SOLVING THE UNDERINVESTMENT AND DEGENERATION PROBLEMS OF WORKERS' COOPERATIVES

ABSTRACT ** : The workers' cooperative sector has been hampered by underinvestment and degeneration. To solve both problems, 'NOVARRS' are proposed, which are a new kind of tradable share. They: are NOn-voting; receive a specified fraction of Value-Added Residual (=sales – all non-labour costs); are Renewable after a specified period – the cooperative must buy back at face value if a new fraction (VARF) cannot be agreed; and carry a right to a Share of net assets on liquidation, and to information and 'voice' at general meetings. The renewal feature allows markets to reset the VARF. Reinvestment is by part-paying workers with adjustable face value NOVARRS. 'VOWVARRS' (NOVARRS with VOtes whose Weights are agreed at issue and renewal) are proposed as a transitional mechanism and to fund capital intensive firms with highly specialized physical capital.     

MORAL HAZARD,RISK AVERSION AND EFFICIENCY

This note revisits the classic moral‐hazard model, but assumes that the output distribution has moving support and punishments are limited. The results show that the principal can implement an efficient solution if the agent is sufficiently risk averse.     

FINANCIAL RISK AND UNEMPLOYMENT

There is a strong correlation between corporate interest rates, their spreads relative to Treasuries, and the unemployment rate. We model how corporate interest rates affect equilibrium unemployment and vacancies, in a Diamond–Mortesen–Pissarides search and matching model. Our simple model permits the exploration of U.S. business cycle statistics through the lens of financial shocks. We calibrate the model using U.S. data without targeting business cycle statistics. Volatility in the corporate interest rate can explain a quantitatively meaningful portion of the labor market. Data on corporate firms support the hypothesis that firms facing more volatile financial conditions have more volatile employment.     

CREDIT RATIONING,RISK AVERSION,AND INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Relative to their counterparts in high‐income regions, entrepreneurs in developing countries face less efficient financial markets, more volatile macroeconomic conditions, and higher entry costs. This article develops a dynamic empirical model that links these features of the business environment to cross‐firm productivity distributions, entrepreneurs’ welfare, and patterns of industrial evolution. Fit to panel data on Colombian apparel producers, the model yields estimates of a credit market imperfection index, the sunk costs of creating a new business, and various technology parameters. Model‐based counterfactual experiments suggest that improved intermediation could dramatically increase the return on assets for entrepreneurial households with modest wealth.     

HORIZONTAL MERGERS WITH CAPITAL ADJUSTMENT: WORKERS' COOPERATIVES AND THE MERGER PARADOX

We study the incentives towards horizontal merger among firms when the amount of capital is the strategic variable. We focus on workers' cooperatives, but our conclusions apply also to employment‐constrained profit maximizers. Within a simple oligopoly model, we prove that the horizontal merger, for any merger size, is: (i) privately efficient for insiders as well as for outsiders; (ii) socially efficient if market size is large enough, even in the case of merger to monopoly.     

FINANCIAL OPERATIONS AND MONETARY STATISTICS: IMPROVED CONCORDANCE IN THE FRENCH NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

National accounts are a powerful means of coordinating different statistical systems. The better their classifications are adapted to the basic statistics or the information blocks one wishes to use, the better the national accounts play their part. This statement explains why, taking the opportunity of revising the whole system, French national accountants tried to improve the concordance between financial operation tables and monetary statistics. Other reasons leading to this attempt can be found in the dissatisfaction of users having to face different and inconsistent financial information such as the monetary statistics on one hand and the financial aggregates of the national accounts on the other; and even more reasons appear in the organizational field since those two statistical systems are issued by two neighbour services of the Banque de France, often depending on the same sources. Further, many propitious factors are converging at the same time: the French financial system is undergoing profound transformations originating as much in the behaviour of economic agents as in the law, and the statistical operations have to adapt to these changes. The national accounts will in the near future include balance sheets in which financial asset holdings are directly comparable to the money supply aggregates. In its first part our paper sets forth the detailed reasons for our attempts, the conditions in which it took place and the present results. We have reached a much better degree of consistency between the two systems, even if the final scheme has not yet been adopted in either the monetary field or in the field of national accounts. But an important question remains open about the durability of the harmonization: we think that it could be relatively uncertain because of the differences in the goals pursued by the two systems and the constraints which they face. That is why in the second part of the paper we tried to review the way such a pragmatic undertaking as ours could call into question the way in which financial operations are described in the system of national accounts. If one agrees with the present boundary between the real and the financial sphere, the articulation must remain somewhat elementary. But if one wants to revise the usual so-called dichotomy between financial and non financial phenomena, we think that a complete rebuilding of the conceptual framework of the accounts has to be done; this would necessitate a considerable amount of theoretical and practical work.     

区域财政横向均衡与改革发展新突破

认为全面深化改革仍需从财政体制上取得新突破。主张对中国经济区合纵连横,即将东、中、西"三大部"纵向区域调整为泛珠三角、泛长三角和大环渤海"三大块"横向区域,依托这一天然的均衡性区域平台在介于国家与省级之间实施区域财政横向均衡制度,以确保公共服务均等化而又不损坏财政经济增长的效率机制;并通过对常住人口统计中创造财富外溢或享有公共服务外溢等非真实因素剔除后"标准人"的假定与论证,解决了政府间财力均衡公式化分配的难题。     

EQUILIBRIUM INDETERMINACY IN A MODEL OF CONSTRAINED FINANCIAL MARKETS

I present a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets in which assets pay in units of a numéraire good. In this economy, agents are constrained to negotiate the same amount of assets in different states of the world. Different from the standard result of economies with real assets, equilibrium indeterminacy can arise, depending on the structure of the financial markets. Equilibrium fails to be unique when it is not possible to transfer wealth between states in which consumers trade a pair of assets that face the same restriction.     

