Presidential Address: Does Finance Benefit Society?

Academics’ view of the benefits of finance vastly exceeds societal perception. This dissonance is at least partly explained by an underappreciation by academia of how, without proper rules, finance can easily degenerate into a rent‐seeking activity. I outline what finance academics can do, from a research point of view and from an educational point of view, to promote good finance and minimize the bad.     

Presidential Address: Debt and Money: Financial Constraints and Sovereign Finance

Economic analyses of corporate finance, money, and sovereign debt are largely considered separately. I introduce a novel corporate finance framing of sovereign finance based on the analogy between fiat liabilities for sovereigns and equity for corporations. The analysis focuses on financial constraints at the country level, making explicit the trade‐offs involved in relying on domestic versus foreign‐currency debt to finance investments or government expenditures. This framing provides new insights into issues ranging from the costs and benefits of inflation, optimal foreign exchange reserves, and sovereign debt restructuring.     

Presidential Address: Friction

The sources of trading friction are studied, and simple, robust empirical measures of friction are provided. Seven distinct measures of trading friction are computed from transactions data for 1,706 NYSE/AMSE stocks and 2,184 Nasdaq stocks. The measures provide insights into the magnitude of trading costs, the importance of informational versus real frictions, and the role of market structure. The degree to which the various measures are associated with each other and with trading characteristics of stocks is examined.     

Presidential Address: The Cost of Active Investing

I compare the fees, expenses, and trading costs society pays to invest in the U.S. stock market with an estimate of what would be paid if everyone invested passively. Averaging over 1980–2006, I find investors spend 0.67% of the aggregate value of the market each year searching for superior returns. Society's capitalized cost of price discovery is at least 10% of the current market cap. Under reasonable assumptions, the typical investor would increase his average annual return by 67 basis points over the 1980–2006 period if he switched to a passive market portfolio.     

Presidential Address: Collateral and Commitment

Optimal dynamic capital structure choice is fundamentally a problem of commitment. In a standard trade‐off setting with shareholder‐debtholder agency conflicts, full commitment counterfactually predicts the firm would rely almost exclusively on debt financing. Conversely, absent commitment a Modigliani‐Miller‐like value irrelevance and policy indeterminacy result holds. Thus, the content of dynamic trade‐off theory must depend on the commitment technology. In this context, collateral is valuable as a low‐cost commitment device. Because ex ante optimal commitments are likely to be suboptimal ex post, observed capital structure dynamics will exhibit hysteresis and depart significantly from standard predictions.     

Presidential Address: Liquidity and Price Discovery

This paper examines the implications of market microstructure for asset pricing. I argue that asset pricing ignores the central fact that asset prices evolve in markets. Markets provide liquidity and price discovery, and I argue that asset pricing models need to be recast in broader terms to incorporate the transactions costs of liquidity and the risks of price discovery. I argue that symmetric information‐based asset pricing models do not work because they assume that the underlying problems of liquidity and price discovery have been solved. I develop an asymmetric information asset pricing model that incorporates these effects.     

Presidential Address: Investment Noise and Trends

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index‐like investing. I develop an equilibrium model linking these investment trends to the decline in individual ownership, interpreting the latter as a reduction in noise trading. Active management corrects most noise trader–induced mispricing, and the fraction left uncorrected shrinks as noise traders' stake in the market declines. Less mispricing then dictates a smaller footprint for active management.     

Presidential Address: Sophisticated Investors and Market Efficiency

Stock‐market trading is increasingly dominated by sophisticated professionals, as opposed to individual investors. Will this trend ultimately lead to greater market efficiency? I consider two complicating factors. The first is crowding—the fact that, for a wide range of “unanchored” strategies, an arbitrageur cannot know how many of his peers are simultaneously entering the same trade. The second is leverage—when an arbitrageur chooses a privately optimal leverage ratio, he may create a fire‐sale externality that raises the likelihood of a severe crash. In some cases, capital regulation may be helpful in dealing with the latter problem.     

Presidential Address: Pension Policy and the Financial System

In this paper, I examine the effect of pension policy on the structure of financial systems around the world. In particular, I explore the hypothesis that policies that promote pension savings also promote the development of capital markets. I present a model that endogenizes the extent to which savings are intermediated through banks or capital markets, and derive implications for corporate finance, household finance, banking, and the size of the financial sector. I then present a number of facts that are broadly consistent with the theory and examine a variety of alternative explanations of my findings.     

试论公司财务治理和财务管理的关系与对接

本文从公司财务治理和财务管理的概念和内涵入手,对财务治理和财务管理的关系进行分析,并从经济学、企业管理学和财务学等方面对二者对接的基础做了探讨,最后指出了二者协调和对接的途径。     

Presidential Address: Issuers, Underwriter Syndicates, and Aftermarket Transparency

I model strategic interaction among issuers, underwriters, retail investors, and institutional investors when the secondary market has limited price transparency. Search costs for retail investors lead to price dispersion in the secondary market, while the price for institutional investors is infinitely elastic. Because retail distribution capacity is assumed to be limited for each underwriter‐dealer, Bertrand competition breaks down in the primary market and new issues are underpriced in equilibrium. Syndicates emerge in which underwriters bid symmetrically, with quantities allocated internally to efficiently utilize retail distribution capacity.     

财政部副部长朱志刚同志在全国财政企业工作会议上的讲话（节选）

上次财政企业工作会议至今,已有四年时间.今天见到大家,感到很高兴,也很亲切.这次会议是在一个比较关键的时候召开的一次重要会议,目的在于明确今后的工作方向和任务,调整我们工作的指导思想和工作重点,做好新形势下的财政企业工作.下面,我想讲一些大家比较关心的问题,供同志们参考.     

Presidential Address, Committing to Commit: Short-term Debt When Enforcement Is Costly

In legal systems with expensive or ineffective contract enforcement, it is difficult to induce lenders to enforce debt contracts. If lenders do not enforce, borrowers will have incentives to misbehave. Lenders have incentives to enforce given bad news when debt is short‐term and subject to runs caused by externalities across lenders. Lenders will not undo these externalities by negotiation. The required number of lenders increases with enforcement costs. A very high enforcement cost can exceed the ex ante incentive benefit of enforcement. Removing lenders' right to immediately enforce their debt with a “bail‐in” can improve the ex ante incentives of borrowers.     

如何与国际金融公司IFC合作

向国际金融公司申请融资的先决条件: ●国有股权小于50%的非国有企业,或乡镇企业、民营股份公司、三资企业     

The Origins of the German Corporation - Finance, Ownership and Control

The ownership of German corporations is quite different today from that of Anglo-American firms. How did this come about? To what extent is it attributable to regulation? A specially constructed data set on financing and ownership of German corporations from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century reveals that, as in the UK, there was a high degree of activity on German stock markets with firms issuing equity in preference to borrowing from banks, and insider and family ownership declining rapidly. However, unlike in the UK, other companies and banks emerged as the main holders of equity, with banks holding shares primarily as custodians of other investors rather than on their own account. The changing pattern of ownership concentration was therefore very different from that of the UK with regulation reinforcing the control that banks exercised on behalf of other investors.     

论利益相关者责任与公司财务治理

企业契约理论创建了利益相关者责任的基本构架,企业能力理论则充实了利益相关者责任的内涵。企业利益相关者责任要求在公司治理上实行利益相关者共同治理,共同治理又要求相适应的公司财务治理结构,而这样的公司财务治理又具有结构上的动态性、内容上的层次性及目标上的不可操作性。