金融体系的比较外文翻译.doc

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1、Comparative Financial Systems1 What is a Financial System?The purpose of a nancial system is to channel funds from agents with surpluses to agents with decits. In the traditional literature there have been two approaches to analyzing this process. The rst is to consider how agents interact through n

2、ancial markets. The second looks at the operation of nancial intermediaries such as banks and insurance companies. Fifty years ago, the nancial system could be neatly bifurcated in this way. Rich house-holds and large rms used the equity and bond markets,while less wealthy house-holds and medium and

3、 small rms used banks, insurance companies and other nancial institutions. Table 1, for example, shows the ownership of corporate equities in 1950. Households owned over 90 percent. By 2000 it can be seen that the situation had changed dramatically.By then households held less than 40 percent, nonba

4、nk intermediaries, primarily pension funds and mutual funds, held over 40 percent. This change illustrates why it is no longer possible to consider the role of nancial markets and nancial institutions separately. Rather than intermediating directly between households and rms, nancial institutions ha

5、ve increasingly come to intermediate between households and markets, on the one hand, and between rms and markets,on the other. This makes it necessary to consider the nancial system as anirreducible whole.The notion that a nancial system transfers resources between households and rms is, of course,

6、 a simplication. Governments usually play a significant role in the nancial system. They are major borrowers, particularly during times of war, recession, or when large infrastructure projects are being undertaken. They sometimes also save signicant amounts of funds. For example, when countries such

7、 as Norway and many Middle Eastern States have access to large amounts of natural resources (oil), the government may acquire large trust funds on behalf of the population.In addition to their roles as borrowers or savers, governments usually playa number of other important roles. Central banks typi

8、cally issue at money and are extensively involved in the payments system. Financial systems with unregulated markets and intermediaries, such as the US in the late nineteenth century, often experience nancial crises.The desire to eliminate these crises led many governments to intervene in a signican

9、t way in the nancial system. Central banks or some other regulatory authority are charged with regulating the banking system and other intermediaries, such as insurance companies. So in most countries governments play an important role in the operation of nancial systems. This intervention means tha

10、t the political system, which determines the government and its policies, is also relevant for the nancial system.There are some historical instances where nancial markets and institutions have operated in the absence of a well-dened legal system, relyinginstead on reputation and other implicit mech

11、anisms. However, in most nancial systems the law plays an important role. It determines what kinds of contracts are feasible, what kinds of governance mechanisms can be used for corporations, the restrictions that can be placed on securities and so forth. Hence, the legal system is an important comp

12、onent of a nancial system.A nancial system is much more than all of this, however. An important pre-requisite of the ability to write contracts and enforce rights of various kinds is a system of accounting. In addition to allowing contracts to be written, an accounting system allows investors to val

13、ue a company more easily and to assess how much it would be prudent to lend to it. Accounting information is only one type of information (albeit the most important) required by nancial systems. The incentives to generate and disseminate information are crucial features of a nancial system.Without s

14、ignicant amounts of human capital it will not be possible for any of these components of a nancial system to operate effectively. Well-trained lawyers, accountants and nancial professionals such as bankers are crucial for an effective nancial system, as the experience of Eastern Europe demonstrates.

15、The literature on comparative nancial systems is at an early stage. Our survey builds on previous overviews by Allen (1993), Allen and Gale (1995) and Thakor (1996). These overviews have focused on two sets of issues.(1)Normative: How effective are different types of nancial system atvarious functio

16、ns?(2) Positive: What drives the evolution of the nancial system?The rst set of issues is considered in Sections 2-6, which focus on issues of investment and saving, growth, risk sharing, information provision and corporate governance, respectively. Section 7 considers the inuence of law and politic

17、s on the nancial system while Section 8 looks at the role nancial crises have had in shaping the nancial system. Section 9 contains concludingremarks.2 Investment and SavingOne of the primary purposes of the nancial system is to allow savings to be invested in rms. In a series of important papers, M

