米什金_货币金融学_第9版各章学习指导(3)

Part Two: Overviews of the Textbook Chapters and Teaching Tips 33

Chapter 8

An Economic Analysis of Financial Structure

The development of a new literature in economics on asymmetric information and financial structure in recent years now enables financial institutions to be taught with basic economic principles rather than placing emphasis on a set of facts that students may find boring and so will forget after the final exam. This chapter provides an outline of this literature to the student and provides him or her with an economic understanding of why our financial system is structured the way it is. In addition, it emphasizes the ideas of adverse selection and moral hazard, which are basic economic concepts that are useful in understanding financial crises in Chapter 9, principles of bank credit risk management in Chapter 10, and principles of bank regulation in Chapter 11.

The chapter begins with a discussion of eight basic facts about financial structure. Students find some of these facts to be quite surprising—the relative unimportance of the stock market as a source of financing investment activities, for example—which piques their interest and stimulates them to want to understand the economics behind our financial structure. The next two sections then explain these facts by providing an understanding of how transaction costs and asymmetric information affect financial structure. My experience with teaching this material is that it is very intuitive and therefore easy for students to learn. Furthermore, students find the material inherently exciting because it explains phenomena that they know are important in the real world. I have also found that it helps students to learn facts about the financial system because they now have a framework to make sense out of all these facts.

Two applications give students practice with using the concepts in the earlier asymmetric information analysis. They examine the role of financial development on economic growth and whether China is a counter-example to the importance of financial development. Students find these applications to be very stimulating because there is something inherently exciting about economic growth. These applications can be skipped without loss of continuity, especially for courses focusing on financial institutions.

The chapter contains a final section on “Conflicts of Interest,” which discusses what conflicts of interest are and why we should care about them. Recent corporate and accounting scandals due to conflicts of interest have received tremendous public attention and are thus highly interesting to students because resulting bankruptcies have cost employees of these firms their jobs and their pensions, and because the scandals may have hampered the efficient functioning of the financial system. It is important to

emphasize to students that conflicts of interest occur when people who are supposed to act in the interests of the investing public by providing them with reliable information, instead have incentives (conflicting interests) to deceive the public to benefit themselves and their corporate clients The section ends by providing a survey of the different types of conflicts of interest in the financial industry and discusses policies to remedy them.

The chapter has been designed to keep the textbook very flexible. The concepts of adverse selection and moral hazard were explained in Chapter 2 and are explained again in Chapter 10, so that Chapter 8 does not have to be covered in order to teach this or later chapters. Furthermore, the applications at the end of the chapter do not need to be covered in order to teach other chapters in the book.

34 Mishkin The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, Ninth Edition

Chapter 9

Financial Crises and the Subprime Meltdown

Financial crises are inherently interesting because they are so dramatic. This has become even more with the subprime financial crisis. Indeed, teaching this new chapter on the financial crises and the subprime meltdown has piqued students interest more than anything else I have taught in my entire career of over thirty years of teaching.

This chapter is an application of the agency theory, the economic analysis of the effects of asymmetric information (adverse selection and moral hazard), that was covered in the previous chapter. Agency theory is used to outline the six factors that play key roles in financial crises. Your students will really start to get engaged when you outline the dynamics of financial crises. I have found that the two figures with schematics, Figure 1 and Figure 3, are especially helpful in getting the dynamics across in class.

Students will be most interested in using the analysis to discuss the recent subprime financial crisis, which is the worst financial crisis to hit the world since the Great Depression. Nonetheless, the application on the Great Depression is worth covering because it contains so many lessons for today. The last half of the chapter focuses on financial crises in emerging market economies. This material can be easily skipped. However, if the course has an international focus, it is material well worth covering.

Part Two: Overviews of the Textbook Chapters and Teaching Tips 35

Chapter 10

Banking and the Management

of Financial Institutions

Although this chapter performs the conventional function of outlining what banks (depository institutions) do and what their balance sheets look like, it also emphasizes the economic way of thinking about how banks manage their assets and liabilities to make a profit. Three tools are used throughout this chapter and the rest of the book—the asymmetric information concepts of adverse selection and moral hazard,

introduced in Chapter 2, the theory of asset demand developed in Chapter 5, and T-accounts, introduced in …… 此处隐藏：6215字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……