Credit reporting,financial intermediation and identification systems: International evidence

Credit reporting systems are an important ingredient for financial markets. These systems are based upon the unique identification of borrowers, which is enabled if a compulsory national identification system exists in a country. We present evidence derived from difference-in-difference analyses on the impact of credit reporting and identification systems on financial intermediation in 172 countries between 2000 and 2008. Our results suggest that the introduction of a mandatory identification system has a positive effect on financial intermediation (bank credit to deposits, net interest margins) and financial access (private credit to GDP), especially in countries where there is also a credit reporting system.     

Credit markets and financial information

The last decade has seen rapid growth in trading of credit instruments on secondary markets. The ensuing availability of a rich set of credit market data has created a novel environment for testing a variety of financial economic theories. In this discussion, we provide a simple framework for linking asset pricing research using equity and credit market data and offer some suggestions for future archival empirical research aiming to establish relations between financial information and credit markets. Credit instruments are intrinsically linked to equity instruments. The strength of this link varies temporally and cross-sectionally in measurable ways that can, and should be, used to guide future empirical research linking information to credit markets.     

Efficient investment and financial intermediation

Insider trading causes uninformed agents to reduce their investments in assets that are most susceptible to it. This problem may be mitigated by forming a financial intermediary that issues securities with different sensitivity to inside information. In particular, the uninformed agents desire the intermediary's demand debt while the informed agents choose its equity. By separating the uninformed agents' financial payoffs from the intermediary's investment decisions, the intermediary can pursue more efficient investments and achieve allocations that are superior to those of the market.     

Intertemporal diversification in financial intermediation

This paper examines the incentive problem between a bank and depositors (or deposit insurer): limited liability makes risk-shifting lucrative. We show how intertemporal diversification of lending decisions – i.e. bank’s loan portfolio consists of overlapping long-term loans and is thus gradually renewed – may solve the incentive problem of risk-shifting. A new (or expanding) bank sets a high-equity level and acquires depositors’ confidence. Subsequently, it can allow its equity to depreciate to a permanently lower level. Depositors can control the bank by monitoring equity and realized credit losses ex post; they do not have to monitor bank’s lending choices ex ante. Maturity mismatch – illiquidity of long-term loans and liquidity of deposits – is optimal. The analysis can be extended more generally to the borrower–lender relationship.     

The theory of financial intermediation

Traditional theories of intermediation are based on transaction costs and asymmetric information. They are designed to account for institutions which take deposits or issue insurance policies and channel funds to firms. However, in recent decades there have been significant changes. Although transaction costs and asymmetric information have declined, intermediation has increased. New markets for financial futures and options are mainly markets for intermediaries rather than individuals or firms. These changes are difficult to reconcile with the traditional theories. We discuss the role of intermediation in this new context stressing risk trading and participation costs.     

Microfinance institutions,financial intermediation and the role of deposits

Microfinance institutions (MFIs), widely regarded as bankers to the poor, have extended their financial functions beyond lending to managing deposits. We empirically examine the influence of MFI deposit-taking on MFI financial performance. Using data of 1,301 MFIs worldwide, we find that an MFI's deposit level is an important determinant of its financial viability. However, the relationship is influenced by MFIs’ institutional type (for-profit or nonprofit) and the legal environment (common law or civil law). The results suggest that the positive financial impact of deposits has not been fully realised, reflecting the need to further improve cost management and revenue generation.     

Financial sector foreign aid and financial intermediation

The effectiveness of foreign aid is typically measured by the effect of aid on economic growth. Prior literature provides ambiguous results on this effect partly due to the aggregation of aid to different sectors and the small amount of foreign aid relative to the economy in most countries. Because growth in financial intermediation and financial markets has been shown to play a key role in spurring economic growth, in this paper we focus on aid to the financial sector and seek to identify the causal effects of foreign aid to the financial sector on financial intermediation. Using fixed effects OLS and system GMM methods for a panel of countries from 1993 to 2016, we find that foreign aid to the financial sector primarily increases claims on the government sector, and has negative or neutral effect on claims to the private sector and no effect on liquid liabilities of the banking sector and interest rate spread between borrowing and lending rates. This effect persists even after controlling for country institutional characteristics, such as trade openness and rule of law. Thus, foreign aid increases public sector borrowing but does not appear to have any benefits for financial intermediation in the private sector. We verify that the relation is not spurious by using aid to the health sector for falsification tests.     

