“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.     

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.     

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.     

国有银行改革的成本和收益

四家国有商业银行改革的成本和收益需从多角度来考察,从财务角度来看,四家银行通过剥离不良贷款,注资、股改上市带来巨大收益;从社会成本来看,高利差以及高不良贷款率意味着社会为国有商业银行支付较高的隐性成本;从历史角度来看,国有商业银行垄断国家金融业数十年,从理论上说,应当为出资人和国家贡献利润和超额利润,但是,高成本消耗了这种利润的大部分。总体来说,四家国有商业银行的改革是成功的,但并非四家国有商业银行的成功。     

A note on cheap talk and burned money

Austen-Smith and Banks [Cheap talk and burned money, J. Econ. Theory 91(1) (2000) 1-16] study how money burning can expand the set of pure cheap talk equilibria of Crawford and Sobel [Strategic information transmission, Econometrica 50(6) (1982) 1431-1451]. I identify an error in the main Theorem of Austen-Smith and Banks, and provide a variant that preserves some of the important implications. I also prove that cheap talk can be influential with money burning if and only if it can be influential without money burning. This strengthens a result of Austen-Smith and Banks, but uncovers other errors in their analysis. Finally, an open conjecture of theirs is proved correct.     

Minority banks and minority communities: Are minority banks good neighbors?

The lagging development of many minority communities has had an adverse effect on economic growth in the United States. One factor historically associated with creating or exacerbating this minority problem is the unwillingness of banks to service minority communities adequately. The federal government used two initiatives to address banks' reluctance to aid minorities: the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that ended the practice of redlining and required all federally regulated banks to demonstrate that they served the convenience and credit needs of their local communities, particularly minorities, women, and other underserved groups, and the establishment and preservation of minority owned banks that were expected to be more sympathetic to the needs of their communities. This paper evaluates the extent to which minority banks have met the needs of minority communities. The assessment is conducted in the context of the ratings received by minority banks on their Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) audits. Through the use of CRA audits, the performance of minority banks is also compared to the performance of the general banking community to determine the validity and success of the government's minority banking initiative. Analysis of CRA audit ratings also compares the performance of minority banks among different ethnicities.     

Commercial banks and real estate lending: The Texas experience

This paper examines the performance of Texas commercial banks specializing in mortgage lending during the difficult times of the late 1980s and early 1990s to investigate how representative their experience as compared with that of banks concentrating in real estate lending across the country. The results show that Texas REBs performed very poorly during the 1980s and early 1990s, but this was because the Texas REBs were clearly different from the majority of the banks classified as REBs in the rest of the country. In contract to non-Texas real estate specializing banks, those in Texas banks put substantial assets into much riskier construction and development loans, and in loans on commercial property, such as office buildings, hotels and shopping centers. In a poor real estate market, these loans performed very poorly. The analysis indicates that the Texas experience is not a basis for rejecting the view that the commercial bank industry can safely replace the declining thrift industry as a major source of residential mortgage financing.     

Central banks and their banknote series: The efficiency-cost trade-off

One of the most important results of theoretical research on currency systems is that spacing denominations apart by a factor of two is better than a factor of three as this lowers the average number of notes and coins exchanged in transactions. These theoretical studies also claim that an efficient denominational mix has the additional benefit of keeping down the production costs incurred by the central bank. This paper challenges this claim and demonstrates that more efficient currency systems can also be more costly. Central banks therefore face an efficiency-cost trade-off and have to weigh the benefits for transactors against those for the central bank itself.     

The countercyclical role of Italian local banks during the financial crisis

The article analyses the role of local banks in Italy during the 2008–2009 crisis from the perspective of the relationship lending model. During the crisis, the risk of cascading failures of financial organizations has dramatically increased, thus causing a return of attention to local banking as a possible source of countercyclical behaviours in the financial markets thanks to their ability to establish fiduciary long-term relationships with small businesses.

The purpose of this article is to test this hypothesis and to disentangle the response of local banks during the financial turmoil according to their governance structure and location. Our results show that non-independent local banks and, to a limited extent, cooperative banks located in the rural area actually played a significant countercyclical role across the crisis. Policy implications suggest that prudential supervision should rethink the indicators of systemic risk in order to differentiate banks according to their capability of mitigating it.