18、ayer (1988, 1990) documents how rms obtained funds and nanced investment in a number of dierent countries. Table 2 shows the results from the most recent set of studies, based on data from 1970-1989, using Mayers methodology. The gures use data obtained from sources-and-uses-of-funds statements. For

19、 France, the data are from Bertero (1994), while for the US, UK, Japan and Germany they are from Corbett and Jenkinson (1996). It can be seen that internal nance is by far the most important source of funds in all countries.Bank nance is moderately important in most countries and particularly import

20、ant in Japan and France. Bond nance is only important in the US and equity nance is either unimportant or negative (i.e., shares are being repurchased in aggregate) in all countries. Mayers studies and those using his methodology have had an important impact because they have raised the question of

21、how important nancial markets are in terms of providing funds for investment. It seems that, at least in the aggregate, equity markets are unimportant while bond markets are important only in the US. These ndings contrast strongly with the emphasis on equity and bond markets in the traditional nance

22、 literature. Bank nance is important in all countries,but not as important as internal nance.Another perspective on how the nancial system operates is obtained by looking at savings and the holding of nancial assets. Table 3 shows the relative importance of banks and markets in the US, UK, Japan, Fr

23、ance and Germany. It can be seen that the US is at one extreme and Germany at the other. In the US, banks are relatively unimportant: the ratio of assets to GDP is only 53%, about a third the German ratio of 152%. On the other hand, the US ratio of equity market capitalization to GDP is 82%, three t

24、imes the German ratio of 24%. Japan and the UK are interesting intermediate cases where banks and markets are both important. In France, banks are important and markets less so. The US and UK are often referred to as market-based systems while Germany, Japan and France are often referred to as bank-

25、based systems. Table 4 shows the total portfolio allocation of assets ultimately owned by the household sector. In the US and UK, equity is a much more important component of household assets than in Japan,Germany and France. For cash and cash equivalents (which includes bank accounts), the reverse

26、is true. Tables 3 and 4 provide an interesting contrast to Table 2. One would expect that, in the long run, household portfolios would reflect the nancing patterns of rms. Since internal nance accrues to equity holders, one might expect that equity would be much more important in Japan, France and G

27、ermany. There are, of course, differences in the data sets underlying the different tables. For example, household portfolios consist of nancial assets and exclude privately held rms, whereas the sources-and-uses-of-funds data include all rms. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that these differences c

28、ould cause such huge discrepancies. It is puzzling that these different ways of viewing the nancial system produce such radically different results.Another puzzle concerning internal versus external nance is the dierence between the developed world and emerging countries. Although it is true for the

29、 US, UK, Japan, France, Germany and for most other developed countries that internal nance dominates external nance, this is not the case for emerging countries. Singh and Hamid (1992) and Singh (1995) show that, for a range of emerging economies, external nance is more important than internal nance

30、. Moreover, equity is the most important nancing instrument and dominates debt. This difference between the industrialized nations and the emerging countries has so far received little attention.There is a large theoretical literature on the operation of and rationale for internal capital markets. I

31、nternal capital markets differ from external capital markets because of asymmetric information, investment incentives, asset specicity, control rights, transaction costs or incomplete markets There has also been considerable debate on the relationship between liquidity and investment (see, for examp

32、le, Fazzari, Hubbard and Petersen(1988), Hoshi, Kashyap and Scharfstein (1991)that the lender will not carry out the threat in practice, the incentive effect disappears. Although the lenders behavior is now ex post optimal, both parties may be worse off ex ante.The time inconsistency of commitments

33、that are optimal ex ante and suboptimal ex post is typical in contracting problems. The contract commits one to certain courses of action in order to inuence the behavior of the other party. Then once that partys behavior has been determined, the benet of the commitment disappears and there is now a

34、n incentive to depart from it.Whatever agreements have been entered into are subject to revision because both parties can typically be made better o by “renegotiating” the original agreement. The possibility of renegotiation puts additional restrictions on the kind of contract or agreement that is f

