Data for outcome payments or information for care? A sociotechnical analysis of the management information system in the implementation of a social impact bond

ABSTRACT

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are a policy intervention designed to explicitly link the activity of social interventions to outcome payments. Despite a burgeoning literature on SIBs there is a lack of evidence in relation to the information system characteristics and accounting mechanisms of SIBs. Applying a multi-dimensional sociotechnical lens to a case study of a SIB allows us to reveal the current problematic convergence of public management and information systems. The authors found that an information system within a SIB is introduced and adapted to increasingly prioritize the production of data for payment over documenting care accounts to support improved provision. The ?ndings of this paper also suggest that claims of SIBs as an innovation are limited as they are subject to the familiar problems of New Public Management practice, in the way they shape the design and use of the data in governance, management and service delivery practices.     

Did covenants distort risk signals from bank subordinated debt yields before the financial crisis?

Restrictive covenants on bank debt require a bank to take or refrain from specific actions that affect the riskiness of that debt. Although covenants all but disappeared in the 1990s, they re-emerged after 2004 with an increase in bank risk leading up to the financial crisis. Subordinated debt yields potentially enable better risk monitoring by supervisors, but covenants can shift risk from bondholders to stockholders without reducing overall bank risk. This can distort the risk signal used by market participants to discipline excessive risk taking. Because covenants are endogenous and increase during periods of bank stress, the yield signal is dampened the most precisely when regulators most need accurate risk monitoring.     

What does futures market interest tell us about the macroeconomy and asset prices?

Economists have traditionally viewed futures prices as fully informative about future economic activity and asset prices. We argue that open interest could be more informative than futures prices in the presence of hedging demand and limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We find that movements in open interest are highly pro-cyclical, correlated with both macroeconomic activity and movements in asset prices. Movements in commodity market interest predict commodity returns, bond returns, and movements in the short rate even after controlling for other known predictors. To a lesser degree, movements in open interest predict returns in currency, bond, and stock markets.     

资本约束下的银行资本调整与风险行为

本文研究了监管资本约束下的中国银行业的风险行为与资本调整策略,发现监管压力并不影响我国银行业的风险行为,但对其资本调整策略却产生了一定的影响。当银行逼近法定最低资本要求时,主要通过调增附属资本的方式来提高其资本充足水平;而当银行违背监管资本要求时,监管压力对其资本调整则没有显著的影响,这表明资本监管不一定能达到降低银行风险行为的目的。鉴于统一的监管制裁对不同类型和规模的银行有着不同程度的影响,当局有必要对其实施分类的资本监管,并研究分类监管制裁行动和手段的可行性与适当性。     

Size inequality,coordination externalities and international trade agreements

Developing countries now account for a significant fraction of world trade and two-thirds of the membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, many are still individually small and thus have a limited ability to bilaterally extract and enforce trade concessions from larger developed economies even though as a group they would be able to do so. We show that this coordination externality generates asymmetric outcomes under agreements that rely on bilateral threats of trade retaliation – such as the WTO – but not under agreements extended to include certain financial instruments. In particular, we find that an extended agreement generates improvements in global efficiency and equity if it includes the exchange of bonds prior to trading but not if it relies solely on ex post fines. Moreover, a combination of bonds and fines generates similar improvements even if small countries are subject to financial constraints that prevent them from posting bonds.     

中国债券市场债券封闭式回购与开放式回购比较研究

本文通过对中国银行间债券市场与交易所债券市场封闭式回购与开放式回购比较研究，得出在目前市场环境下，决定回购利率因素及变量关系和这两种形式回购交易特点。     

浅析QDII基金的败因及治理措施

QDII本质上是一种有管制的证券市场开放机制,是一国积极利用境外资本市场,充分实现证券市场优化资源配置功能的可行途径。但运作一年的QDII基金,却出现了巨大的亏损。本文认为QDII基金的败因,主要有:海内外投资文化和体制的相互包容性差,缺乏QDII投资的经验和风险意识;投资过分集中,不能有效的分散风险,难以实现全球投资的初衷;次贷危机引致全球性的经济疲软,股市普遍性的下跌。并在此基础上提出了QDII基金的治理措施:严格筛选符合资格的机构投资者,加强QDII人才的培养;分散投资,降低风险,注重新兴市场的潜力;加强基本面分析,坚持长期稳健的战略。     

The relative contributions of equity and subordinated debt signals as predictors of bank distress during the financial crisis

Bank supervisors utilize early warning signals to predict which banks are likely to become distressed. Previous research has found that market discipline signals do not significantly improve out-of-sample forecasts relative to accounting-based signals. Most of that evidence, however, comes from periods in the 1990s when the U.S. economy and banking system were healthy, potentially neutralizing an advantage of market signals to incorporate new information quickly. For the period between the fourth quarters of 2006 and 2012, we assess the accuracy of two market signals – expected default frequency (EDF) and subordinated note and debenture (SND) yield spreads – relative to accounting-based signals in forecasting which publicly traded BHCs would become distressed. In 2008, EDF signals were relatively more accurate, but they did not lead to economically significant reductions in missed distress events relative to other signals. Supervisors would have been better off devoting slack resources to monitor BHCs with high commercial real estate concentrations. As the crisis subsided, a failure probability model developed from bank failures in the 1980s and early 1990s was consistently the most accurate signal. For the two dozen BHCs with actively traded SNDs, yield spreads over Treasuries were extremely poor predictors of distress because the spreads were distorted by too-big-to-fail subsidies. The Tier 1 leverage ratio was the most accurate distress signal for these large BHCs. In sum, the evidence to justify systematic reliance on market signals by supervisory agencies to forecast bank distress remains weak.     

Bond market event study methods

The procedures used in corporate bond event studies to date fail to control for heteroskedasticity due to differences in return volatility by term-to-maturity, rating, and other factors resulting in low test power. Bond return standardization yields considerably more powerful tests. Also, due to infrequent trading, use of bond transaction price observations over several days before and after an event, while giving more weight to returns calculated from transactions closer to the event, yields considerably more powerful tests than returns based solely on transactions the day before and the day after the event. Exploring the test bias caused by overlapping event dates, we find that, adjusted for rating and maturity, the correlation among standardized abnormal bond returns is small but that even fairly small correlations can result in biased test statistics. A bond market modification of the Kolari and Pynnönen (2010) procedure corrects this bias.     

长寿债券的运行机制与定价模型

通过分析长寿债券的市场发展以及连续型和触发型两类长寿债券的运行机制,采用风险中性定价方法推导出当死亡率服从双指数跳跃(DEJD)分布时,长寿债券的定价解析式,研究发现,无论从理论还是实践看,设计并发行触发型长寿债券是一种应对长寿风险更为明智的选择。