深化汇率制度改革 提高市场流动性

法国巴黎银行是全球四家标普信用评级为AA＋以上的银行之一，在全球范围内设有30多个交易室、六个主要交易室；该行通过运用全球平台中较好的定价和风控技术建起了交易平台，在人员配备和技术准备等各方面为成为银行间外汇市场的做市商而积极努力。本刊特此采访了法国巴黎银行大中华区短期利率及外汇交易部主管胡凯毅先生。     

我国汇率制度变化与贸易发展关系的历史分析

文章回顾了自上世纪80年代以来各阶段人民币汇率制度的特征,探讨了各时期汇率变动对进出口影响效应的有效性,揭示了影响贸易变化的实际因素,指出名义汇率可能与进出口关系并不密切,影响贸易的根本问题还在于国内外产品价差、企业竞争力、经济环境、宏观政策等因素,也不能把汇率政策理解为单一地调整名义汇率。     

House prices and risk sharing

Homeowners in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are able to maintain a high level of consumption following job loss (or disability) in periods of rising local house prices while the consumption drop for homeowners who lose their job in times of lower house prices is substantial. These results are consistent with homeowners being able to access wealth gains when housing appreciates as witnessed by their ability to smooth consumption more than renters. A calibrated model of endogenous homeownership and consumption is able to reproduce the patterns in the data quite well and provides an interpretation of the empirical results.     

Exploring different views of exchange rate regime choice

The empirical distinction between de facto and de jure exchange rate regimes raises a number of interesting questions. Which factors may induce a de facto peg? Why do countries enforce a peg but do not announce it? Why do countries “break their promises”? We show that a stable socio-political environment and an efficient political decision-making process are a necessary prerequisite for choosing a peg and sticking to it, challenging the view that sees the exchange rate as a commitment device. Policymakers seem rather concerned with regime sustainability in the face of adverse economic and socio-political fundamentals.     

Consumption and risk sharing over the life cycle

A striking feature of U.S. data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age. This paper asks if individual-specific earnings risk can provide a coherent explanation. We find that it can. We construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which households face uninsurable earnings shocks over the course of their lifetimes. Earnings inequality is exogenous and is calibrated to match data from the U.S. Panel Study on Income Dynamics. Consumption inequality is endogenous and matches well data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. The total risk households face is decomposed into that realized before entering the labor market and that realized throughout the working years. In welfare terms, the latter is found to be more important than the former.     

Effective protection and exchange-rate determination

Considerable research interest has entered on the implications for exchange-rate determination of fluctuations in intermediate goods prices ang changes in tariff protection. This paper draws together the strands of this literature by examining the role of effective protection in exchange rate determination. A disaggregated portfolio balance model of the open economy is used to analyze the determination of real and nominal exchange rates in the presence of rational expectations. Additionally, it is used to explore the implications for resource allocation of changes in the effective rate of protection in a country capable of influencing its terms of trade.     

Semi-rational expectations and exchange-rate dynamics

The Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) asserts that, on average, the economic agents are accurate in predicting future economic developments. The paper demonstrates, however, that in a world of costly information, individual rationality may result in consistent and persistent forecasting biases. A distinction is drawn between perfect foresight or efficient forecasting—which is consistent with the REH—and myopic perfect foresight—which is the profit maximizing, and thus the rational one from an individualistic point of view, even though the latter may result in persistently biased forecasting. These concepts are illustrated in a model of exchange rate dynamics which introduces myopic or ‘semi’ rationality into Dornbusch's familiar model.     

Intergenerational risk sharing and fiscal policy

Risk-sharing implications of alternative fiscal policies are compared in a stochastic production economy with overlapping generations. Ex ante efficiency is shown to be achievable with optimal transfers, regardless of distributional concerns. For CRRA preferences, stylized real-world policies (notably safe debt and safe pensions) are found inefficient in the direction of imposing not enough productivity risk on retirees and too much on future generations. Safe transfers can be rationalized as efficient if preferences display age-increasing risk aversion, such as habit formation. The ubiquity of safe transfers suggests that governments treat the young as more risk tolerant than older cohorts.     

Determinants of bankruptcy regime choice for Canadian public firms

Distressed Canadian public firms usually file for bankruptcy protection under either the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA) or the more flexible Companies Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). The latter targets reorganization while the BIA focuses on both reorganization and liquidation. This paper examines the factors that enter into the choice of either of these two regimes by bankrupt filing public firms. We document that firms are more likely to file under the CCAA when the global stock market is bullish. Larger firms, more leveraged firms and firms with higher quality bankruptcy trustees are more likely to file under CCAA. The worst performing firms also tend to file under the CCAA. Finally firms in Ontario and Quebec have a tendency to file more frequently under the BIA compared to other provinces.     

Incentive problems and the pattern of international risk sharing

This paper analyzes the implications of moral hazard and a lack of contract enforcement for risk sharing across countries and regions. We demonstrate that both incentive problems can considerably restrict efficient risk sharing. However, we show that the cross-sectional risk sharing component is much more affected than the intertemporal component. We argue that this may help to explain several stylized facts of international risk sharing, such as the low degree of insurance against permanent shocks.     

