构筑道德、产权、法律有机结合的社会信用体系

随着我国市场经济的不断发展,社会信用缺失引致的经济秩序、社会秩序的紊乱及其造成的负面影响,正在对社会机体健康构成严重影响。对这种道德“流通”中的失范现象,必须加强信用建设予以消除:即要建立健全社会信用体系,形成以道德为支撑、产权为基础、法律为保障的社会信用制度     

论征信业的产品、功能与发展

在向市场经济转轨的过程中，我国社会大规模的“信用短缺”甚至“信用丧失”现象已成为经济发展中的“瓶颈”问题。本在对征信业及其产品、功能分析的基础上提出了发展我国征信业的建议，以寻求一条解决之道。     

中国共产党对社会信用的百年探索与基本经验

中国共产党对社会信用的探索有着丰富的思想资源和深厚的理论根基,贯穿于革命、建设和改革的全过程,经历了孕育期、推进期、拓展期、深化期四个阶段.百年来,中国共产党在探索社会信用过程中始终坚持党的集中统一领导,将社会信用道德培育和社会信用制度建设结合起来,在立足本土实际基础上积极借鉴外来经验,坚持以人民为中心的价值立场,根据...     

信用规则体系:社会信用体系的基础组成部分北大核心

信用规则是指对信用主体的行为起到规范、引导、劝诫和教化作用的各类社会规则的集合。信用规则体系是社会信用体系的重要组成部分,其框架内的大部分信用规则由社会信用体系输出实施,用于规范“政商社法”四大领域中各类信用主体的行为。另有一类信用规则用于规范社会信用体系自身运行。在性质上,大部分信用规则属于社会规则范畴,所针对的是“人”,包括法人组织和自然人,对他们的失信行为进行规范。有少部分信用规则不在社会规则范畴,它们是用于规范信用信息使用及其基础设施运行的,所针对的是“物”。在信用规则体系框架中,“骨干”是信用法律,而政策规定、道德伦理、风俗习惯和组织纪律等类型的信用规则是“枝叶”。对于当前急迫推进的信用立法工作,在首部信用法律的目标和宗旨中,应给出信用规则体系概念,并对其框架边界和主要内容予以描述。     

政府推进社会信用体系建设的对策取向

市场经济离不开健全的社会信用,针对我国信用供给和需求在总量和结构上存在的失衡矛盾,迫切需要具有管理者和参与者双重身份的政府在构建社会信用体系中发挥助推作用,通过提高信用产品质量,增加有效信用供给;刺激引导信用消费,扩大信用需求;推进信用环境建设,加快信用产品市场化运行,建立和完善适应市场经济发展的社会信用制度。     

银行信用体系建设问题研究

银行信用体系建设是社会信用体系建设的一个重要组成部分,在我国社会主义市场经济条件下,完善银行信用体系建设是发展社会主义先进文化的必然要求,是改善社会信用环境,疏通中央银行货币政策传导机制,优化资金资源配置,促进社会生产力发展的必然要求。     

加强社会信用体系建设,完善社会信用信息系统

良好的社会信用体系是经济建设、社会发展的重要支撑。本文对社会信用体系建设的基本内涵、现实状况进行了回顾,并在此基础上重点关注社会信用系统建设完善对于社会信用体系的支撑作用,指出了传统社会信用信息系统向新系统转型的方向。     

Degrowth,the past,the future,and the human nature

In the last years, different sources point to a same message: industrial civilization has entered an overshoot mode, the natural limits to growth have been already surpassed. This frontier does not wait for us in the future; it already belongs to our past. If population and the economy are truly beyond the limits, then current visions and theories of social change would be deeply perturbed. If the development era is approaching its end, then many sociological theories on current societies will share the same destiny, sustainable development doctrines between them. It is worth to examine theories that explicitly look at the social world this way or that – at least – are not incompatible with it. Differences between these theories depend on sociological, psychological and anthropological questions; or, in other words, they depend on the human nature. Exploring the relationship between degrowth and the human nature gives rise to debates about selective pressures under conditions of scarcity (human evolution), historical and anthropological evidence, philosophy, and sociology (institutional resilience, utopies as whole society experiments…). As its conclusion, the argument accepts that an evolutionary perspective supports that there are some potentials for conscious social change even in a way-down era, but it does not justify the belief in a particular only line of history. This conclusion does not satisfy the desire of knowing the future; nevertheless it may be the only one possible. The future is not written. Neither in history nor in evolution; not even in the mixture of history and evolution that conforms us as inhabitants of the Earth.     

