B股市场开放后上海中资银行同业外汇存款业务分析

2月20日，当中国证监委正式决定，境内居民可以炒B股时，曾经长期处于低迷的B股市场犹如被注入一支兴奋剂，顿时活跃起来。居民反映积极，纷纷到银行划款开户，一时间B股开户大军成为银行门外一道亮丽风景。不过，热闹景象如浮在层面的泡沫，事实并不如人所想。来自上海部分银行的统计数据表明，上海只有不足5％的个人外汇储蓄存款进入了B股市场。     

Frequent issuers’ influence on long-run post-issuance returns

Prior studies conclude that firms’ equity underperforms following many individual sorts of external financing. These conclusions naturally raise significant questions about market efficiency and/or about the techniques used to measure long-run “abnormal returns.” Rather than concentrating on a single security type or issuance, we examine long-run performance following any and all sorts of security issuances. Initial financing events do not associate with underperformance; however, subsequent financings do. Our results suggest that negative post-issuance returns have nothing to do with the specific type of security issued, and everything to do with the number of types of securities issued.     

TESTING ALTERNATIVE VIEWS OF GOVERNMENT BUDGETING

We develop three competing models of government budgeting: (1) a rational model, in which government services are provided in accordance with consumer tastes, (2) a Friedman-type model, in which spending and borrowing decisions derive from the level of taxes, and (3) a Buchanan public-choice type model, in which the extent of deficit spending determines government spending plans. We use quarterly U.S. data over the period 1947 to 1987 to empirically test each of these models within a vector autoregressive framework, taking into account the potential role of other relevant macro variables. We first specify the testing framework utilizing data on the levels of government revenue, spending and deficit, and show that the resulting estimates are unrealistic. We then divide each of these variables into anticipated and unanticipated components. The results thus obtained reject the Buchanan-type models, but are unable to reject either a Friedman-type model or a “weak” form of the rational model. Our results suggest that future research should concentrate on developing appropriate tests capable of distinguishing between these two models of the government budgeting process.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Financial Distress on Trade Credit

This paper studies the use of supplier's trade credit by firms in financial distress. Trade credit represents a large portion of firms’ short‐term financing and plays an important role in financial distress. We find that firms in financial distress use a significantly larger amount of trade credit to substitute for alternative sources of financing. Firms that are smaller, with less market power, and with more unique products tend to use more trade credit financing when in distress. We also find that firms that significantly increase their trade payables when in financial distress, experience an additional drop of at least 11% in sales and profitability growth over the previously documented 21% average drop for financially troubled firms.     

The Business Cycle Associated with Exchange Rate-Based Stabilizations

This article examines the effects of disinflation on economicactivity in countries characterized by chronic inflation. Suchcountries have a long history of inflation at rates exceedingthose in industrial countries as well as labor and capital marketsthat have adjusted to function in an inflationary environment.A sample of disinflation programs in several Latin Americancountries and in Israel demonstrates that stabilization effortsin countries with chronic inflation often do not induce theusual Phillips curve tradeoff in the medium run. Specifically,stabilization programs that use the exchange rate as the mainnominal anchor are often associated with a business cycle thatbegins with a boom and ends with a recession. Stabilizationprograms that use money supply as the nominal anchor generallyinduce the expected Phillips curve result: lower inflation isaccompanied by a recession after the program is implemented.     

Comment on: “Estimating the expected marginal rate of substitution”

The methodology proposed in Flood and Rose [2005. Estimating the expected marginal rate of substitution: a systematic exploration of idiosyncratic risk. Journal of Monetary Economics 52 (5) 951-969] fails to distinguish between the single unique marginal rate of substitution (MRS) process and the class of valid pricing kernels, of which the MRS is but a particular member. Thus, at best, this methodology explores the properties of some arbitrary pricing kernel, which may differ radically from the true MRS. Furthermore, the estimates of the expected MRS proposed by Flood and Rose [2005. Estimating the expected marginal rate of substitution: a systematic exploration of idiosyncratic risk. Journal of Monetary Economics 52 (5) 951-969] are highly correlated with ex post shocks, implying that these estimates are not conditional expectations at all. The cure for this misspecification introduces additional econometric problems, suggesting that the model may, in practice, be poorly identified.     

Structural identification of high and low investment regimes

We propose a structural model to investigate the existence and possible differences between low and high regimes of investment expenditures in equipment at the firm level. The existence of such differences is predicted by recent theoretical studies of investment behavior stressing the role of asymmetries and non-convexities in the adjustment cost technology. The structural spike model is estimated for a balanced panel of Dutch firms operating in 13 different industrial sectors. The flexibility of the structural approach explains why the proposed method outperforms models applying “ad hoc” spike definitions often encountered in the empirical literature of lumpy investments.