Participating mortgages and the efficiency of financial intermediation

This paper establishes a basic framework to study three different variants of Participating Mortgages (PMs). We obtain results for Shared Appreciation Mortgages (SAMs), Shared Income Mortgages (SIMs) and Shared Equity Mortgages (SEMs) in closed-form. We illustrate our findings with examples that show PMs are also attractive in an environment where prepayment can occur. Finally we conclude with the public policy implications of employing PMs as workout loans, especially post sub-prime crisis. We argue that by facilitating better risk sharing, PMs offer a means to enhance the efficiency and resiliency of the financial system.     

Markets and institutions in financial intermediation: National characteristics as determinants

Given the importance of financial intermediation and the rise of globalization, there is little prior research on how national preferences for financial intermediation (markets versus institutions) are determined by cultural, legal, and other national characteristics. Using panel analysis for data on a recent 8-year period for 30 countries, this paper documents that national preferences for market financing increase with political stability, societal openness, economic inequality, and equity market concentration, and decreases with regulatory quality and ambiguity aversion. We confirm with robustness tests that our result for regulatory quality is independent of differences in national wealth and that our result for political stability is independent of both wealth and political legitimacy. These results should be of much interest to managers, scholars, regulators, and policy makers.     

运用信息技术促进金融创新提高金融信息服务水平

如何实现金融信息化?这是一个需要银行、保险、证券、税务等行业共同面对的课题。如何实现银行信息化?则需要人民银行和各商业银行以及IT企业一起回答。在日前召开的2002中国国际金融（银行）技术暨设备展览会上,银行数据大集中和管理信息化等话题成为备受关注的焦点。本刊特别刊发以几位银行系统高层管理者在第三届金融信息化发展论坛上的主题演讲为蓝本的精彩文章,以期与广大读者共同关注金融信息化的深层次问题,希望各界人士对此作进一步探讨。     

Credit distortion and financial crisis

A simple and consistent theory based on credit distortion is developed to understand the origin of financial crises in the emerging markets. We prove that without the guarantee of various government agencies on the credit risk of foreign loans, the interest rate on foreign loans would be the same as the domestic loans, which would eliminate the incentive to borrow foreign loans on a great scale. We demonstrate that the common phenomena preluding the crisis, such as heavy foreign borrowing and overinvestment in real estate, are rational choices when a particular currency is overvalued and cheap credit is available.     

Usefulness of financial information in evaluation of BRIC firms

The hottest investments in the past five years have been in BRIC country stocks. Results of this study show that during 2002-2006 time period financial ratios of BRIC firms have not improved while the sizes of these firms have significantly increased, suggesting that investors are investing not because of financial performance but because of growth. Despite the opacity of BRIC countries' financial reporting, results of this study show that there is still a positive and significant price-earnings association. The explanatory power is increased by also considering growth rates.     

Money, intermediation, and banking

The business of money creation is conceptually distinct from that of intermediation. Yet, these two activities are frequently—but not always—combined together in the form of a banking system. We develop a simple model to examine the question: When is banking essential? There is a role for money due to a lack of record-keeping and a role for intermediation due to the existence of private information: both money and intermediation are essential. When monitoring costs associated with intermediation are sufficiently low, the two activities can be separated from one another. However, when monitoring costs are sufficiently high, a banking system that combines these two activities is essential.     

