An asset manager trades o? the bene?ts of higher leverage against the costs of adjusting leverage in order to mitigate expected insolvency losses. We explicitly calculate optimal dynamic incentive-compatible leverage policies in simple versions of this problem.

This article provides a survey on term structure models designed for pricing fixed income securities and their derivatives

Using the daily data of Chinese 7-day repo rates from January 1, 1997 to December 31, 2008, this paper tests a variety of popular spot rate models, including single-factor diffusion, GARCH, Markov regime-switching and jump-diffusion models. We document that Chinese spot rates are subject to both market forces and administrative forces. GARCH, regime-switching and jump-diffusion models capture some important features of the dynamics of Chinese spot rates, but all models under study are overwhelmingly rejected. We further explore possible sources of model misspecification using diagnostic tests.

解决“两权分离”所导致的代理问题是投资者利益保护的重要内容，也是促进新 兴市场国家企业健康成长、保障资本市场稳健发展的必经程序。本文以2003~2005 年沪深两 市上市公司数据，考察了产品市场竞争、公司治理与代理成本之间的关系。研究结果表明， 产品市场竞争和合理的公司治理机制能够降低企业的代理成本、提升代理效率。而在不同产 品市场竞争环境下，不同公司治理机制表现出不同作用。这一研究结论意味着，在中国资本 市场公司治理整体上存在诸多问题、而相应改革进展缓慢这一既定的前提下，要想有效解决 代理问题，通过降低进入壁垒等方式加强产品市场竞争，是一可行途径。

The issues concerning the governance mechanism of board independence and its determinants remain controversial in the field of corporate finance. Particularly, the association between the properties of family power and board independence is yet comprehensively discussed and is crucial important for the financial market in Europe and Asia. We set out in our study to identify the determinants of board independence with the sample of listed firms in Taiwan from 2002 to 2006 based on the notions that independent boards play an important role to enhance corporate governance mechanism. The argument that the higher involvement of family power in the board room is harmful to the board independence is expected. The evidence shows that firms with larger size and greater opportunities of managers to consume private benefits tend to hire more independent directors. Besides, higher growth opportunities, as well as greater outsider influence provide the same positive effect on appointing independent directors. Regarding to the most important evidence, firms with greater proportion of family members on the directorship reduce the tendency to appoint more independent directors; moreover, the higher percentage of shares owned by family members provides the positive effect on board independence. However, firm age is found to have a contradictory effect to that reported in the prior studies and firms which are more seasoned do not necessarily tend to hire more independent directors. Furthermore, we also compare board structures across different firm sizes and find that board composition in small and large firms is extremely divergent. We tend to contribute to the literatures with the evidence that firms with greater influence of power of family directorship on the board meeting are burdened with severe problem of less independence of the board.

We seek to exam the government’s role on post-privatization performance in China. Using a sample of 514 firms privatized for the period from 1996 to 2002, we find evidence that the government’s role could be both positive and negative. On the one hand, firms with politically connected CEOs have significant higher return on sales (ROS) than firms with non-politically connected CEOs both before and after listing; and CEO’s political connection has a positive effect on firms with debt burden. Also there is a significantly positive relationship between the proportion of shares owned by Government Agencies and Tobin’s Q. On the other hand, firms with politically connected CEOs underperformance firms with non-politically connected CEOs in terms of ROS change after listing, and, a significantly negative relationship is found between the proportion of shares owned by Government Agencies and postprivatization ROS.

The B-share markets in China, originally for foreign investors only, were opened to local investors in 2001. This reform was expected to improve the information efficiency in B-share markets, since local investors were supposed to be better informed than foreign investors. Meanwhile, we find that, after opening to local investors, B-share price synchronicity increases, and firm-specific return variation (idiosyncratic risk) decreases. Opening B-share markets to local investors fails to improve or even deteriorates the information capitalization of B-share prices. The findings may help us understand Chinese government’s policy making. For instance, in August 2007, Chinese government announced that Chinese citizens would be allowed in public to buy and sell Hong Kong stocks through special accounts with domestic commercial banks. But after hearing opinions from different entities, Chinese government decides to infinitely postpone this policy.

In this paper, due to the important influence of corporate governance on corporate financial behaviors and from an angle of corporate governance, we develop six hypotheses based on overseas and home relevant researches and data of Chinese listed companies from 1999 to 2003, and then we do hypotheses testes with regression models to examine the impact of share percent of the top 5 shareholders and counterbalance mechanism among blockholders on cash dividend distribution of listed companies, and to explore influence and counterbalance mechanisms in tunneling of cash dividend which derived from the special phenomena of “same shares same rights but different price”. We find that share percent of top 5 shareholders, control ability (or combined control ability) and balance degree (or combined balance degree) of blockholders have important influence on tunneling of cash dividend distribution. Lastly, the paper proposes five suggestions to restrict controlling shareholders to enlist private interests from tunneling of cash dividend and to protect rights and interests of small and medium shareholders.

The paper, based on the samples of 2003, makes empirical analyses of China listed companies from the perspective of Chinese Corporate Governance Index ( ) and its six dimensions: the index of controlling shareholders’ behaviors, board governance index, top management governance index, information disclosure index, stakeholders’ governance index, supervisors committee governance index, and find that is positively associated with return on assets (ROA), net assets per share (NAPS), earnings per share (EPS), operating cash flow per share (OCFPS), total assets turnover (TAV), rate of total assets growth (ITA) and Z-score. These indicate that good corporate governance mechanisms improve profitability, stock expansion ability, operating efficiency, growth and development potential, as well as financial flexibility and safety of listed companies. Corporate governance mechanisms of controlling shareholders, board of directors, top management, information disclosure, stakeholders and supervisors committee are largely responsible for decision-making and decision-execution mechanisms, and furthermore, they have direct and profound effects on the performance and value of listed companies.

本文针对中国证券市场的现实特点，尤其是比较严格的卖空限制，将信息结构和看法差异两个摩擦因素作为市场价格变动的解释因素，试图探讨两者在价格形成中的作用，本模型是对Handa,Schwarta and Tiwari模型的改进，HST模型对信息的处理比较简单，只考虑了信息存在的情况，且信息只能持续一个时期，我们在此基础上，对其进行了扩展。不仅信息的存在与否进是不确定的，同时信息也能在多个时期存在，分析均衡买卖价差的性质和信息存在有关的因素之间的关系。