主题：Social Trust, Financial System Architecture, and the Role of Banks
主讲人：李欣明 南开大学
主持人：林智韬 暨南大学
时间：2023年3月31日（周五）15：00-16：30
地点：暨南大学石牌校区经济学院大楼（中惠楼）102室
摘要
Social trust is an important element of national culture that affects the roles of financial institutions and markets and their prominence in the financial architectures of nations. Banks use comparative advantages in information acquisition and processing to mitigate agency problems among others arising from mistrust. For example, banks screen and monitor informationally opaque borrowers on behalf of funds suppliers that provide deposit monies to be lent to the borrowers they do not know and in which they have only limited trust. Banks may therefore play larger roles and be more prominent in financial architectures of nations with lower social trust, effectively substituting their skills for the missing social trust. However, banks are also informationally opaque by virtue of the private information they acquire and thus also subject to mistrust by funds suppliers. To the extent that distrust of banks by funds suppliers empirically dominates their distrust of funds users, the suppliers may more frequently forego bank intermediation and invest directly in users’ stocks or bonds, yielding smaller roles and prominence for banks. We address which of these alternatives prevails, employing data from 39 countries over 15 years in empirical analyses at both bank and national levels. We find consistent, robust evidence at the bank level that social trust diminishes bank roles and prominence, suggesting that banks may be less distrusted overall than funds users, and are relatively successful in substituting their skills for social trust. At the national level, the data also suggest greater roles and prominence for stock markets in countries where social trust is higher, smaller roles and prominence for banks, and neutral influence on bond markets. These findings suggest that social trust helps build confidence in direct investment in firms with less need for costly debt contracting of bonds and even costlier bank intermediation.
主讲人简介
李欣明，金融学博士，南开大学金融学院学术发展中心主任，长任副教授（正高级），博士生导师，百名青年学科带头人，美国联邦储备委员会和银行监管者协会青年学者, SSCI一区期刊Research in International Business and Finance银行区主编, 美国东部金融学会会刊The Financial Review副主编，曾任世界银行咨询专家, 天津市河东区金融局副局长（挂职）。研究领域包括: 银行、公司金融、金融稳定、数字金融等。论文发表于Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis，Journal of Financial Intermediation，Journal of Business Ethics，Journal of Corporate Finance，Journal of Banking and Finance，Journal of Financial Stability等金融学国际期刊。主持及参与国家社科基金重大项目，国家自然科学基金项目和教育部人文社会科学基金项目等 6 项。论文获得第十三届亚太金融市场国际会议最佳论文奖，JFQA、JFI、JBF、JFS最高被引用论文。