Banks,the IMF,and the Asian crisis

This paper examines the impact of the Asian crisis on bank stocks. In the second half of 1997, Western banks outperformed their stock markets. In contrast, East Asian bank indices incurred losses in excess of 60% in each of the crisis countries. Most of these poor performances are explained by stock market movements in the crisis countries. After taking into account these movements, currency exposures affected banks adversely only in Indonesia and the Philippines. Except for the Korean program, which affected positively bank stocks in all countries in our sample but one, IMF programs had little effect on bank values.     

Middlemen: the good,the bad,and the ugly

We examine the role of a middleman as an expert in markets. A seller's effort determines the quality of the good. Buyers observe neither the seller's effort nor the good's quality. A middleman, after observing a signal about the good's quality, decides whether to purchase it and then to sell it. We show that the presence of a middleman may either reduce or exacerbate the seller's moral hazard problem. We also consider a model with multiple middlemen. We find that the seller's effort is minimized if either the middleman's signal is perfect or the number of middlemen is large.     

Investor wealth,the IMF,and the Asian crisis

This study further investigates the impact of IMF actions on stock markets during the Asian crisis. Extending two earlier studies by Kho and Stulz (2000) and Evrensel and Kutan (2007), we investigate the long-term shareholder wealth impact of IMF actions and programs on both financial and real sector returns in the stock markets of Thailand, Indonesia, and Korea. We perform a series of tests employed in Cornett and Tehranian (1989, 1990) that incorporate heteroscedasticity across sectors and contemporaneous dependence of the disturbances. The findings indicate that IMF actions regarding liquidity disbursement or liquidity concerns in markets are the most important events affecting abnormal returns and hence investor wealth in both real and financial sectors. However, the response of the financial sector to IMF actions is much stronger than that of the real sector. In addition, the results suggest moral hazard effects during the Asian crisis in all the three countries.     

Expectations,the exchange rate,and the current account

A critical examination is undertaken of the relationship between the exchange rate and the current account in a small open economy. Theoretically, the correlation between the exchange rate and the current account seems to be ambiguous. In particular, the association between movements in the exchange rate and the current account is likely to depend in an essential manner on the nature of exogenous disturbances affecting the two variables simultaneously. Lastly, the question of the role of an optimal monetary policy and the choice of an exchange rate regime in an uncertain environment is raised.     

Time-to-build, time-to-plan, habit-persistence, and the liquidity effect

The inability of sticky-price monetary business cycle models to generate liquidity effects has been extensively documented by a number of authors. This paper develops a sticky-price monetary business cycle model with investment gestation lags and habit-persistence in consumption that is capable of generating an empirically plausible liquidity effect.     

Gold and the Dollar (and the Euro, Pound, and Yen)

Usually, gold and the Dollar are negatively related; when the Dollar price of gold increases, the Dollar depreciates against other currencies. This is intuitively puzzling because it seems to suggest that gold prices are associated with appreciation in other currencies. Why should the Dollar be different? We show here that there is actually no puzzle. The price of gold can be associated with currency depreciation in every country. The Dollar price of gold can be related to Dollar depreciation and the Euro (Pound, Yen) price of gold can be related to Euro (Pound, Yen) depreciation. Indeed, this is usually the case empirically.     

Obesity,Mortality, and the Obesity Paradox

The percentage of the population who are obese has grown dramatically on a worldwide basis over the last several decades, although the growth in the prevalence of obesity has slowed recently at a high level in the United States. Although there have been numerous studies of the effect of this trend on mortality, the findings have been inconsistent and controversial, in part because of methodological differences and the complexity of the relationships between obesity and mortality. The objective of this article is to discuss the issues surrounding these relationships and to shed light on the likely effects of the obesity epidemic on mortality. Of particular interest is the so-called obesity-mortality paradox, where mortality experience is lower for overweight and in some cases obese individuals than for those of normal weight. Although more recent studies of the relationship between mortality and obesity seem to indicate those who are obese have experienced a reduced percentage of additional mortality, this may in part be due to the shorter average time those currently obese have been exposed to their condition, the heterogeneity of the normal and obese populations, measurement issues including treatment of smokers and those who are ill, and study design limitations. An increased number of premature deaths may arise as more individuals who are obese are exposed for a longer period to excess adiposity. Although public policy issues surrounding obesity are being addressed with a great deal of activity and publicity, they have and will continue to prove quite challenging for both individuals and society to manage and overcome. The prevalence of obesity has had and will continue to have a significant effect on the mortality experience in most areas of actuarial practice. As a result, it is important for actuaries to enhance their understanding of these effects.