Connecting National Safety Nets: The Dialectics of the Basel II Contracting Process

Basel II consists of supervisory guidelines negotiated by representatives of central banks and national regulatory commissions that were members of the Basel committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). The BCBS is itself a regulatory response to globalization, which is connecting national safety nets in market-driven ways. A country’s financial safety net is a social contract established by short-lived agents for principals in long-lived economic sectors. Restraints placed on the authority of the BCBS members to contract for their principals by domestic politics explains: why Basel II authorizes individual countries to implement the agreement in markedly different ways; why US implementation of Basel II ran into so much doubt, controversy, and delay; and how the implementation debate set small and large banks and the Federal Reserve and other federal regulators against one another.

Basel II and Bankers’ Propensity to Take or Avoid Excessive Risk

Both Basel I and Basel II are concerned (indeed, obsessed) with risk taking by bankers. But risk is an essential part of banking. The essential issues are “when are such risks excessive and does Basel II effectively constrain bankers from taking excessive risks?” I answer these questions by outlining alternative definitions of excessive risk and analyzing the extent to which Basel II deals effectively with this risk. I find the Basel II measures both costly and inadequate, and likely increase excessive risk taking. I conclude with a preferable alternative procedure – including subordinated debt fully in required capital and prompt corrective action based on prestructured capital/asset ratios.     

新巴塞尔资本协议与商业银行操作风险管理

操作风险正日益成为全球银行业风险管理的研究焦点。新巴塞尔协议将操作风险纳入风险管理框架，为其设定新的资本要求。目前我国的商业银行缺乏风险意识，尤其是在操作风险方面基本没有什么量化操作风险的科学方法，不能正确反映所承受的风险，操作风险的管理水平亟待提高。本文首先对操作风险进行界定，分析其主要特点，之后从国际和国内两方面对操作风险现状进行考察，阐述了新巴塞尔协议中操作风险的计量方法并对其进行评述，最后介绍了操作风险管理流程，并对我国商业银行操作风险管理的策略选择提出建议。     

国际银行业统一监管体系的发展与完善

布雷顿森林体系解体以来,银行业发展迅速,机构跨国化,业务多样化以及创新工具不断涌现,金融危机频发,急需一个有效的国际统一监管体系。巴塞尔委员会自1975年成立以来,对国际银行统一监管发挥了重要作用,文章就巴塞尔协议这35年以来的发展趋势进行了研究,并试图找出新协议的缺陷和仍需继续改进的地方,提出进一步完善的重点。     

Implications of Basel II for Different Bank Ownership Patterns in Europe

This paper explains that Basel II has different implications for stakeholder-owned (mutual) and stockholder banks in the European Union. Some strategic paths for stakeholder-owned banks are proposed as a response to the Stockholder Value Maximization goals Basel II implicitly advances. Even though empirical evidence indicates that capital strength and risk-taking exposures do not differ across bank ownership structures, SME lending and other characteristic specializations of stakeholder banks promise to generate high capital charges. However, improved corporate-governance practices and cooperative securitization and risk-management activities can reduce the compliance costs and risk-taking constraints mutual banks might experience from shifting to a Stakeholder Value Maximization Model. For all EU banks irrespective of their ownership structure, the analysis stresses that establishing an incentive-compatible cross-country safety-net scheme poses a critical challenge.

新巴塞尔协议与我国银行业监管改革

巴塞尔协议是一个对全球银行活动有着深刻影响的国际性银行监督管理合约,代表着银行业风险管理的未来方向。我国已表示接受巴塞尔协议。这将促进我国银行业全面加强风险管理,推进监管的规范化、全程化,保证监管的持续性和有效性。文章从研究新巴塞尔协议出发,探讨如何改革我国     

美国棕色地带成因初探

棕色地带概念（即因现实的或潜在的环境污染而被废弃的工商业设施）在美国形成并发展到极致。美国城市发展和复兴中政府的中心任务是棕色地带再开发。本文主要对美国棕色地带形成的原因进行了探讨。工业化的衰退给城市留下了“棕色地带”遗产；郊区蔓延发展和土地使用决策尤其是分区制促使棕色地带由中心城市向老郊区蔓延；种族歧视和经济歧视使棕色地带纵深发展。而随着全球化的发展，棕色地带从发达国家扩展到发展中国家，成为全球的现象。     

