律师与银行家携手法律与金融业共荣--访北京天铎律师事务所主任律师胡维翊

加入世贸组织后,银行业作为由垄断向市场化过渡的行业之一,将面临很大的挑战.其中规则意识的培育和有效利用是保障我国银行业"软着陆"的重要基石.规则运用的直接表征就是法律服务在银行业经营中的地位.为了充分展示法律服务对银行业的重要意义,本刊特采访了北京天铎律师事务所主任律师胡维翊,请这位身具中国和美国法律背景的著名金融法律专家阐述法律服务与金融业的联系.     

蕴有为于无为之中访全国人大代表、原浙江省财政厅厅长翁礼华

当年偷偷摸摸发展起来的浙江民营经济现在已成为中国经济发展中的一个缩影和样本,在2004年通过的宪法修正案中将“私人财产不可侵犯”写入其中,这意味着对于金融领域来说,金融行业的所有制结构将发生巨大的变化,金融企业民营化的趋势在所难免。带着种种猜想,我们采访了开风气之先     

金融资产管理公司大有可为

金融资产管理公司的成立是中国金融改革与发展的多赢选择,就目前的状况而言,中国的金融资产管理公司不但要长期存在,还要赋予其更广阔的生存发展空间。     

Much Ado about Nothing? Do Domestic Firms Really Benefit from Foreign Direct Investment?

Governments the world over offer significant inducements toattract investment, motivated by the expectation of spilloverbenefits to augment the primary benefits of a boost to nationalincome from new investment. There are several possible sourcesof induced spillovers from foreign direct investment. This articleevaluates the empirical evidence on productivity, wage, andexport spillovers in developing, developed, and transition economies.Although theory can identify a range of possible spillover channels,robust empirical support for positive spillovers is at bestmixed. The article explores the reasons and concludes with areview of policy aspects.      

金融中心建设中的政府作为——以纽约、伦敦为例

纽约、伦敦是目前世界上两大全球性国际金融中心。纽约金融中心的特色在于创新能力,而伦敦金融中心的亮点则在于监管艺术。为强化两地的金融中心地位,美国和英国政府近期又有一系列举措。研究美、英两国政府的作为有助于我国的金融决策层从美英的实践中吸取经验和教训,利用后发优势,制定出适宜的建设金融中心的行动路线。     

Do Firms Hedge in Response to Tax Incentives?

There are two tax incentives for corporations to hedge: to increase debt capacity and interest tax deductions, and to reduce expected tax liability if the tax function is convex. We test whether these incentives affect the extent of corporate hedging with derivatives. Using an explicit measure of tax function convexity, we find no evidence that firms hedge in response to tax convexity. Our analysis does, however, indicate that firms hedge to increase debt capacity, with increased tax benefits averaging 1.1 percent of firm value. Our results also indicate that firms hedge because of expected financial distress costs and firm size.     

万事达卡步步为"赢"

人性化的管理 《银行家》:万事达卡驻中国地区人员只有二十几个,而他们在2004年的人民币交易总额突破了18万亿元。这两个数字的对比总能给人留下深刻的印象。是什么原因使万事达卡具有如此高的效率? 冯炜权:一个公司要提高效率,当然会有自己的独到之处。我认为效率的提高至少要具备以下几个方面的条件。     

Do Japanese Analysts Overreact or Underreact to Earnings Announcements?

Several recent studies have used U.S. analysts' forecasts to test for underreaction or overreaction to information in earnings announcements. These tests have provided mixed results. Evidence in Mendenhall (1991) is that analysts underreact. By contrast. results in De Bondt and Thaler (1990) show overreaction by U.S. financial analysts to earnings announcements. The current study contributes to this topic by examining over/underreaction by Japanese financial analysts. Test results show that Japanese analysts do not overreact to earnings announcements, market to book ratios and sales growth. Instead. there is strong evidence that Japanese analysts underreact to earnings announcements and that their underreaction is more pronounced for firms with mostly permanent earnings. Our results also show that Japanese analysts display larger forecast biases for earnings reported under U.S. GAAP as opposed to Japanese GAAP. Finally, we find that US. analysts discount information in earnings announcements to a larger degree (relying to a greater extent on information in past prices instead) when compared to their Japanese counterparts. Further, in contrast to their Japanese counterparts, these analysts display no optimistic bias. The results above suggest that the impact of each country's unique culture and capital norms will have to be taken into account by policy makers in evaluating the feasibility of harmonization of accounting standards.     

Do Australian companies manage earnings to meet simple earnings benchmarks?

Measurement error in unexpected accruals is an important problem for empirical earnings management research. Several recent studies avoid this problem by examining the pooled, cross–sectional distribution of reported earnings. Discontinuities in the distribution of reported earnings around key earnings thresholds may indicate the exercise of management discretion (i.e. earnings management). We apply this approach to the detection of earnings management by Australian firms. Our results generally indicate significantly more small earnings increases and small profits than expected and conversely, considerably fewer small earnings decreases and small losses than expected. These results are much stronger for larger Australian firms. We undertake an exploratory analysis of alternative explanations for our results and find some evidence consistent with management signalling its inside knowledge about the firm's expected future profitability to smooth earnings, as opposed to 'management intent to deceive' as an explanation for our results.     

