Numerous studies have focused on the theoretical and empirical aspects of corporate capital structure since the 1960s. As a new branch of capital structure, however, debt maturity structure has not yet received as much attention as the debt-equity choice. We use the existing theories of corporate debt maturity to investigate the potential determinants of debt maturity of the Chinese listed firms. In addition to the traditional estimation methods, the system-GMM technique is used to explicitly control for the endogeneity problem. We find that the size of the firm, asset maturity and liquidity have significant effects in extending the maturity of debt employed by Chinese companies. The amount of collateralized assets and growth opportunities also tend to be important. However, proxies for a firm’s quality and effective tax rate apparently report mixed or unexpected results. Debt market and equity market conditions are also examined in relation to corporate loan maturity. The system-GMM results show that market factors seem to influence debt maturity decisions. Finally, corporate equity ownership structure has also been found to have some impact on debt maturity mix.

Current integration and co-movement among international stock markets has been boosted by increased globalization of the world economy, and profit-chasing capital surfing across borders. With a reputation as the fastest growing economy in the world, China’s stock market has continued gaining momentum during recent years and incurred growing attention from academicians, as well as practitioners. Taking into account economic and geographical considerations, the US and Hong Kong are considerably the most comparable stock markets to China. As the usual vector error correction model (VECM) could overlook the long memory feature of cointegration residual series, which can in turn exert bias on the resulting inferences, we chose to employ a fractionally integrated VECM (FIVECM) in this paper to investigate the long-term cointegration relations binding China’s stock market to the aforementioned stock markets. In addition, by augmenting the FIVECM with multivariate GARCH model, the return transmission and volatility spillover between market return series were revealed simultaneously. Our empirical results show that China’s stock market is fractionally cointegrated with the two markets, and it appears that China’s stock market has stronger ties with its neighboring Hong Kong market than with the world superpower, the US market.

With the expansion of multinational corporations (MNCs), the alarming upsurge in widely publicized and notable corporate scandals involvingMNCs in emerging markets has begun to draw both academic and managerial attention to look beyond home market practices to the pressing concern of CSR in emerging markets. Previous studies on CSR have focused primarily on Western markets, reserving limited discussions in addressing the issue of MNC attitudes and CSR practices in their emerging host markets abroad. Despite this incongruity in academic response to CSR in emerging markets, managers of multinational companies continue to face mounting and most often conflicting pressures to weigh among multiple strategic CSR responses in emerging markets. Such a task is often further complicated by the complexity of varying business norms and standards, regulatory environments, and stakeholder demands for CSR across national boundaries. With such a challenge in mind, I attempt to examine the explanatory factors in leading MNCs, otherwise recognized for accountability and integrity in their home markets, to employ inconsistent or negligent practices under CSR pressure in Chinese emerging economy. Preliminary findings reveal that discrepancies exist in how MNCs perform in CSR in home countries versus in host countries. While MNCs do have much to improve, the institutional environment in the emerging market, including the legal framework and the ethical culture, also needs to be improved by the host country governments, the industry associations, and local firms. Meanwhile, media interest and journalists, NGOs, third party monitors, industry stakeholders as well as consumer advocacy groups can raise the visibility of MNC’s contradictory practices between their origin nations and countries with emerging economies and offer the pressures and incentives for MNCs to amend their ethical shortcomings. This article also suggests implications for both theory and practice.

The increasingly competitive environment in the financial services market has resulted in pressure to develop and utilize alternative delivery channels. A growing phenomenon in financial services is the use of the Internet as a channel for financial services in many countries and there is wide agreement that this channel will have a significant impact on the banking system. The vast opportunities brought by the Internet to the banking industry have therefore attracted much attention from researchers. This study aims to analyze the role, adoption and barriers of Internet banking in the banking system in China. Using a quantitative approach, this study surveyed a sample of senior manager in three major cities namely, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Chengdu. Using a number of statistical analyses including analysis including T-test, ANOVA, Factor Analysis and Chi Square Test, The study finds that the main role of Internet banking in China is to Increase to Market Share. Another important finding is to Increase profitability. Maintain Competitive Edge and Improve customer service are the main reasons for the adoption of Internet banking by Chinese banks. However, it appears that Security risk constitutes the main barrier to Internet banking.

In this paper, we pay attention to the relationship between stock index and increments of trading accounts in A, B share market and funds. We show that there exists bilateral relationship between A, B index and their trading accounts increments. However, Granger causality only exists from stock index to increments of funds accounts. Regressions show that the investors’ sentiment will be easily driven by the index in the same direction, which imply momentum strategy in a very short period. In comparison, when using weekly data, only increments of funds accounts Granger cause the stock index. These uncover the differences between fund managers and small investors while investing on stock market. We also analyse the relationship between index volatility and trading accounts volatility.

