Li-Gang Liu

• ANZ Hong Kong

The present analysis sheds light on the setting up a regional rating agency in Asia in the wake of recent financial crisis. We investigate the policy facing a financial regulator while evaluating whether or not to admit new entrant into the credit rating market. In an incomplete contracting framework, we show that an impartial financial regulatory...

This paper investigates whether there is any consistency between banks' financial strength ratings (bank rating) and their risk-return profiles. It is expected that banks with high ratings tend to earn high expected returns for the risks they assume and thereby have a low probability of experiencing financial distress. Bank ratings, a measure of a...

Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have become quite profitable recently. As the largest shareholder, the state has not asked SOEs to pay dividends in the past. Therefore, some have suggested that the state should ask SOEs to pay dividends. Indeed, the Chinese government has adopted this policy advice and started to demand back dividend payment...

This paper estimates pass-through of exchange rate changes to domestic inflation in Hong Kong in a two-step approach. We first estimate exchange rate pass-through to import prices and then from import price to domestic inflation using a Phillips-Curve model. We find that Hong Kong¡¦s exchange rate pass-through to import prices is relatively high co...

This paper develops a composite real activity index (RAI) using eight monthly activity indicators for the Mainland economy based on the methodology of the Conference Board. The RAI appears to be able to track the Mainland GDP growth quite well. The results from a logit regression indicate that the RAI can correctly predict the next movement of the...

This paper adopts a three-equation New Keynesian model to evaluate the appropriateness of China's monetary policy framework. Our simulation results show that a hybrid rule that relies on both interest rate and quantity of money to conduct monetary policy appears to be more suitable than its alternatives at the current stage of economic and financia...

This paper develops both a bivariate and a multivariate indicator model using a large group of high-frequency economic indicators to forecast Hong Kong's non-rental component inflation. Indicator models can offer timely forecasts on future inflation developments because monthly indicators are often employed, thus allowing more frequent updates of f...

A salient feature of Hong Kong's external trade is its intermediation role. As the entrepot for Mainland China, Hong Kong helps channel raw materials and semi-manufacturing products from the rest of the world to the Mainland for further processing and then helps re-export the processed goods and final products to the rest of the world. Economic the...

Credit rating agencies (RAs) help reduce information asymmetries between corporate issuers and investors. However, although information asymmetries are more severe in emerging than in developed countries, corporate ratings bestow lower information content in the former. This is a problem since deserving corporations that are based in emerging count...

To gauge governments' contingent liabilities behind banking systems, we employ: Sovereign ratings (SOVBD); bank's financial strength ratings (assessing solidity without external support; BFSR); bank's overall credit ratings (government support reduces default probabilities; BDCR). We find: 1) BDCR and SOVBD are positively correlated, much more in d...

This paper examines the information content of firm ratings. We disentangle the relative contribution to firms' ratings of sovereign risks and of the individual firms' performance indicators employed by rating agencies. We reach three conclusions. First, the contribution of sovereign risk to firm ratings is high in developing countries but is negli...

What is the information content of firm ratings? We disentangle the relative contribution to firms? ratings of sovereign risks and individual firms? performance indicators, reportedly employed by rating agencies. We reach three conclusions. First, sovereign risks? contribution is disproportionately greater in developing countries vis-�-vis develope...

This paper focuses on the switching behaviour of enrolees in the Swiss basic health insurance system. Even though the new Federal Law on Social Health Insurance (LAMal) was implemented in 1996 to promote competition among health insurers in basic insurance, there is limited evidence of premium convergence within cantons. This indicates that competi...

Using historical data on sovereign and individual borrowers, the authors assess the potential impact on non-high-income countries of linking capital asset requirements for banks to private sector ratings, as the Basel committee has proposed. They show that linking bank's capital asset requirements to external ratings would have undesirable effects...

We demonstrate that credit rating agencies aggravated the East Asian crisis. In fact, having failed to predict the emergence of the crisis, rating agencies became excessively conservative. They downgraded East Asian crisis countries more than the worsening in these countries' economic fundamentals would justify. This unduly exacerbated, for these c...

To explain rating splits, the literature has proposed the information asymmetry hypothesis, the self-selectivity hypothesis, the rating model difference hypothesis and the random error hypothesis. While the fist two hypotheses mainly explain rating splits from the perspective of issuers, the last two hypotheses try to clarify rating differences fro...