近年来，在债市违约潮频发制约债券融资的背景下，我国吸收借鉴国外信用衍生品发展经验，创新了中国版的信用风险缓释工具（Credit Risk Mitigation，以下简称CRM），推动了债市功能恢复和金融资源的有效配置。本文搜集银行间及交易所债券市场凭证类CRM数据，从提升企业投资效率的视角，考察了我国金融创新对实体经济提质增效的服务效果。结果发现，发行CRM能够同时降低企业投资不足与过度投资程度，有效抑制企业的非效率投资现象。CRM创设机构发挥了关键性的治理作用，主要通过缓解企业融资约束、降低信息不对称、增强债务治理等机制促进投资效率。CRM服务民营企业提升投资效率的效果更明显，且当CRM创设规模覆盖比率越高、保护期限越长时，提升投资效率的效果越强。结论显示，作为增强债券市场有效性的金融创新制度，CRM具有较好的增信效果和治理效果，契合了金融服务实体经济高质量发展的根本宗旨，对中央提出的“扩大有效益的投资”、“提高资金使用效率”都具有重要实践启示。

This study finds that reducing political influence over local courts weakens local government debt capacity. We establish this result by exploiting the staggered roll-out of a judicial centralization reform aimed at alleviating local court capture in China and find reduced judicial favoritism towards local governments post-reform. The majority of local government lawsuits are with contractors over government payment delays. The reform not only increases government lawsuit losses but also exposes their credit risk, as payment delays without court support signal government liquidity constraint. Investors respond by tightening lending and increasing interest rates, which curbs government spending.

This paper creates default-probability-(PD)-implied credit ratings for Chinese firms following the S&P global rating standard. The domestic credit rating agency (DCRA) ratings are higher than the PD-implied ratings by ten notches on average for the identical level of default risk, implying that the domestic ratings are significantly inflated. The PD-implied ratings outperform the DCRA ratings in detecting defaults and complement the latter in predicting yield spreads. The PD-implied ratings draw information from operating efficiency-related variables; in contrast, the DCRA ratings pay attention to scale-based firm characteristics in credit risk assessment.

Over the last decade, China’s P2P lending industry has been seen as an important credit source but it has recently suffered from a wave of bankruptcies. Using 126,090 P2P loan deals from RenRen Dai, one of the biggest online P2P websites in China, this paper attempts to predict credit default probabilities for P2P lending by implementing machine-learning techniques. More specifically, thisstudy proposes a stacking ensemble machine-learning model to assess credit default risk for P2P lending platforms. A Max-Relevance and Min-Redundancy (MRMR) method is used for feature selection and then irrelevant features are eliminated by using k-means clustering method. Finally, the stacking ensemble model is performed to produce accurate and stable predictions in the feature subset. Experimental results show that stacking ensemble model yields high performance, not only in prediction accuracy but also in precision and recall. In comparison to single classifiers, the stacking ensemble machine-learning model has a minimum error rate and provides more accurate credit default risk prediction. The results also confirm the efficiency of the proposed stacking ensemble model through the area under the ROC curve.

We study non-performing loan (NPL) transactions in China using proprietary data from a leading market participant. We find these transactions – driven by tighter financial regulation – are consistent with banks concealing non-performing assets from regulators as (i) transaction prices do not compensate for credit risks; (ii) banks fund the NPL transactions and remain responsible for debt collection; and (iii) 70% of NPL packages are re-sold at inflated prices to bank clients. These results imply NPL transactions do not truly resolve NPLs. Recognizing the hidden NPLs implies the total NPLs in China is two to four times the reported amount.

我们发现，股市泡沫和信贷市场中的信用风险存在因果关系。我们分析了来自人人贷（国内头部P2P众筹平台）的超过45万笔贷款数据，时间为2015年，当时A股正经历非理性的大起大落。随着上证综指突破3500点，散户们积极进入股市，并通过P2P平台融资，我们发现，此时P2P平台贷款的违约率以及违约程度都有了大幅提高。对于低质量贷款以及过分自信的贷款者，这种效应更加显著。其他一系列P2P市场状态指标，也都出现恶化。总之，我们认为，金融科技的发展会扩大金融风险，促使风险在不同市场之间蔓延。

In this paper, using a set of zero yield curve data of China’s government bonds and credit bonds, along with China’s aggregate credit risk measures, and macroeconomic variables from 2006 to 2013, we document a puzzle of counter-credit-risk corporate yield spreads. We interpret this puzzle as a symptom of the immaturity of China’s credit bond market, which reveals a distorted pricing mechanism latent in the fundamental of this market. As by-products of our analysis, we also find interesting results about relations between corporate yield spreads and interest rates as well as risk premia and the stock index, and these results are somewhat attributed to this puzzle.

Different from the well established markets such as the dollar-Euro market, recent CIP deviations observed in the onshore dollar-RMB forward market were primarily caused by conversion restrictions in the spot market rather than changes in credit risk and/or liquidity constraint. This paper proposes a theoretical framework under which the Chinese authorities impose conversion restrictions in the spot market in an attempt to achieve capital flow balance, but face the tradeoff between achieving such balance and disturbing current account transactions. Consequently, the level of conversion restriction should increase with the amount of capital account transactions and decrease with the amount of current account transactions. Such conversion restriction in turn places a binding constraint on forward traders’ ability to cover their forward positions, resulting in the observed CIP deviation. More particularly, the model predicts that onshore forward rate is equal to a weighted average of CIP-implied forward rate and the market’s expectation of future spot rate, with the weight determined by the level of conversion restriction. As a secondary result, the model also implies that offshore non-deliverable forwards reflect the market’s expectation of future spot rate. Empirical results are consistent with these predictions.

This paper focuses on evidence from stock markets as it investigates the spillovers from the United States to mainland China and Hong Kong SAR during the subprime crisis. Using both univariate and multivariate GARCH models, this paper finds that China's stock market is not immune to the financial crisis, as evidenced by the price and volatility spillovers from the United States. In addition, HK's equity returns have exhibited more significant price and volatility spillovers from the United States than China's returns, and past volatility shocks in the United States have a more persistent effect on future volatility in HK than in China, reflecting HK's role as an international financial center. Moreover, the impact of the volatility from the United States on China's stock markets has been more persistent than that from HK, due mainly to the United States as the origin of the subprime crisis. Finally, as expected, the conditional correlation between China and HK has outweighed their conditional correlations with the United States, echoing increasing financial integration between China and HK.

Great credit risk is a big headache which blocks the development of the banking sector of China. Based on the panel data of the Chinese banking sector from 2002 to 2006, this paper empirically examines the effects of foreign strategic investors’ participation on the risk behavior of Chinese banks. The results show that foreign strategic investors (FSI) had a positive, but limited impact on the credit risk of Chinese banks. Further analysis reveals that the risk management abilities of Chinese banks have improved apparently when the proportion of shareholding of the leading foreign strategic investors exceeds 15 percent, which results in a significant drop of the credit risk. However, due to the ‘minority ownership’ restriction on foreign investors' stock shares, the positive effect of the participation of foreign strategic investors is limited. The visible decline in both non-performing loans (NPLs) and the NPL ratio of Chinese banks mainly reflects the rapid growth of China's economy and benefits a lot from the massive financial restructuring of state-owned banks.