金融体系特征、风险特性与企业创新

本文基于中国工业企业库和专利数据库,利用2006—2008年中国证券市场资本化总额占比的快速上升和企业风险特性的差异,探讨了金融结构和金融发展对企业创新的影响。实证结果表明,市场主导程度更高的金融结构,而非更大的金融市场总体规模,通过缓解外部融资依赖程度更高行业中的私有企业的融资约束,显著促进了高风险私有企业的创新。以上实证结果并非由金融体系特征变化前的时间趋势所驱动,并对遗漏变量等问题保持稳健。本文对于深入理解转型升级,构建支持企业创新的金融体系具有重要政策含义。     

日本解决地方财政困境的改革措施与启示

20世纪90年代中期日本泡沫经济破灭以来,日本地方财政状况逐步恶化,地方政府债务规模不断增大,甚至发生因"隐性债务"膨胀而导致地方财政破产的恶性事件。针对地方财政管理中存在的问题,2000年以来日本政府出台了一系列改革措施力图重建地方财政。这些措施包括:引入"财政健全化"指标体系,力图早期诊断和化解财政风险;改革地方转移支付资金不足部分的补足方式,提高财政信息的透明度;加强地方政府债务管理,减少中央政府担保,实行多元化融资形式;在地方政府会计核算中部分引入权责发生制,加强对存量资产的管理;推行"三位一体"财政体制改革,充实地方财政;推行市町村合并,强化地方自治体间的联合等。本文综合考虑中日两国在财政体制、政体、历史、文化等方面的相似性与差异性,提出中国地方财政风险问题的解决之道。     

优化金融供给结构 防范流动性风险

2018年以后,中国经济金融运行中出现了三对相互关联的"两难选择":"去杠杆"与"稳增长"之间的矛盾、资金"脱实向虚"与"脱虚向实"之间的矛盾、金融整治与防风险之间的矛盾。实施宽松的货币政策、加大向经济金融运行注入流动性,难以破解这些"两难选择",甚至有可能引致南辕北辙的效应。破解之策在于:拓展商业票据市场、债券市场和股票市场,允许城乡居民和实体企业以资金供给者和资金需求者的身份直接进入金融市场;加快发展资产管理市场,将金融服务对象从法人机构向居民家庭扩展,推动实体企业的暂时闲置资金从存款(尤其是定期存款)转向现金管理(或资金管理);形成以负面清单为基础的行为监管机制和监管沙盒机制。     

FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY: SOME EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR ITALIAN PRODUCERS' COOPERATIVES

ABSTRACT ** :  In this paper, we test the extent to which producers' cooperatives can experience an increase in technical efficiency following a tightening of financial constraints. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms for the wine production and processing sector, using frontier analysis. The results support the hypothesis that increasing financial pressure can affect positively the cooperatives efficiency.     

现代金融机构操作风险管理研究

近年来操作风险管理的兴起成为全球金融界的重要现象,业界和监管界对其定义、性质和管理框架的共识已经基本形成。在操作风险衡量技术上,以损失分布法为代表的量化方法正在兴起,但面临数据难题和有效性争论。在管理策略和方法上,风险规避、控制降低、多样化分散、风险转嫁和风险吸收等多种策略,以及保险、业务外包、提取资本金、风险定价等多种手段,开始被应用于操作风险管理,面临国际化和现代化的我国金融机构应该从中学习和借鉴这些先进的理念、制度和方法。     

SOCIAL COOPERATIVES AND WORK INTEGRATION IN ITALY

ABSTRACT * : The paper presents and analyses the birth and evolution of social cooperatives for work integration in Italy. Born spontaneously in response to the failure of policies for the employment of disadvantaged workers, this particular entrepreneurial form was recognized and regulated in 1991 by enactment of a special law. The paper sets out the main results of recent research studies, results which enable quantification of the phenomenon and illustration of its principal features, as well as providing preliminary information on the effectiveness of this type of cooperative in the integration of disadvantaged workers into the internal or open labour market and on the variables that influence their results. The paper therefore highlights both the advantages and the drawbacks of these initiatives. Overcoming these drawbacks seems to be conditional on recognition of social cooperatives for work integration as instruments of employment policy.     

BANK COMPETITION AND FINANCIAL STABILITY: LIQUIDITY RISK PERSPECTIVE

We study whether competition affects banks' liquidity risk‐taking, which was at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. We find that banks with greater market power take more liquidity risk, implying that decreased competition leads to financial fragility. During a financial crisis, however, the effect of market power on liquidity risk varies across bank size. Small banks with greater market power reduce liquidity risk while large banks with greater market power do not change their liquidity risk‐taking behavior. This suggests that enhanced charter values due to reduced competition lowers small banks' risk‐shifting incentives when their default risk significantly increases during a crisis. (JEL G21, G28)     

FINANCIAL DEREGULATION AND RELATIVE RISK OF AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRY*

In the early 1980s the Australian economy underwent a period of rapid financial deregulation and liberalisation, the key symbol of this process being the floating of the exchange rate in December 1983. It has been suggested that one effect of such regulatory change is to alter the risk characteristics of economic units most directly impacted by the changes. In this vein, Brooks and Faff (1995) examined banking industry risk and found that deregulation coincided with a stabilising of the beta risk of banks. However, financial deregulation was expected to have widespread effects across the economy. Accordingly, in this paper we further test for possible effects by examining the level and stability of the beta risk of individual stocks and portfolios in other industries in both prederegulation and post-deregulation periods. From a comparison of the two periods we find that the effects on beta levels vary across industries. However in general post-deregulation betas have become stable across a large range of key industry classifications. This provides interesting insights into the effects of financial deregulation on relative risk and why different industries may have different experiences.