利率风险与债务期限结构的正反馈效应分析

本文在总结以前学者有关债务期限结构分析的基础上,提出了债务期限结构与利率波动之间可能存在正反馈机制。通过对经筛选的我国上市企业面板数据的实证分析,发现银行间同业拆借利率可以较好地反映企业债务期限结构的变化。而分行业的实证分析则表明,利率波动加剧会使绝大多数行业的短期债务比例降低,呈现显著负相关关系。但现阶段我国的利率形成受企业债务期限结构变化的影响不明显,长短期的面板Granger因果检验无法通过。最后,本文从利率风险及利率期限结构的角度对我国上市公司特殊的债务结构给出了新的解释。     

Balancing budget through tax increases or expenditure cuts: is it neutral?

Fiscal adjustment currently ranks at the top in the economic policy agenda of many OECD countries, and not only those European countries aiming to meet the Maastricht convergence criteria. Recently, Alesina and Perotti argued that successful cases of fiscal adjustment resulted from cutting expenditures, while those focusing on tax increases were unsuccessful. The paper, using a bivariate VECM representation for the joint government revenue–government expenditure dynamics for five of the main OECD countries, provides two contributions to this issue. First, it proposes and performs a neutrality test of the alternative adjustment strategies (through revenue or expenditures), second it characterizes the departure from neutrality in the three countries where the neutrality hypothesis is rejected. The conclusion, prevailing for these three countries, is that adjustment through taxes not only is inefficient, but even results in a perverse effect with induced extra expenditures which more than offset the increase in government revenue.     

Bounding the benefits of stochastic auditing: The case of risk-neutral agents

Summary. In the context of a costly-state-verification model with a risk-neutral agent having limited liability, it has been postulated that allowing stochastic auditing reduces the asymmetric information problem to a trivial one: i.e., the first best can be approached arbitrarily closely with feasible contracts. This paper proves the postulate to be false: the surplus from feasible contracts is bounded strictly below the first-best surplus level. The bound is straightforward to compute in examples. The paper thus removes a justification for the restriction to deterministic auditing commonly made in the literature. Received: July 18, 1997; revised version: February 23, 1998     

Disorder in the Risk Order

Abstract

This paper studies the difference in global equity portfolios allocated by the criterion of minimizing the risk by using two different risk measures, the standard deviation and the conditional value at risk. An empirical analysis is performed on a comprehensive stock exchange database. The main hypothesis of the present work is that the choice of risk measure has crucial importance in portfolio optimisation, especially in those situations when the stock markets are extremely volatile and the return distributions are non-normal. The rationale behind establishing minimum-risk portfolios is to keep track of the highest possible risk reduction benefits from international diversification.     

WHICH FISCAL MULTIPLIERS ARE REGIME‐DEPENDENT? A META‐REGRESSION ANALYSIS

We analyse whether estimated multiplier effects are systematically higher if the economy suffers a downturn. For that purpose, we conduct a meta‐regression analysis on a unique data set of 98 empirical studies with more than 1800 observations on multiplier effects and control for regime‐dependence of the multiplier. We find that spending multipliers are much higher (by about 0.7–0.9 units) during a downturn. Tax multipliers are not sensitive to the economic regime, and generally lower than spending multipliers. Finally, for all spending categories other than government consumption, the multiplier significantly exceeds one during downturns.     

浅议我国商业银行中间业务的法律风险与防范对策

商业银行中间业务的开展对促进商业银行提高经营效益、降低银行风险，以及实现可持续发展等方面发挥了重要作用。然而现阶段我国商业银行发展中间业务时面临诸多法律风险，如立法上的缺陷、法律的滞后性等。因而，应积极制定有关法律、法规，适度监管，为商业银行中间业务的开展营造良好的法律环境。