“贱卖论”的前现代基因

刚刚有些偃旗息鼓的“国有银行贱卖”论战,在中国可能并不会真的成为过去“贱卖”的正当理由关于国有银行在引进国外战略投资者和海外上市的过程中存在“贱卖”的表征,《经济》杂志在《通往资本之路》(参见《经济》2005年第10期)一文中,已有阐述:“贱卖”自有“贱卖”的理由:外资参股中国金融机构的过程恰恰让我们看到,改革至今,我们的产权环境仍然很不尽如人意,以至于产权价值不得不大打折扣。这一判断直接得到汇金公司总经理谢平一段公开讲话的佐证。直接参与国有银行股改引进外资战略投资者的过程,在他的记忆中,“中行、建行的转让价格里…     

社会主义经济理论的重大创新--刘诗白教授专著《现代财富论》读后

我国著名经济学家、经济学界的泰斗刘诗白教授几十年如一日不断地进行着经济理论创新,特别是社会主义经济理论的创新。今天,呈现在我们面前的这部洋洋四十余万字的学术专著《现代财富论》（以下简称《专著》）,是他奉献的又一部经济理论创新之作,是创建当代中国社会主义政治经济学的一次新尝试,是对马克思的劳动价值理论创造性的继承和发展,更是对我国当前正在全面建设小康社会和构建和谐社会伟大实践强提供了有力的理论支撑。     

社会主义财富理论的新探索 国内学术界高度评价《现代财富论》

刘诗白教授新著《现代财富论》自今年初由三联书店出版发行以来．在学术界引起强烈反响。《人民日报》、《光明日报》、《经济日报》等媒体分别以“探讨现代财富及其源泉的力作”、“现代财富多样化的探讨”、“着力完善科技创新体系”为题，对该书作出高度评价。     

超越"公"与"私":论所有权的社会化变革

随着我国经济的迅速发展和生产社会化程度的不断提高,传统的偏私或偏公的观念,已难以对所有权社会化的趋势作出合理的经济学解释.所有权本身的逐渐衰落和约束的逐渐弱化,使得所有权发生着深刻的变革.超越"公"与"私",实现公与私观念的更新,建立现代社会化的产权制度就成为所有权变革的价值取向.这对于深化我国的经济体制改革具有十分重要的意义.     

当前中国银行业改革的若干战略思考

银行业改革的成功与否决定着中国金融改革的成败.中国银行业改革和打造国家金融安全体系的核心是银行产业组织效率的提升.国有银行体制转轨的路径选择应该是股权多元化的产权结构改革和放开行业管制的市场结构改革并重的综合改革.银行业应该在对外资开放的同时全面对内资,特别是民间投资者开放.     

Independent agencies: more than a cheap copy of independent central banks?

The rise of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) confronts governments with new challenges. More specifically, it raises the twin issue of (democratic) legitimacy of both the IRAs and of the delegating government once a large number of key areas of policymaking are moved outside its direct control. So, the effectiveness of IRAs depends on their interactions with the other branches of government and on governance arrangements that provide the right incentives to all stakeholders involved. To identify such models, this paper first reiterates the history of independent central banks, the prototype IRA. The main lesson from is that the independent central bank model is characterized by an independence-bias and that there is a growing realization that more attention needs to go to the entire governance model, as opposed to simply independence. Based on this lesson, the paper proposes a governance model for IRAs based on independence, accountability, transparency and integrity to provide the right incentives to all stakeholders. The last part of the paper empirically illustrates how policymakers are currently dealing with two of these four pillars—independence and accountability—when redesigning financial sector supervisors. More specifically we show that the virtuous interaction between independence and accountability is not (yet) always well understood.     

Comparative cheap talk

When are comparative statements credible? We show that simple complementarity conditions ensure that an expert with private information about multiple issues can credibly rank the issues for a decision maker. By restricting the expert's ability to exaggerate, multidimensional cheap talk of this form permits communication when it would not be credible in a single dimension. The communication gains can be substantial with even a couple of dimensions, and the complete ranking is asymptotically equivalent to full revelation as the number of issues becomes large. Nevertheless, partial rankings are sometimes more credible and/or more profitable for the expert than the complete ranking. Comparative cheap talk is robust to asymmetries that are not too large. Consequently, for sufficiently many independent issues, there are always some issues sufficiently symmetric to permit comparative cheap talk.     

The super-alertness of central banks

The Review of Austrian Economics - This paper applies Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurial alertness to central banking. As opposed to entrepreneurs operating within the market, central banks...     

The cost-output relationship of banks revisited

This paper offers a different method for the analysis of economies to scale in banks. It concentrates on the characteristics of the cost surface rather than on those of the cost function. This facilitates a direct test for the existence of interproduct complementarity in banks. The paper suggests that the interest charges should be examined as part of the banks' operating costs. This study offers two main empirical results regarding a more efficient growth pattern and organizational structure of banks. First, it shows that a proportionate increase in bank outputs does not reduce the average costs of production, and secondly, it reveals that the production process of banks involves interproduct complementarity.     

Costly optimizers versus cheap imitators

A dynamic model is constructed with two types of agents, optimizers and imitators. The mix between the two types evolves according to the relative average performances of the two groups. The main conclusion is that imitators may have as high a long-run ‘fitness’ as optimizers. The model is used to sort issues concerning the conventional hypothesis that everyone acts as if unboundedly rational.     

Reputational cheap talk with misunderstanding

We consider a cheap talk game with a sender who has a reputational concern for an ability to predict a state of the world correctly, and where receivers may misunderstand the message sent. When communication between the sender and each receiver is private, we identify an equilibrium in which the sender only discloses the least noisy information. Hence, what determines the amount of information revealed is not the absolute noise level of communication, but the extent to which the noise level may vary. The resulting threshold in transmission noise for which information is revealed may differ across receivers, but is unrelated to the quality of the information channel. When information transmission has to be public, a race to the bottom results: the cut-off level for noise of transmitted information now drops to the lowest cut-off level for any receiver in the audience.     

Multidimensional cheap talk with sequential messages

This paper studies a two-dimensional cheap talk game with two senders and one receiver. The senders possess the same information and sequentially send messages about that information. In one-dimensional sequential message cheap talk games where the state space is unbounded, the information is fully transmitted under the self-serving belief, as suggested by Krishna and Morgan (2001b). However, this result depends crucially on the structure of the one-dimensional model. It generally does not hold in two-dimensional models. We consider the extended self-serving belief, which implies full information transmission even if the self-serving belief cannot work. Then, we show that the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the fully revealing equilibrium is that the senders have opposing-biased preferences.     

The financial and economic performance of social banks

ABSTRACT

The financial crisis of 2008 provides evidence for the instability of the conventional banking system. Social banks may present a viable alternative for conventional banks. This article analyses the performance of social banks related to the bank business model, economic efficiency, asset quality, and stability by comparing social banks with banks where the difference is likely to be large, namely with the 30 global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) of the Financial Stability Board over the period 2000–2014. We also analyse the relative impact of the global financial crisis on the bank performance. The performance of social banks and G-SIBs is surprisingly similar.     

Are private banks more efficient than public banks?

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and, surprisingly, that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of production process, the bank's environment, management's risk preferences, the bank's activity mix or size, the econometric approach, or the introduction of deposit insurance. The policy conclusion is that the efficiency of the Russian banking system may benefit more from increased levels of competition and greater access of foreign banks than from bank privatization.