加强事务所内部治理机制建设应做好的工作

一、抓好两项建设(一)抓好制度建设众所周知,制度建设对每个会计师事务所都是十分重要的。古人云“没有规矩不成方圆”,用制度管人管事可以取得事半功倍的效果。对事务所来说,特别要注重     

Structuring the Initial Offering: Who to Sell To and How to Do It

We develop a unified model of the issuer’s decisions that takes into account both mechanism design and adverse selection risk. The model enables us to determine the optimal amount of information gathering prior to setting the offer price, and to understand what does and does not cause underpricing. The flexibility to allocate securities between a pool of investors who provide pricingrelevant information and investors who do not provide information is key to controlling underpricing. Policies that guarantee a minimum allocation to investors in the pool result in underpricing; policies that cap the allocations to such investors do not. The optimal number of investors in the pool, and thus the amount of information acquired, generally increases with the riskiness of the issue. However, this relation breaks down if pool members are guaranteed minimum allocations.We are grateful to the referees and the editor, Marco Pagano, for their insightful suggestions. We thank Sugato Bhattacharyya, Jos von Bommel, Zhoahui Chen, Robert Hauswald, Dilip Madan, Kristian Rydqvist, Alex Stomper, Meg Van De Weghe, Ivo Welch and participants at Carnegie Mellon, Indiana University, the University of Maryland, Tulane University and Yale University finance seminars for their helpful comments. This paper has evolved from an earlier paper titled Private versus Public Offerings: Optimal Selling Mechanisms with Adverse Selection, that was presented at the 1999 Western Finance Association meetings.     

Do central banks respond to exchange rate movements? A structural investigation

We estimate a small-scale, structural general equilibrium model of a small open economy using Bayesian methods. Our main focus is the conduct of monetary policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. We consider generic Taylor-type rules, where the monetary authority reacts in response to output, inflation, and exchange-rate movements. We perform posterior odds tests to investigate the hypothesis whether central banks do target exchange rates. The main result of this paper is that the central banks of Australia and New Zealand do not, whereas the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England do include the nominal exchange rate in its policy rule. This result is robust for various specification of the policy rule. We also find that terms-of-trade movements do not contribute significantly to domestic business cycles.     

Do Short-Term Objectives Lead to Under- or Overinvestment in Long-Term Projects?

We examine managerial investment decisions in the presence of imperfect information and short-term managerial objectives. Prior research has argued that such an environment induces managers to underinvest in long-run projects. We show that short-term objectives and imperfect information may also lead to overinvestment, and we identify how the direction of the distortion depends upon the type of informational imperfection present. When investors cannot observe the level of investment in the long-run project, suboptimal investment will be induced. When investors can observe investment but not its productivity, however, overinvestment will occur.     

How Do Different Types of Investors React to New Earnings Information?

Abstract:   The purpose of this study is to investigate how different types of investors react to new earnings information. Using the extremely comprehensive official register of share holdings in Finland, we find that the majority of investors are more likely to sell (buy) stocks in a company after a positive (negative) earnings surprise and that they are biased towards buying after the disclosure of an annual report. Large investors show behaviour opposite to that of the majority of investors. We consider several possible explanations for this heterogeneous investor behaviour, of which differences in investor overconfidence emerges as the strongest candidate.     

利用网络平台做好教育培训

“网大”倍受有识之士关爱,注重从基层抓起是很重要的。网络培训工作,就是要做到方便员工及时了解和掌握当前业务发展的主流、重点,大力推动经营转型和人才强行建设。笔者认为利用网络平台,做好教育培训工作,要突出的两个最重要的特点,其一,组织热推;其二,学员热情。双热效应才能构建崇尚学习的生态环境。近年来,工行河北邢台分行在这方面做出了有益尝试。     

Do share prices matter?

This paper examines whether the cross sectional variation in Australian share prices is partially explained by measures of firm size and ownership characteristics in a manner that is consistent with firms behaving in accordance with Merton's (1987) model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information. Based on a sample of firms whose shares were traded on the ASX during 1995, we show that firms largely owned by less wealthy shareholders tend to have low stock prices, although this relation is not linear. In addition, larger, better–known, firms tend to have higher stock prices. These findings are consistent with prior evidence from US markets, and suggest the existence of a shareholder clientele effect in Australia that is related to the share price of the underlying firm.     

Will Any q Do?

We find that the relative levels of computationally costly q estimators and simple q estimators, when used as continuous variables, are affected by variations in many firm financial characteristics. In contrast, when the estimators are used as dichotomous variables, they classify the vast majority of firms identically with respect to the unit q breakpoint. Finally, we find that the computationally costly approach may induce sample‐selection bias as a result of data unavailability. Our results suggest that the simple approach is preferable except when extreme precision of the q estimate is of paramount importance and sample‐selection bias is not likely to be an issue.