primarily found at poor environmental performers. Further analysis shows that the increase in hard disclosure and the decrease in soft disclosure is significantly more pronounced at firms that are covered by small number of media and analysts, with low institutional ownership and stock liquidity. Overall, our findings suggest that firms might change the type of environmental disclosure to mitigate their exposures to short selling threat, and provide evidence of the disciplining effect of short sales on environmental disclosures.     

银行理财产品信息披露制度刍议

近年来银行理财业务在迅猛发展的同时也产生了一系列问题，其中由于信息披露而引发的矛盾尤为突出。受金融市场发育程度、金融监管体制与立法技术的制约，立法与监管机构对银行理财产品在信息披露方面的规制尚存不足。信息披露是规范市场的基础，有利于保护投资者合法权益，维护金融秩序，完善我国银行理财产品信息披露制度。