团队

We show that attention constraints of decision makers function as barriers to financial inclusion. Using administrative data on retail loan screening processes, we find that loan officers exert less effort reviewing applicants from unattractive social or economic backgrounds and reject them more frequently than justified by credit quality. More importantly, when quasi-random workload variations tighten officer attention constraints, unattractive applicants receive even worse treatment—review-time halves and approval rates drop by approximately 40%—while attractive applicants are not affected. Our findings suggest that financial technologies that reduce information-processing costs may promote more balanced financial access.

An influential line of research emphasizes that colonial legacy plays a key role in formal financial development. Can colonial legacy also shape informal finance? We investigate the impact of colonial legacy on informal financial development using a manually georeferenced data set within a credible empirical framework. In the 19th century, Europeans arbitrarily designed colonial borders that partitioned many ethnicities across multiple countries in Africa. Leveraging several spatial regression discontinuity designs across national borders and within British-French–partitioned Cameroon and a unique natural experiment where the same former British colony is compared with two otherwise similar areas with different exposures to French colonization, we discover that former British colonies today have better informal financial development than former French colonies. Exploring the channels, we find that places with a British colonial legacy maintain a style of social control that facilitates information flow, supports private enforcement and market interactions, and promotes strong legal cultures.

Research offers conflicting predictions about the impact of credit conditions on mental health. We first assess how bank regulatory reforms that improved credit conditions, for example, by enhancing the efficiency of credit allocation and lowering lending rates, impacted mental health. We discover that among low-income individuals, these regulatory reforms reduced mental depression, boosted labor market outcomes, eased access to mortgage debt, and reduced the ranks of the “unbanked.” We also find that mergers of large regional banks that led to branch closures and tighter credit constraints in affected counties harmed the mental health of lower-income individuals in treated counties.

强积金是香港的强制性公积金计划，旨在为居民提供基本的退休保障。在过去25年里，强积金对香港普惠金融的发展起了重要的推动作用，成功鼓励了家庭参与证券市场。然而，其年化回报率偏低的问题一直备受批评。随着积金易平台即将推出，不同强积金计划将可以整合到统一数码制度中，这正好提供一个有利的契机，以对香港的主要退休储蓄制度作出重大改进。 关颖伦教授、Thomas Maurer教授及太明珠教授分析了导致强积金表现欠佳的三个主要原因：资产配置过于保守，限制了收益潜力；部分强积金产品质量不高，管理或投资策略存在缺陷；以及高昂的费用，直接侵蚀了投资者的回报。针对这些问题，他们向政府提出了以下建议：首先，政府可以修订预设投资策略以进一步降低费率，同时积金局亦可以邀请收费较低的新服务供应商进入市场。其次，政府应积极监察资产配置，透过采取规定性措施、推广理财教育及筛选强积金资讯，协助市场参与者了解强积金复杂的投资产品空间。第三，政府可以开拓强积金的产品空间，引入更多元化的投资选择。最后，积金局应提高数据透明度，并善用其数据资源进行分析。

Banks’ information technology (IT) capabilities affect their ability to serve customers during the COVID-19 pandemic, which generates an unexpected and unprecedented shock that shifts banking services from in-person to digital. Amid mobility restrictions, banks with better IT experience larger reductions in physical branch visits and larger increases in website traffic, implying a larger shift to digital banking. Stronger IT banks are able to originate more Paycheck Protection Program loans to small business borrowers, especially in areas with more severe COVID-19 outbreaks, higher internet use, and higher bank competition. Those banks also attract more deposit flows and receive better mobile customer reviews during the pandemic.

Adverse market events can affect credit supply not only by hurting financial fundamentals but also by changing the risk-taking behaviors of individual decision makers. We provide micro-level evidence of this individual decision-making channel in the U.S. mortgage market. We find that mortgage application rejection rates are more sensitive to foreclosure intensity when loan officers are more exposed to foreclosure news, despite the same housing market and bank fundamentals. Loans originated from the affected branches have lower ex-post default rates, consistent with higher lending standards being applied. In the aggregate, this effect results in tighter credit supply during housing market downturns.

We examine how investor demand for leverage shapes asset management fees. We show that in the sample of U.S. equity mutual funds: (1) fees increase in fund market beta precisely for beta larger than one; (2) this relation becomes stronger and high-beta funds experience larger inflows when leverage constraints tighten; and (3) low net alphas are especially common among high-beta funds. These results are consistent with a model in which asset managers compete for leverage-constrained investors with heterogeneous risk aversion. The asymmetric relation between betas and fees also extends to the HML and SMB factors.

Take the recent study by Chen Lin and Mingzhu Tai from the HKU Business School, conducted with collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their paper addressed a fundamental worry for almost everyone during the pandemic: Money. Specifically, they examined how people in the U.S. saved money in response to COVID-19.

为什么在疫情期间会有大量存款汇入银行？我们发现，银行分行若位于2019冠状病毒病感染率较高的地区，它们的存款利率较位于感染率较低的地区的银行分行（即便是隶属同一家银行集团）为低。信贷提取、国家政策（如薪资保护计划）以及避险措施并非导致这些银行分行之间出现存款利率变化的原因。证据显示，2019冠状病毒病感染率较高的地区与当地民众对其就业前景和收入减少的焦虑有连带关系，导致民众减少支出和增加银行存款。