文档介绍：Comparative Financial Systems: A Survey
Franklin Allen Douglas Gale
Wharton School Economics Department
University of Pennsylvania New York University
Philadelphia, PA 19104 New York, NY 10003
******@ Douglas.******@
April 2001
1 What is a Financial System?
The purpose of a financial system is to channel funds from agents with sur-
pluses to agents with deficits. In the traditional literature there have been
two approaches to analyzing this process. The firstistoconsiderhowagents
interact through financial markets. The second looks at the operation of
financial intermediaries such as banks and panies. Fifty years
ago, the financial system could be neatly bifurcated in this way. Rich house-
holds and large firmsusedtheequityandbondmarkets,whilelesswealthy
households and medium and small firms used banks, panies
and other financial institutions. Table 1, for example, shows the ownership
of corporate equities in 1950. Households owned over 90 percent. By 2000 it
held less than 40 percent, nonbank intermediaries, primarily pension funds
and mutual funds, held over 40 percent. This change illustrates why it is no
longer possible to consider the role of financial markets and financial institu-
tions separately. Rather than intermediating directly between households and
firms, financial institutions have e to intermediate between
households and markets, on the one hand, and between firms and markets,
on the other. This makes it necessary to consider the financial system as an
irreducible whole.
The notion that a financial system transfers resources between households
and firms is, of course, a simplification. Governments usually play a signif-
icant role in the financial system. They are major borrowers, particularly
during times of war, recession, or when large infrastructure projects are be-
ing undertaken. They sometimes also save significant amounts of funds. For
e