International risk sharing is better than you think, or exchange rates are too smooth

Exchange rates depreciate by the difference between domestic and foreign marginal utility growth or discount factors. Exchange rates vary a lot, as much as 15% per year. However, equity premia imply that marginal utility growth varies much more, by at least 50% per year. Therefore, marginal utility growth must be highly correlated across countries: international risk sharing is better than you think. Conversely, if risks really are not shared internationally, exchange rates should vary more than they do: exchange rates are too smooth. We calculate an index of international risk sharing that formalizes this intuition. We treat carefully the realistic case of incomplete capital markets. We contrast our estimates with the poor risk sharing suggested by consumption data and home-bias portfolio calculations.     

High exchange-rate volatility and low pass-through

Two specifications of an open-economy model are shown to generate high exchange-rate volatility and low exchange-rate pass-through (ERPT). In the model, price discrimination causes ERPT to be incomplete in both the short and the long run. In the short run, a small amount of nominal rigidities is enough to reduce ERPT sharply; still, exchange-rate depreciation worsens the terms of trade, consistent with the evidence. Possible biases from omitted variables and measurement error in the ERPT empirical literature (due to data limitations) are investigated using model-generated time series. Estimates of ERPT coefficients can be quite different from true parameters, and are sensitive to the shocks driving the economies. Estimates can nonetheless detect key structural features of the models.     

Stock market liberalization and international risk sharing

This paper empirically examines what macroeconomic risks are shared (or not shared) internationally after stock market liberalization in several developing countries. To address this issue, we incorporate an international asset pricing model into a non-linear structural vector autoregression (VAR) system that identifies various sources of macroeconomic risks. We find that most of the risks corresponding to exogenous financial market shocks are surprisingly well shared, although other macroeconomic risks associated with exogenous shocks to output, inflation and monetary policies are not fully shared across countries. Our results suggest that one of the main benefits from stock market liberalization is to allow the countries studied in this paper to better hedge against exogenous and idiosyncratic financial market risks, and stock market liberalization needs to be accompanied by other measures of economic integration in order to achieve the full benefits of international risk sharing.     

Capital mobility and international sharing of cyclical risk

This paper investigates whether the international globalization of financial markets allows for significant cross-country risk-sharing at the business cycle frequency. We find that cross-country risk-sharing is still limited and this is unlikely to be the result of financial frictions that limit state-contingent contracts. Part of the limited international risk sharing could be the consequence of frictions that de-facto reduce the short-term mobility of financial capital. But even with these frictions we find significant divergence between model predictions and the data.     

国际碳基金的发展及中国的选择

全球气候变化已成为国际社会关注的焦点,一些发达国家为此成立碳基金来促进节能减排的实施,而中国对碳基金的研究和实践还处于起步阶段,应采取以下措施设立碳基金：完善相关法律与制度,加大政府支持力量;提高国内企业与银行对CDM项目和＂碳金融＂的认识;建立完善的管理方法与制度,以保证碳基金合理有效地使用;加强与国际机构的合作,不断提高科学技术与管理水平;积极参与和促进碳排放权交易中介组织的建设;发挥商业银行的优势,参与碳基金的建立。     

Firm-level political risk and debt choice

We examine the effect of firm-level political risk on debt choices and find: (i) firms with higher political risk display a preference for private debt over public debt; (ii) the magnitude of this preference varies with the aggregate policy uncertainty; (iii) politically risky firms indeed receive less favorable terms in the bond market. To explain such findings, we show that private lenders have several advantages in serving politically risky borrowers. First, to the extent that lenders cannot perfectly foresee the adoption of new government policies, private lenders' expertise in implementing the reorganization process is important to limit their potential loss. Second, politically risky borrowers must undertake significant operation adjustments facing rising policy uncertainty. Private lenders can gather accurate information and closely monitor these adjustments. Last, as the severity of political risk varies with aggregate policy uncertainty, there exists an implicit contract between a borrower and its relationship bank, whereby a borrower accepts less favorable terms during normal times in exchange for the bank's support during difficult times. Taken together, this study advances our understanding of how cross-sectionally heterogeneous political risk influences corporate debt choice.     

Auditor choice and bank risk taking

We investigate the importance of auditor choice on bank risk-taking in a cross-country setting for 5498 banks from 116 emerging and developed countries. Using the Z-score as our main proxy for bank risk, we report evidence that hiring a Big Four auditing firm reduces bank-risk even after controlling for bank and country variables. The reported evidence is valid for banks outside the United States and is robust to concerns relating to endogeneity and alternative banking risk measures. The results are economically meaningful. All else constant, the Z-score of a bank audited by a Big Four firm is 10.4% higher than a similar bank with a non-BIG Four auditor. Moreover, consistent with the view that Big Four auditors serve a corporate governance mechanism in emerging markets, we find that Big Four auditors maintain the ability to curb bank risk in countries characterized by weak institutions. Finally, our results suggest that while audit quality is associated with bank safety, its impact is reduced in countries that require audit-oversight.     

Forced retirement risk and portfolio choice

Current literature on the effect of labor income on portfolio choice overlooks that workers face a risk of being forced to retire before their planned retirement age. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, this paper finds that the forced retirement risk is both significant and highly correlated with stock market fluctuations. Using a life-cycle portfolio choice model, this paper shows that forced retirement risk makes labor income near retirement stock-like. Therefore, contrary to conventional wisdom, those who are still working but near retirement should have a lower share of risky assets in their financial portfolios than retirees do.     

Understanding managed care risk sharing arrangements

A risk sharing agreement between a managed care organization and an employer can be used by employers to either guarantee a managed care plan's short-term success or mitigate its failure. Under such arrangements, the managed care organization financially shares the employer's risk of unfavorable claims experience.