Decomposing financial (in)stability in emerging economies

The analysis of the build-up of risks in emerging economies have traditionally been scarce and focused mostly on external risks, despite the recent substantial development of their financial system. This paper builds an index of financial vulnerabilities tailored to emerging economies, grouping 32 indicators around four poles: valuation and risk appetite, imbalances in the non-financial sector, financial sector vulnerabilities, and global vulnerabilities. It adopts a model-free approach, purposely departing from early warning models or complex econometric constructs, and rely on data made already available by international organisations. Our index of financial vulnerabilities enables a granular mapping of where risk originates and how it spreads to other parts of the financial system. Using various data visualisation tools and benefitting from the flexibility of our index’s methodology, we are able build a narrative of the evolution of financial stability in emerging economies from 2005 to 2015. Finally, we also discuss the relation between our index and both the business cycle (proxied by GDP) and the credit cycle (proxied by the credit-to-GDP gap).     

济南市古生物化石赋存特征及保护区划研究

为贯彻《古生物化石保护条例》,提高济南市古生物化石保护水平,在对区内古生物化石资源进行野外勘查和综合整理的基础上,依据古生物化石鉴定结果及其赋存地层分布特征,得出济南市古生物化石的分布特征,划分了古生物化石产地,选择化石完整程度、富集程度、剖面出露程度、周边地质环境、工程活动影响五个评价因子,运用综合指数法,建立了符合济南实际的古生物化石保护区划分体系,将区内古生物化石产地进行了保护区分级,并按照“保护优先,结合实际”的原则,制定了符合济南市实际的古生物化石保护措施。     

Policy responses to an overheated housing market: Credit tightening versus transaction taxes

Among Asian economies, Hong Kong has experienced the highest real growth in house prices since the 2010s. Two macroprudential measures, namely credit tightening (loan-to-value ratio cap) and transaction taxes (stamp duty), were introduced to cool down the overheated housing market. This study examines and compares their effectiveness based on a set of constant-quality house price indices. Through an error correction model, we find that credit tightening was able to curb house price growth in the high-price segment, while transaction taxes could not. An explanation is that the exemptions from transaction taxes for those with genuine housing needs could be abused by other market participants. It is easier for buyers to exploit the exemptions to get around the stamp duty than to manipulate the property valuation for mortgage lending. The implication is that the effectiveness of macroprudential measures hinges on whether compliance or exemption can be easily monitored and enforced.     

市场化程度对花卉产业组织影响实证分析

以刘易斯市场规模分析框架为基础,采用2008—2014年中国各省区市花卉产业的面板数据,对市场化进程与花卉产业组织的关系进行实证分析,结果表明:市场化程度对企业数量、小企业数量和小企业比例具有正向影响作用,市场化是促进花卉产业组织演化的重要因素,有利于优化花卉产业组织的规模和结构。因此,政府应该从市场组织与制度完善角度维护好市场竞争秩序,企业应该提升核心竞争力而不是简单扩大规模。     

Productivity changes in pre-crisis Western European banks: Does scale effect really matter?

Insofar as the completion of the Single Market for Financial Services, it has presented new challenges for European Banking industries. In this study, we use a recently developed generalized metafrontier Malmquist productivity index (gMMPI) to provide insights on productivity growth. We extend the gMMPI to broaden the index's capacity by decomposing various sources of productivity change in the metafrontier context. The sample contains commercial banks from 12 Western European countries prior to the recent financial crisis. A key advantage of our extension is that it introduces the role of scale effects. The empirical results show that an average bank's productivity growth arises mainly from technical changes and scale effects. Moreover, smaller and larger banks grow faster than medium ones. In addition, conservative banks tend to grow faster. These findings suggest that a more competitive and integrated financial market induced by financial deregulation is indeed able to improve banks’ productivity.     

Does corporate governance still affect firm performance after controlling the distress factor?

We explore the impact of corporate governance on firm performance. We first identify whether corporate governance can still be an influential factor or has been largely captured by the traditional Fama-French three-factor model. More importantly, our study adds a financial distress factor to the Fama-French three-factor model to form a four-factor pricing model (labelled as the ‘financial distress four-factor model’). We find that for the US Russell 1000 firms, the financial distress four-factor model is the better model of the two models considered. We further find that the financial distress four-factor model has a higher explanatory power in capturing the return variation. We find that the differences between the return of firms with good (weak) corporate governance and the expected return are insignificantly different from zero for most portfolios in all the two models. The financial distress four-factor model, however, has the fewer portfolios with return difference being significantly different from zero, implying that corporate governance has been better priced in the financial distress factor.     

企业财务风险预警指标体系构建研究

本文以现有财务管理、财务预警系统理论和实践研究为基础,从筹资风险、投资风险、经营风险和收益分配风险四个方面建立财务风险预警指标体系,最后通过使用层次分析法、综合功效系数法等技术,设计了一套初级的企业财务风险预警模型。本文以我国深市所有石油上市公司为研究样本,有一定的实际价值。     

BIS在ICU的应用价值

目的:探讨脑电双频指数监测在ICU患者中的应用价值。方法:对南京医科大学无锡市第二人民医院2013年3月-2014年6月进行BIS监测的53例患者进行统计分析。结果:BIS值与Ramasy评分显著负相关(p<0.01)相关性良好,BIS值与Rls85评分负相关(P<0.01),相关性良好。BIS值与GCS评分呈正相关关系(P<0.01),相关性良好。结论:脑电双频指数可用于评估脑功能障碍,为患者生命安全提供保障。     

Technological adoption and use after mass market displacement: The case of the LP record

This paper investigates the reasons why some technologies, defying general expectations and the established models of technological change, may not disappear from the market after having been displaced from their once-dominant status. Our point of departure is that the established models of technological change are not suitable to explain this as they predominantly focus on technological dominance, giving attention to the technologies that display highest performance levels and gain greatest market share. And yet, technological landscapes are rife with technological designs that do not fulfil these conditions. Using the LP record as an empirical case, we propose that the central mechanism at play in the continuing market presence of once-dominant technologies is the recasting of their technological features from the functional-utilitarian to the aesthetic realm, with an additional element concerning communal interaction among users. The findings that emerge from our quantitative textual analysis of over 200,000 posts on a prominent online LP-related discussion forum (between 2002 and 2010) also suggest that the post-dominance technology adopters and users appear to share many key characteristics with the earliest adopters of new technologies, rather than with late-stage adopters which precede them.     

Extreme Value Theory and Statistics of Univariate Extremes: A Review

Statistical issues arising in modelling univariate extremes of a random sample have been successfully used in the most diverse fields, such as biometrics, finance, insurance and risk theory. Statistics of univariate extremes (SUE), the subject to be dealt with in this review paper, has recently faced a huge development, partially because rare events can have catastrophic consequences for human activities, through their impact on the natural and constructed environments. In the last decades, there has been a shift from the area of parametric SUE, based on probabilistic asymptotic results in extreme value theory, towards semi‐parametric approaches. After a brief reference to Gumbel's block methodology and more recent improvements in the parametric framework, we present an overview of the developments on the estimation of parameters of extreme events and on the testing of extreme value conditions under a semi‐parametric framework. We further discuss a few challenging topics in the area of SUE. © 2014 The Authors. International Statistical Review © 2014 International Statistical Institute