轮胎“特保案”美国的真正目的

背景 美国总统奥巴马9月11日宣布，对所有从中国进口的小轿车和轻型卡车轮胎实施惩罚性关税。 美国钢铁工人联合会今年4月以中国对美轮胎出口扰乱美国市场为由，向美国国际贸易委员会提出申请，对中国产乘用车轮胎发起特保调查。     

后冷战时期中国人对美国的看法与思考

冷战结束后,中国人对美国的看法是多方面、多层次的,包括对美国的政治、经济、文化、社会、思想、对外政策等等的认识,而且那些看法是变动不居的,要对他们在各个问题上的看法作出准确的统计和精确的判断,是相当困难的.如果需要找到一个词来概括中国人在冷战后认识和思考美国问题的最基本和最普遍的特征,那么"疑虑"可能是最恰如其分的.不论是从思考的起点,思考的心理状态,还是目前思考所处的状态等哪一方面看,都是如此.     

The effects of the United States granting MFN status to Vietnam

Conclusions In this paper, the direct impacts on Vietnam’s trading opportunities of the U.S. granting MFN treatment were first estimated by building up from the resulting level of tariffs applied to individual traded goods. Then, the economic impacts on Vietnam were inferred, using simulations with the Global Trade Analysis model. The results revealed that the increased market access to the United States brings significant welfare gains to Vietnam. The direct terms of trade improvement resulting from increased market access accounts for 60 percent of the total gain, with the remaining 40 percent derived from second-best induced gains in efficiency. Exports to the United States more than doubled, from $338 million to $768 million.¹³ The estimated increase in exports of clothing is especially significant, with these exports increasing almost fifteenfold, while exports of agricultural commodities decreased slightly. Total welfare as measured by Equivalent Variation increased by $ 118 million or 0.9 percent increase in real expenditure per capita. By granting MFN status to Vietnam, the United States also gains from improved resource allocation, although some of the gains are offset by deterioration in its terms of trade. The gains for the United States were estimated to be around $56 million per year.     

Migration of professional manpower to the United States

The results of an investigation of the immigration of professionals to the United States are presented. The data concern a sample of professionals from 17 developing and developed countries who were immigrants in 1969. Both direct and indirect immigration are considered, and special attention is paid to the constraints on professional immigration and the adjustment of status imposed by immigration policies. The results suggest that the relative wage rate is more strongly related to the brain drain than is relative income and that more restrictive policies concerning labor certification would probably prove effective in reducing the student brain drain in the short term.     

The fertility of the Irish in the United States in 1910

The relatively high marital fertility of the Irish in the United States in the 19th century has long been interpreted as evidence for the persistence of a distinctive Irish culture in the United States. This claim echoes a similar view of Irish-American marriage patterns. Recent work has shown that the marriage patterns of the Irish in the United States were similar to native-born whites with similar occupational and other characteristics. This paper studies the reasons for the high fertility of Irish-Americans in 1910. Irish-born women in that year had much larger families than the typical native-born woman, and little of the difference can be attributed to other characteristics. Second-generation Irishwomen were less distinctive in this regard, although even they differed from the natives primarily because of a different proclivity to have a large family. Our results signal the complexity of immigrant adjustment to a new environment; the Irish largely abandoned one aspect of Irish demographic behavior while clinging to another.     

Did nordic countries recognize the gathering storm of World War II? Evidence from the bond markets

This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who perceived a significantly increased threat of war between 1938 and early 1940. At the same time, historical methods face problems when it comes to capturing the often tacitly held beliefs of a large number of people in the past. In this paper, we analyze these assessments by looking at sudden shifts in sovereign debt yields and spreads in the Nordic bond markets at that time. Our results suggest that Nordic contemporaries indeed perceived significant war risk increases around the time of major war-related geopolitical events. While these findings question some—but not all—of standard Nordic World War II historiography, they also demonstrate the value of analyzing historical market prices to reassess the often tacitly held views and opinions of large groups of people in the past.     

美国银行法改革探析

20世纪80年代以来,以放公管制为特征的金融自由化改革在主要发达国家不断深化,美国世纪末的银行法改革具有划时代意义,它将开辟世界范围的银行业、保险业和证券业混业经营的新纪元。然而此次银行法改革的核心内容,正是30年代金融管制体系建立时期所刻意强调的。本文回顾30年代金融服务业分业经营体系建立的背景,及此后金融管制理论的变革,分析80年代以来美国银行法改革的动因,以及世纪末金融服务现代化法案的主要内容和影响。