Higher Education Finance in the UK*

The introduction of top‐up fees for home‐domiciled undergraduate tuition in England from 2006–07 – and their planned increase in 2012–13 – raises important issues for university funding in Scotland, since it abolished tuition fees for Scottish and EU students in 2000–01. This paper focuses on what the increase in resources directed at English universities arising from top‐up fees means for the relative funding of English and Scottish undergraduates. Widely‐used funding‐per‐head figures do not provide an accurate picture of home‐ and EU‐domiciled undergraduate funding, as they include funding for research, postgraduate degrees and overseas students. The empirical work of this paper focuses on creating a consistent series of funding per full‐time equivalent undergraduate over time for England and for Scotland, stripping out funding for research, non‐EU students and postgraduate degrees to create a more accurate picture of the funding gap between the two countries. It also takes into account the different composition of undergraduate degree subjects taken in England and Scotland. The findings indicate that the apparent historical advantage in funding per head in Scottish institutions compared with English ones has been largely driven by compositional differences: Scotland has a high proportion of medical, science and engineering undergraduates – subjects that command greater funding due to their relative complexity to teach. The top‐up fee introduced in 2006–07 brought funding per head in England to a level similar to that experienced in Scotland, and the future increase will result in funding per head in England outstripping that in Scotland by some magnitude. This suggests that the funding of Scottish students will fall significantly behind that of English students unless additional new sources of public or private funding for nScottish universities are found.     

Contracts offered by bureaucrats

We examine the power of incentives in bureaucracies by studying contracts offered by a bureaucrat to her agent. The bureaucrat operates under a fixed budget, optimally chosen by a funding authority, and she can engage in policy drift, which we define as inversely related to her intrinsic motivation. Interaction between a fixed budget and policy drift results in low‐powered incentives. We discuss how the bureaucrat may benefit from stricter accountability as it leads to larger budgets. Low‐powered incentives remain even in an alternative centralized setting, where the funding authority contracts directly with the agent using the bureaucrat to monitor output.     

What Price Emergency Planning? Local Authority Civil Protection in the UK

The Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) will have far-reaching effects on government departments and on local government. Terms such as 'best value', 'bench-marking' and 'national performance standards' are now being used to describe the way in which local authority accountability and efficiency are to be tackled and improved. The local authorities' emergency planning function is no exception to this process. This article explores the present status of local authority emergency planning and examines the suggestions currently being made for its future structure and funding.     

Wholesale funding and bank stability: The impact of economic policy uncertainty

The primary aim of this paper is to examine the conditioning effects of economic policy uncertainty on the relationship between wholesale funding and bank stability. Based on a sample of 1829 commercial banks in 27 countries over the period 2005–2020, we provide evidence of a nonlinear relationship between wholesale funding and bank stability. Specifically, a small share of nondeposit funding to total deposit and short-term funding (below 22.3%) offers some risk reduction, but a substantial mixing of nondeposit and deposit funding increases bank fragility. Moreover, the adverse effects of excessive wholesale funding on bank stability are strengthened during periods of high policy uncertainty. Nevertheless, banks in advanced countries, large banks, and high-quality banks with better asset quality are less affected by the detrimental impact of excessive wholesale funding on bank stability when during periods of increased policy uncertainty.     

中期票据市场发展的国际经验

中期票据主要是指一种经监管当局一次注册批准后、在注册期限内可以分批发行的企业融资性票据,与公司债相比,中期票据在筹资成本、发行灵活性和筹资保密性等方面具有一定优势。文章介绍了国际中期票据市场的发展历史和现状,以及在传统中期票据基础之上的结构化中期票据品种的主要原理和发展状况。     

Coordinating Monetary and Macroprudential Policies

This paper studies noncooperative games between a monetary authority and a macroprudential regulator whose objectives are a subset of those in the social loss function. The analysis is based on a New Keynesian model with a financial sector and a financial friction à la Gertler and Karadi (2011). When the friction affects the financing of all factors of production equally, macroprudential policy is shown to be a powerful additional tool, fully eliminating inefficiencies, regardless of the source of the shock and no matter whether the central bank and the regulator cooperate. But when trade‐offs are present and policy is discretionary, the institutional arrangements become crucial. While coordination leads to higher welfare than a setting in which each authority takes the decision rule of the other as given (namely, the Nash equilibrium), our analysis shows that a noncooperative setting in which the macroprudential authority acts as a leader within the period can be superior to cooperation. Finally, our conclusions are unaffected by whether the macroprudential instrument affects funding costs or acts as a liquidity requirement.     