Credit risk transfer and financial sector stability

In this paper, we study credit risk transfer (CRT) in an economy with endogenous financing (by both banks and non-bank institutions). Our analysis suggests that the incentive of banks to transfer credit risk is aligned with the regulatory objective of improving stability, and so the recent development of credit derivative instruments is to be welcomed. Moreover, we find the transfer of credit risk from banks to non-banks to be more beneficial than CRT within the banking sector. Intuitively, this is because it allows for the shedding of aggregate risk which must otherwise remain within the relatively more fragile banking sector. Therefore, regulators should act to maximize the benefits from CRT by encouraging the development of instruments favorable to the cross-sectoral transfer of aggregate credit risk (including basket credit derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations). Finally, we derive the optimal regulatory stance for banks relative to non-bank financial institutions. We show that a level playing field approach is sub-optimal. Regulatory stances should be set to actively encourage cross-sector CRT, first because of the higher fragility of the banking sector and second to induce banks to incur the costs of CRT which otherwise lead them to undertake an insufficient amount of CRT.     

Credit conditions and recoveries from financial crises

Recoveries from recessions associated with a financial crisis tend to be sluggish. In this paper, we present evidence that stressed credit conditions are an important factor constraining the pace of recovery. In particular, using industry-level data, we find that industries relying more on external finance grow more slowly than other industries during recoveries from recessions associated with financial crises. Additional tests, based on establishment size, on alternative definitions of financial crises, and on corporate-government interest rate spreads, support the findings. Moreover, for subsets of industries where financial frictions are more severe, we find much stronger differential growth effects.     

Aspects of insurance,intermediation and finance

This paper is concerned with the role of the insurance company as a financial intermediary which offers securities to uninformed retail investors. The search costs of retail investors cause the demand for the securities offered by intermediaries to be inelastic, making possible an intermediary spread, the difference between the returns on primary securities and the rates offered on the secondary securities sold by intermediaries. It is argued that the intermediary spread is economically significant, and a simple model of its determination is offered: the spread is shown to be an increasing function of interest rates. The bonus policy of life insurance companies is analyzed and is shown to be inefficient under simple assumptions about asset returns.     

Experimental evidence on financial incentives, information and decision-making

This paper reports on a series of experiments aimed at exploring in greater detail previous work on the effects of financial incentives on information use and task performance in a principal-agent setting. The paper also develops some new statistical modelling in the area of experimental testing including incorporation into the modelling approach of data from post-experiment questionnaires. We find significant support for the finding that profit-related individual money rewards encourage increased accessing of valuable but costly past profit information by agents – and that this in turn enhances individual performance in earning profit for the agency.     

董事会独立性、股权制衡与财务信息质量

财务信息作为信息披露的主体,其质量高低直接关系到资本市场的有效运作,引入独立董事制度,彰显董事会的独立性以提高公司的透明度是监管机构改善公司治理结构的重要举措,但在我国一股独大,股权缺乏制衡的制度背景下,独立董事制度的实际运作效果不仅实务界缺乏统一的认识,而且学术界也没有提供可以判断的经验证据。本文利用中国资本市场的数据检验了股权缺乏制衡是否影响财务信息的质量,董事会的独立性是否有助于解决股权制衡的问题,提高公司的透明度。研究结果证实,股权缺乏制衡对财务信息质量有负面影响,董事会独立性在股权缺乏制衡的环境中能发挥监督制约作用,提高财务信息的有用性。     

Monetary policy games,financial instability and incomplete information

In the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, monetary authorities, while pursuing traditional objectives, such as the control of inflation, are also eager to promote financial stability. In this paper, we model the strategic interaction of the central bank and the financial sector and explore a simple monetary policy game with perceived substantial risks to financial stability, where the central bank can be of two types, one pursuing strict inflation-targeting and the other concerned with affecting the expectations formed by the financial sector participants; however, the financial sector is unsure which, due to incomplete information. The conclusion is that for small shocks to inflation there is a pooling equilibrium, whereas for larger shocks there is separation. In the latter case, the central bank that has an explicit financial stability concern is willing to exercise more muted control to inflation in order to reinforce the safety of the financial sector.