Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

It is widely acknowledged that Korea will not be secure against future economic crisis without structural reform of finance, enterprise and labor markets. Real reform requires a transfer of authority from the government to market-based institutions, forcing banks to take full responsibility for the loans they authorize. Before the crisis, the government implicitly insured depositors' bank loans made to the large conglomerates, leaving banks little incentive to develop the necessary skills in credit analysis and loan monitoring. The insured agents did not take proper care to manage their risks. Moral hazard or will increased government control over the financial sector weaken market discipline?

Increasingly we are witnessing a paradigm shift from checklist style regulations of financial institutions to one that emphasizes supervision and the role of the marketplace. Advocates of this new paradigm argue that the size and financial strength of a financial institution does not necessarily equate to excellence and efficiency. This paper offers as evidence from an efficiency study of the merchant banking industry in Singapore that such a paradigm shift is appropriate. The findings of the study indicate that the efficiencies of the merchant banks do not appear to change much over time, profit and cost efficiencies are un-correlated, and that size is not a reliable indicator of efficiency.

In this paper, we present empirical evidence linking the movements in the U.S. $/Yen exchange rate and the U.S. productivity figures to the U.S. outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) in Japan by constructing a five variable vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Our results show a lagged and statistically significant negative response of the U.S. FDI to a one standard deviation increase in the U.S. productivity figures. We further find that a once and for all appreciation in the U.S. dollar increases the U.S. FDI in Japan which is consistent with the earlier findings in the literature. The U.S. export figures, however, are found to serve as a complement to the U.S. outbound FDI whereas the impact of the U.S. imports from Japan on the U.S. outbound FDI is found to be negative. The results support the view that a productivity increase in the U.S. decreases the amount of the U.S. outbound foreign direct investment in the long run.

This paper seeks to identify which factors are important for estimating portfolio's expected return and standard deviation in the Taiwan stock market. We have summarized from the existing empirical literature a total of 26 factors that may have explanatory power. The results of our evaluation show that except for the trading volume, the remaining 25 factors do not seem to help explain the average stock returns during the July 1985–June 1999 period. However, the power of the trading volume to account for the expected returns on the stock is affected by any changes in the sample or by the use of a different evaluation model. We suggest three potential explanations of why all 26 factors show no stable power to explain average returns on Taiwan stocks: high volatility, selection bias, and market differences. Moreover, we find that all of the 26 factors are important in capturing the systematic covariation in stock returns.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of Taiwan's stock stabilization fund on the stock market. Stabilization funds have long been used by many countries to achieve the goal of market stabilization. However, the actual impacts of the funds still remain a puzzle. This is the first paper that empirically examines the effect of the stabilization fund on the stock market. Taiwan's stock stabilization fund, which was inaugurated in February 1996 after the panic selling induced by the announcement of military exercise by mainland China, provides an experimental environment for investigating whether this alternative mechanism is effective in stabilizing the stock price when the market is in panic. By intervention analysis, we find that in the short run, the stabilization fund is statistically significant in preventing the market price from further declining after the announcement of the mainland China's military exercise. This evidence still holds after controlling the effects of the following two events: Morgan-Stanley's announcement to include Taiwan stock index into its worldwide equity market indices, and the event of U.S. aircraft carrier sent to Taiwan Strait to secure this area during the period of military exercise by mainland China.

One of the most attractive issues in the construction industry today is cost reduction because depression is coming after Japan's bursting bubbles and spreading to other Asian countries. However, most researchers do not know how to solve this problem because they still know very little about the relationship between cost and output for the construction industry. Therefore, the author tried to analyze the cost function of construction firms with due consideration of their available resources by using Cobb-Douglas Production and Cost Functions in this paper. By statistical analysis, the cost and production functions of Japan's and Taiwan's construction firms were discovered.