Funding Modes of German Banks: Structural Changes and their Implications

We investigate the funding modes of German banks and the implications for lending and profitability during 1992–2002. We find that at many banks, deposits from customers decrease in relative terms while interbank liabilities increase as a source of funding. We cannot detect a negative impact of the relative decline in deposits on lending. The decreasing ability of banks to collect deposits and the substitution of deposits by interbank liabilities unfavorably affects the net interest result of banks that exhibit a deposit deficit, especially savings banks. Our findings indicate a structural lengthening of the intermediation chain, which has broader implications for the functioning and stability of the financial system.     

The role of securitization in bank liquidity and funding management

This paper studies the role of securitization in bank management. I propose a new index of “bank loan portfolio liquidity” which can be thought of as a weighted average of the potential to securitize loans of a given type, where the weights reflect the composition of a bank loan portfolio. I use this new index to show that by allowing banks to convert illiquid loans into liquid funds, securitization reduces banks' holdings of liquid securities and increases their lending ability. Furthermore, securitization provides banks with an additional source of funding and makes bank lending less sensitive to cost of funds shocks. By extension, the securitization weakens the ability of the monetary authority to affect banks' lending activity but makes banks more susceptible to liquidity and funding crisis when the securitization market is shut down.     

Delivering Public Services Under the New Public Management: The Case of Public Housing

One of the biggest changes in public sector housing practice in recent years has been the introduction of New Public Management techniques. Housing associations, promoted by successive governments to supplement local authority provision of social housing, have readily taken on the new management agendas of performance indicators and business disciplines in service delivery. The author identifies a conflict between the social purposes of public funding for housing and the business practices of housing associations. The limited accountability of housing associations allows for practices that lead to social exclusion. For local authorities, a parallel conflict arises because of government emphasis on 'what works' in public housing management, rather than on 'what matters'.     

The Potential Impact of Reforms to the Essential Parameters of the Council Tax*

Council tax was introduced in Britain in 1993 and represents a unique international property tax. There is a growing belief that it is time to reform the number and structure of council tax bands, but such views have a minimal empirical base. This paper sets out to assess the impact of changing the bands on personal and local government finances, and extends the analysis to the role of the tax multipliers linked to each band. The research is based on the experience of a representative sample of local authorities in Scotland. A statistical revaluation for 2000 is estimated for the existing eight‐band system, and from this base a 10‐band system is calculated. Financial implications are then simulated for each local authority, taking account of central resource equalisation mechanisms. The results indicate that increases in the number of bands will have little impact on the burden of the council tax compared with regular revaluations. Changing the tax multiplier range has the greatest impact on local authority finances and council tax payments.     

Wholesale bank funding,capital requirements and credit rationing

This paper analyzes how different types of bank funding affect the extent to which banks ration credit to borrowers, and the impact that capital requirements have on that rationing. Using an extension of the standard Stiglitz–Weiss model of credit rationing, unsecured wholesale finance is shown to amplify the credit market impact of capital requirements as compared to funding by retail depositors. Unsecured finance surged in the pre-crisis years, but is increasingly replaced by secured funding. The collateralization of wholesale funding is found to expand the extent of credit rationing.     

债权人保护:股份回购资金来源限制的法律漏洞及其填补

2018年《公司法》修改取消股份回购资金来源限制后,股份公司可以通过回购股份向股东返还财产,同时规避利润分配规则与减资规则,导致了债权人保护的法律漏洞。两大证券交易所与全国股转公司发布股份回购实施细则等自律性规范,在一定程度上填补了债权人保护的法律漏洞,并实质性地引入了偿债能力测试及董事责任规则,为公司资本制度的未来变革进行了有益尝试。《公司法》应当把握股份回购导致财产返还的经济实质,恢复资金来源限制,但具体限制标准则依赖于资本维持原则的改革方向。     

Rollover Risk,Liquidity and Macroprudential Regulation

I study rollover risk in wholesale funding markets when intermediaries hold liquidity ex ante and fire sales may occur ex post. Multiple equilibria exist in a global rollover game: intermediate liquidity holdings support equilibria with both positive and zero expected liquidation. A simple uniqueness refinement pins down the private liquidity choice, which balances the forgone expected return on investment with reduced fragility and costly liquidation. Due to fire sales, liquidity holdings are strategic substitutes. Intermediaries free ride on the holdings of other intermediaries, causing excessive liquidation. To internalize the systemic nature of liquidity, a macroprudential authority imposes liquidity buffers.     

