工作上的伙伴：汇丰和交行

2006年9月30日至10月21日,交通银行有关部门负责人和分行行长共10人在汇丰集团的伦敦总部参加了"交通银行高管人员领导能力培训班"。这是交行和汇丰首次举办的针对交行高管人员的领导能力培训项目,得到了双方高层的高度重视,汇丰对培训内容作了专门策划、精心安排,交行高管对学习主动积极、全心投入,培训获得了良好效果。20天的培训紧张而充实,培训内容涵盖三大板块--汇丰集团经营管理概览、领导能力和战略思维、零售银行业务与分行经营,总计36项课程。让我们走近汇丰,近距离地感受这个全球金融业翘楚的理念、战略和思维；让我们走近汇丰,无障碍地体会西方优秀银行的文化、品牌和精神。本栏目撷取了组织此次培训的汇丰集团学习与发展部高级经理Kevin Dolling,以及参加此次培训的几位交行高管人员的学习体会,希冀读者能从他们的心得感受中收获对中国金融业改革有益的借鉴和帮助。     

The Polycentric Character of Business Ethics Decisionmaking in International Contexts

Many ethical issues facing managers of multinational corporations are polycentric problems. That is, they involve a number of distinct centers -- each of which define rights and obligations of a multiplicity of affected parties -- and resolving matters around one center typically creates unpredictable repercussions around one or more of the other centers. Polycentricity is a normative phenomenon especially unsuited for adjudication, often requiring recourse to alternative processes of contract (or reciprocal adjustment) and managerial direction. This study explores how such concerns about the limits of adjudication (and its various moral counterparts) apply to international decisionmaking connected to human rights obligations of multinational companies. The focus is on ethical problems such as controlling child labor in LDCs such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan; setting wages in developing countries like Honduras; and conducting business transactions with rights-violating regimes, such as the governments of Nigeria and Myanmar.     

Trust and development

In this paper we examine linkages between social trust and economic development using, for the first time, a panel of data. We confirm earlier cross-sectional studies finding that trust is a significant factor in development and also show for the first time that trust significantly interacts with both investment in physical and human capital. We provide a robustness analysis of our results via a set of jackknife experiments on our main equations, and the trust coefficients and interactions are very tightly distributed, indicating that the results are not highly sample dependent. We also consider whether trust directly influences investment and find that in a panel framework it does not unless we allow for a trust–education interaction in the investment equation.     

A Bootstrap Method for Identifying and Evaluating a Structural Vector Autoregression*

Graph‐theoretic methods of causal search based on the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes et al. (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data‐based contemporaneous causal order for the structural vector autoregression, rather than, as is typically done, assuming a weakly justified Choleski order. Demiralp and Hoover (2003) provided Monte Carlo evidence that such methods were effective, provided that signal strengths were sufficiently high. Unfortunately, in applications to actual data, such Monte Carlo simulations are of limited value, as the causal structure of the true data‐generating process is necessarily unknown. In this paper, we present a bootstrap procedure that can be applied to actual data (i.e. without knowledge of the true causal structure). We show with an applied example and a simulation study that the procedure is an effective tool for assessing our confidence in causal orders identified by graph‐theoretic search algorithms.     

Cross-country interdependencies in growth dynamics: A model of output growth in the G7 economies, 1960–1994

Cross-Country Interdependencies in Growth Dynamics: A Model of Output Growth in the G7 Economies, 1960–1994. — Recently developed methods in time series analysis are employed to study output growth across the G7 economies. The methods accommodate the interdependencies that exist between economies’ growth, and provide the means for analyzing the sources of shocks to output growth and for examining the time profiles of the shock effects. Sophisticated dynamic adjustments in output are identified, due to lagged responses to shocks, the feedback of effects across countries, and the differential speeds of response to different types of shock. Among the shocks considered, those to world trade and oil prices are shown to significantly affect many countries’ output levels.     

Legal protection of investors,corporate governance,and the cost of equity capital

This study examines the effect of firm-level corporate governance on the cost of equity capital in emerging markets and how the effect is influenced by country-level legal protection of investors. We find that firm-level corporate governance has a significantly negative effect on the cost of equity capital in these markets. In addition, this corporate governance effect is more pronounced in countries that provide relatively poor legal protection. Thus, in emerging markets, firm-level corporate governance and country-level shareholder protection seem to be substitutes for each other in reducing the cost of equity. Our results are consistent with the finding from McKinsey's surveys that institutional investors are willing to pay a higher premium for shares in firms with good corporate governance, especially when the firms are in countries where the legal protection of investors is weak.     

Capital management in mutual financial institutions

Capital management by mutual financial institutions (such as credit unions) provides a valuable testing ground for assessing the impact of capital regulation and theories of managerial behaviour in financial institutions. Limited access to external equity capital means that capital accumulation must be met primarily by reliance on retained earnings. To deal with shocks to the capital position and avoid breaching regulatory requirements, managers will aim to have a buffer of capital in excess of the regulatory minimum. Moreover, mutual governance arrangements and an absence of capital market discipline mean that managers have discretion to set target capital ratios which differ significantly from industry averages. This paper develops a formal model of capital management and risk management in mutual financial institutions such as credit unions which reflects these industry characteristics. The model is tested using data from larger credit unions in Australia, which have been subject to the Basel Accord Risk Weighted Capital Requirements since 1993. The data supports the hypothesis that credit unions manage their capital position by setting a short term target profit rate (return on assets) which is positively related to asset growth and which is aimed at gradually removing discrepancies between the actual and desired capital ratio. Desired capital ratios vary significantly across credit unions. There is little evidence of short run adjustments to the risk of the asset portfolio to achieve a desired capital position.     

The Effective Duration and Convexity of Liabilities for Property-Liability Insurers Under Stochastic Interest Rates

Managing interest rate risk for property-liability insurers requires appropriate measurement of the sensitivity of liabilities to movements in interest rates. Most prior studies have assumed that interest rates shift in a parallel fashion and that the cash flows from liabilities are unaffected by interest rate changes. This article recognizes that unpaid property-liability (P-L) insurance losses are inflation-sensitive, that movements in interest rates will affect future claim payouts due to the correlation between interest rates and inflation and that interest rates are stochastic. The effective duration and convexity of P-L insurance liabilities calculated based on this approach are substantially lower than those measured using traditional approaches, which has important implications for asset-liability management by P-L insurers.