The impacts of business environmental factors on operations strategy choices in a manufacturing context have been heavily researched. However, how managers of service firms in developing countries such as China develop operations strategy has yet to receive any significant attention among researchers. Drawing on the manufacturing literature, we examine, in the Chinese context, the relationships between business environmental factors (such as business cost, competitive hostility, labour availability, and environmental dynamism) and operations strategy choices (such as low cost, quality, flexibility and delivery performance). Employing a path analytic framework, we have identified strong linkages between business environment (viz.: business cost, competitive hostility and environmental dynamism) and operations strategy choices. We have found that environmental dynamism (such as changes in retail technology and innovations in new service development) had the strongest influence on the degree of emphasis placed on operations strategy choices. However, environmental concerns about labour availability do not appear to have any direct effect on the operations strategy selections among retail firms in China.

Chinese commercial banks have experienced tremendous growth over the past decade but have received limited academic attention due to data collection difficulty. We’ve successfully compiled a hand-collected panel dataset of Chinese commercial banks governance characteristics from 1998 to 2007. We empirically examine the relation between board governance and the profitability of Chinese commercial banks. We find that board governance has significant impact on Chinese banks’ performance. Specifically, higher board ownership, lower percentage of insiders on board, and lower block ownership are associated with better bank performance. In addition, to improve bank performance, Chinese bank managers should also focus on effectively control of bank’s operating cost, increasing net interest margin, and closely monitoring loan productivity. This is the first study conducted on the efficacy of Chinese banks’ governance system and its relation with banks’ profitability. Empirical evidence from this study has important policy implications in reforming China’s banking system into a more transparent and more efficient market driven system.

Despite the considerable media attention given to the collapse of the market for complex structured assets that contain subprime mortgages, there has been too little discussion of why this crisis occurred. The Subprime Crisis: Cause, Effect and Consequences argues that three basic issues are at the root of the problem, the first of which is an odious public policy partnership, spawned in Washington and comprising hundreds of companies, associations and government agencies, to enhance the availability of affordable housing via the use of creative financing techniques. Second, federal regulators have actively encouraged the rapid growth of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives and securities by all types of financial institutions. And third, also bearing blame for the subprime crisis is the related embrace by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board of fair value accounting. After reviewing the Bush administration's proposed solutions as flawed, this article recommends a strategy for subprime crisis resolution. Job one is to rebuild market confidence in structured assets by going back to first principles on issues such as market transparency, standardization of contracts, and accounting treatment. By reducing complexity on the trade of structured assets through simple deal structures and providing investors with the information they need to analyze collateral, for example by requiring SEC registration and public pricing of assets, much of the current liquidity problem is ameliorated.

中央银行独立性问题在现代宏观经济研究特别是货币政策研究中备受关注，其与宏观经济指标的相互作用很大程度上决定着货币政策的运行效果。就此问题，本文首先介绍了西方学者对央行独立性的不同定义及研究的理论基础，随后从理论和实证两个角度分析中央银行独立性同宏观经济运行之间的关系，最后本文得出如下结论：中央银行独立性与通货膨胀之间的关系比较明确，与其他变量之间的关系仍不能明确界定；中央银行独立性的提升确实能有效降低通货膨胀率，但是抑制通货膨胀不能单独地成为支持中央银行独立性的理论基础；是否提高中央银行独立性应该结合其与物价、就业、经济增长的关系； The Central Bank Independent (CBI) issue has drawn more attention in macroeconomic research, especially is in the monetary policy research .To a large extent, it’s interaction with macroeconomic goals (price, economic growth, employment) mutually plays a remarkable role on the effect of monetary policy. On this question, this article first introduced the western scholar’s different definition on central bank independent and the theoretical basis of it. Then, we analyses the relationship between Central Bank independence and macroscopic economic performance theoretical and empirical angle. Finally we drawn draws the following conclusions: The relations Between the Central Bank independence and the inflation is quite explicit, but we are not clear about it’s relation with other variables such as growth、employment、deficits; Increasing Central Bank independent can effectively reduce the inflation rate, but “cut down” inflation cannot alone become the support for Central Bank independence; Whether or not to enhances the Central Bank independence should take in account it’s relations with the price, the employment, the economy grows; we should care about the “stationary” of variable when dealing with time-series data, otherwise the conclusion maybe less in accuracy and credibility;

内容提要：本文在介绍泰勒规则产生、内涵、发展的基础上，利用Lawrence模型将汇率因素引入，构建了开放经济条件下的前瞻性泰勒规则。实证结果表明：泰勒规则能够为中国货币政策提供一个很好的参照系；相对于物价稳定目标，央行更关注经济增长；将微观主体的预期和汇率因素引入到货币政策时，央行对利率的敏感性增强；继续推动利率和汇率体制改革能更有效地提高泰勒规则的解释力；“前瞻性泰勒规则”能提高中国货币政策透明度； Abstract: This paper introduce the origination、connotation and development of Taylor’s rule. On this basis, we then contrast the forward looking Taylor’s rule in an open economy by employing a model from Lawrence (1999).The empirical analysis indicates that: Taylor’s rule provides us a frame of reference in policy making; Central bank prefer “economic growth” to “price stability”; when considering the effect of public expectation and exchange rate, central bank pay more attention to price stability; exchange rate and interest rate regime reformation would increase the explanation of Taylor’s rule; the forward looking Taylor’s rule could enhance the transparency of monetary policy.