财务决策权的制度安排及我国企业的现实选择

财务决策权是企业权力安排中一项最重要的构成要素。财务决策权的安排取决于对企业资源的拥有程度。在我国,财务决策权主要集中在以内部人为主的董事会。国外的经验表明,无论谁具有财务决策权,建立"独立"的第三方对其进行监督和制约是保证正确行使财务决策权的关键。但是,我国较为特殊的公司治理环境决定了当前独立董事和监事会的制度安排无法发挥监督和制约内部控制人的作用。以利益相关者理论为基础,为了增强对企业财务决策权的监督和制约,建立多元化的董事会制度成为一种必然选择。     

Empirical investigation of securitisation drivers: the case of Italian banks

This paper explores the determinants of securitisation by Italian banks over the period 1999–2006, investigating the funding, specialisation, and regulatory capital arbitrage hypotheses. According to our evidence, when we consider all securitisation types together, Italian banks seem to have securitised out of funding motives, to diversify and optimise their available funding channels. When we separately consider securitisations backed by residential mortgages and those backed by non-performing loans, we find that the main factors affecting the former type of securitisation are the need for funding and capital arbitrage motivation, whereas the latter appear to have been affected to a lesser extent by a need for funding and to have also been slightly conditioned by a desire to specialise.     

The effects of the structure of banking market and funding strategy on risk and return

This paper analyses the implications of bank market power and funding structure for risk and return. It employs a sample of 978 banks in 55 countries leading up to the 2008 financial crisis to test for two related hypotheses. First, competition reduces internal capital as the level of market power increases when banks use internal funding to diversify into non-interest income generating activities. Building on these results and employing various specifications of Lerner index and funding strategy, the second test suggests that the relatively low insolvency risk among banks in emerging and developing countries during 2000–2007 is attributed to the high degree of market power and the use of internally generated funds.     

Funding implications of normal and excessive profitability in the nonprofit sector

We study nonprofit profitability and its effect on nonprofit external funding. In a sample of over 273 thousand U.S. NPOs during 1999–2019, we find that profitability is associated with greater public support; however, when NPOs are excessively profitable, they receive fewer subsequent donations. We find a similar relationship, but to a smaller degree, between profitability and government funding. We infer that funders desire moderate but not overly high profitability. We also find that donors are more tolerant of normal and excessive profitability for NPOs in the healthcare industry, smaller NPOs, and NPOs with shorter planning horizons. The relationship between profitability and external funding is weaker during recession periods, with funders not penalizing excessively profitable organizations during economic downturns.     

论会计准则的法律地位

本文从法律的角度论述了会计准则的性质和地位 ,进而探讨了在西方遵循会计准则并非免除法律责任的充分条件 ,最后从我国法律体系和会计准则的基本特征出发 ,讨论了我国会计准则的法律地位。在我国 ,目前应当充分肯定会计准则的法律地位 ,在认定虚假财务报告时应以会计准则作为基本依据 ,同时应当努力提高会计准则的质量 ,缩小会计准则与公众意识的差距。     

The impact of the global financial crisis on the cross-currency linkage of LIBOR–OIS spreads

This article examines the impact of global financial crisis on cross-currency linkage of the LIBOR–OIS spread, a financial stress measure in interbank markets. The impulse response analysis is conducted in a multivariate setting, adopting the bias-corrected bootstrap as a means of statistical inference. The overall evidence suggests that the crisis has substantially changed the nature of the cross-currency interactions in liquidity stress. Also global money markets have failed to contain stress in US dollar funding and the role of the Japanese yen as a liquidity source appears to be significant, while these two currencies drive the cross-currency system of liquidity stress.