汇率制度选择研究历来就是在标准的分析框架下，根据不同的制度选择标准进行的，恰当的分析框架和合理的选择标准缺一不可。在分析框架上，主流汇率制度选择理论经历了M-F-D范式向新开放经济宏观经济学范式的演变；在制度选择标准上，则经历了宏观稳定性标准向微观的福利标准的发展演变历程。本文对此做了扼要的回顾。最后对以后的研究提出了一些建议，并指出了已有研究对我国人民币汇率制度选择和进一步完善的指导意义。

本文首先阐述了中小金融机构在对中小企业融资上的“小银行优势”，之后以民生银行在2000年转变市场定位为引，探讨了当前我国中小金融机构未能给予中小企业足够金融支持的原因。作者认为，中小金融机构仍然是中小企业融资的最佳方式，并大胆地提出了通过立法限制中小金融机构的经营地域和发展规模及限制其为大企业融资等若干建议。

In this paper, we provide an overview of the subprime mortgage securitization process and the seven key informational frictions that arise. We discuss the ways that market participants work to minimize these frictions and speculate on how this process broke down. We continue with a complete picture of the subprime borrower and the subprime loan, discussing both predatory borrowing and predatory lending. We present the key structural features of a typical subprime securitization, document how rating agencies assign credit ratings to mortgage-backed securities, and outline how these agencies monitor the performance of mortgage pools over time. Throughout the paper, we draw upon the example of a mortgage pool securitized by New Century Financial during 2006.

We study the effects of Chinese monetary policy shocks on China's major trading partners in East Asia by estimating structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models for six economies in the region. We find that a monetary expansion in Mainland China leads to an increase in real GDP (temporary) and the price level (permanent) in a number of economies in our sample, most notably in Hong Kong and the Philippines. The impact could result from intertemporal substitution present in a general equilibrium framework which allows for positive domestic impacts of foreign monetary expansions. Our results emphasize the growing importance of China for its neighboring economies and the significance of Chinese shocks for the design of monetary policy in Asian economies.

Chinese authorities have traditionally relied mainly on administrative and quantitative measures in conducting monetary policy, with interest rates playing a less prominent role. Additional support for this view resides in a number of earlier studies that have found that the impact of interest rates on the real economy has been miniscule. However, taking into account numerous reforms in the financial sector and more widely in the Chinese economy, interest rates may have gained some influence in the last few years. It is important to study the effectiveness of interest rates also in light of future reforms of the monetary policy tools in China. Whereas administrative policy measures were effective in guiding the behaviour of state-owned enterprises, the authorities may need to increase the use of more market-oriented monetary policy tools as the share of the economy in private and foreign ownership grows. We use a vector error correction model to study, within a credit demand framework, whether the impact of interest rates in China has become stronger over the last decade. Our results suggest that loan demand has indeed become more dependent on interest rates, albeit the channel from interest rate to the real economy is still weak.

There is growing evidence that economic crises are transmitted across economies and equity markets. This motivates two questions. First, can the direction and magnitude of a country's stock market reaction during an extreme case ("contagion") be explained by economic fundamentals? Second, are there benefits of international diversification during times of widespread contagion among equity markets? We examine the reaction of major world equity markets to the 1997 Asian Crisis. In particular, we investigate the interrelationships among world equity markets, the factors explaining the different directions and magnitudes of countries' reactions to this crisis and the effectiveness of the global diversification of investment portfolios during financial crises. Our analyses provide evidence that is consistent with the correlations among world equity markets increasing dramatically during the period of the Asian Crisis. However, this effect is concentrated on a short period around the crisis. The benefits of international diversification may be obtainable, even when the period contains a worldwide financial crisis. We show that the productivity and interest rate macroeconomic variables, worldwide beta and the existence of derivatives trading are important in explaining the stock market returns during the Asian Crisis. The effect of the worldwide beta variable is particularly strong. Finally, the trade variables are insignificant, their influences being subsumed by interest rate and inflation macroeconomic variables. On balance, we interpret our results as supporting a rational view of the spread of an economic crisis to other markets.

This paper develops a model of private debt financing under inefficient financial intermediation. It suggests a mechanism that can generate the following sequence of events observed in the recent Asian crisis: A period of relatively low capital flow despite a steady improvement in economic fundamentals (capital inflow inertia), followed by a fast buildup of capital inflow, and ended with a large capital outflow and domestic credit crunch. Unlike other models requiring large movements in fundamentals or asset prices to explain a financial crisis, this model can exhibit large credit/capital flow swings with moderate changes in the economic and market environment.

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.

Using loan-level data, we analyze the quality of subprime mortgage loans by adjusting their performance for differences in borrower characteristics, loan characteristics, and house price appreciation since origination. We find that the quality of loans deteriorated for six consecutive years before the crisis and that securitizers were, to some extent, aware of it. We provide evidence that the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market follows a classic lending boom-bust scenario, in which unsustainable growth leads to the collapse of the market. Problems could have been detected long before the crisis, but they were masked by high house price appreciation between 2003 and 2005.

We conduct a within-county analysis using detailed zip code level data to document new findings regarding the origins of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The recent sharp increase in mortgage defaults is significantly amplified in subprime zip codes that experience an unprecedented relative growth in mortgage credit from 2002 to 2005. This expansion in mortgage credit to subprime zip codes occurs despite sharply declining relative (and in some cases absolute) income growth in these neighborhoods. In fact, 2002 to 2005 is the only period in the last 18 years when income and mortgage credit growth are negatively correlated. We show that the expansion in mortgage credit to subprime zip codes and its dissociation from income growth is closely correlated with the increase in securitization of subprime mortgages. Finally, we show that all of our key findings hold in markets with very elastic housing supply that have low house price growth during the credit expansion years. Overall, our findings favor a supply-based explanation for credit expansion over income-based or house price expectations-based hypotheses.