35、easible (we are referring here to the contract or agreement as executed, rather than the contract as originally written or conceived) and, to that extent, tends to reduce the welfare of both parties ex ante. Anything that gives the parties a greater power to commit themselves to the terms of the con

36、tract will, conversely, be welfare-enhancing.Dewatripont and Maskin (1995) (included as a chapter in this section) have suggested that nancial markets have an advantage over nancial intermediaries in maintaining commitments to refuse further funding. If the rm obtains its funding from the bond marke

37、t, then, in the event that it needs additional investment, it will have to go back to the bond market. Because the bonds are widely held, however, the rm will nd it difficult to renegotiate with the bond holders. Apart from the transaction costs involved in negotiating with a large number of bond ho

38、lders, there is a free-rider problem. Each bond holder would like to maintain his original claim over the returns to the project, while allowing the others to renegotiate their claims in order to nance the additional investment. The free-rider problem, which is often thought of as the curse of coope

39、rative enterprises, turns out to be a virtue in disguise when it comes to maintaining commitments.From a theoretical point of view, there are many ways of maintaining a commitment. Financial institutions may develop a valuable reputation for maintaining commitments. In any one case, it is worth incu

40、rring the small cost of a sub-optimal action in order to maintain the value of the reputation. Incomplete information about the borrowers type may lead to a similar outcome. If default causes the institution to change its beliefs about the defaulters type, then it may be optimal to refuse to deal wi

41、th a rm after it has defaulted. Institutional strategies such as delegating decisions to agents who are given no discretion to renegotiate may also be an effectivecommitment device.Several authors have argued that, under certain circumstances, renegotiation is welfare-improving. In that case, the De

42、watripont-Maskin argument is turned on its head. Intermediaries that establish long-term relationships with clients may have an advantage over nancial markets precisely because it is easier for them to renegotiate contracts.The crucial assumption is that contracts are incomplete. Because of the high

43、 transaction costs of writing complete contracts, some potentially Pareto-improving contingencies are left out of contracts and securities. This incompleteness of contracts may make renegotiation desirable. The missing contingencies can be replaced by contract adjustments that are negotiated by the

44、parties ex post, after they observe the realization of variables on which the contingencies would have been based. The incomplete contract determines the status quo for the ex post bargaining game (i.e., renegotiation)that determines the nal outcome.An important question in this whole area is “How i

45、mportant are these relationships empirically?” Here there does not seem to be a lot of evidence.As far as the importance of renegotiation in the sense of Dewatripont and Maskin (1995), the work of Asquith, Gertner and Scharfstein (1994) suggests that little renegotiation occurs in the case of nancia

46、lly distressed rms.Conventional wisdom holds that banks are so well secured that they can and do “pull the plug” as soon as a borrower becomes distressed, leaving theunsecured creditors and other claimants holding the bag.Petersen and Rajan (1994) suggest that rms that have a longer relationship wit

47、h a bank do have greater access to credit, controlling for a number of features of the borrowers history. It is not clear from their work exactly what lies behind the value of the relationship. For example, the increased access to credit could be an incentive device or it could be the result of grea

48、ter information or the relationship itself could make the borrower more credit worthy. Berger and Udell (1992) nd that banks smooth loan rates in response to interest rate shocks. Petersen and Rajan (1995) and Berlin and Mester (1997) nd that smoothing occurs as a rms credit risk changes.Berlin and

49、Mester (1998) nd that loan rate smoothing is associated with lower bank prots. They argue that this suggests the smoothing does not arise as part of an optimal relationship. 金融体系的比较1、什么是金融体系？一个金融系统的目的（作用）是将资金从盈余者（机构）向短缺者（机构）转移（输送）。在传统文献中分析这个传输过程有两种途径。首先是考虑代理机构如何通过金融市场沟通；其次看金融中介机构如银行、金融公司是怎样运行的。五十年前，金融系统就是这样清楚地分开的。当较不富裕的家庭和中小等企业通过使用银行、保险公司和其它的金融机构时，富裕的家庭和大公司则使用了股票市场和