Prof. MA Yue (馬躍)

Professor Ma (马跃) earned BSc in Optimal Control Theory (Math) from Xiamen University, China, and a joint PhD degree in Economics and Econometrics from Manchester University, the UK. He was a postgraduate student of Nobel Prize laureates Professor Robert Engle, late Professor Leonid Hurwicz, and Professor Angus Deaton when he studied at the China-US Economics Training Centre organized by Professor Gregory Chow (邹至庄, Princeton) and Professor Dwight Perkins (Harvard), at Renmin University, Beijing, in 1985-86. He then pursued his PhD study at Manchester University under the Sino-British Friendship Scholarship Scheme sponsored by Sir Yue-Kong Pao (包玉剛) from Hong Kong, and co-sponsored by the British and the Chinese government during 1987-1990. He was a tenured Reader at Stirling University in Scotland, and Professor and Head of Economics Department at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, before he joined CityU in 2013.

马跃教授现任香港城市大学经济与金融系主任、金融讲座教授、博导、亚太会计与经济学杂志主编(APJAE, 英文 SSCI)。

英国曼彻斯特大学经济与计金融量经济学博士，中国人民大学经济系研究生(在中美经济培训中心有幸从师于 三位诺贝尔经济奖得主恩格尔Robert Engle、先师赫维茨Leonid Hurwicz、迪顿Angus Deaton)，厦门大学控制理论专业学士。

曾任欧洲央行特聘专家，香港金融管理局客座研究员，英国斯特灵(Stirling)大学经济学研究教授(Reader)，香港 岭南大学经济系主任、教授，厦门大学王亚南经济学客座教授、闽江学者，中山大学岭南学院客座教授，香港浸会大学商学院研究顾问。

媒体采访：中央电视台国际频道、中国国际广播电台、凤凰卫视中文台、凤凰卫视资讯台、世华财讯、标 准普尔(上海)、英国广播公司(BBC)、美国之音、西班牙电台(香港)、亚洲联合卫视。

研究兴趣：人民币国际 化，网络经济与网络金融，企业融资与金融契约，银企关系，开放宏观经济下的汇率与货币政策，金融市场开放与稳定。

研究成果在中港台新美英德法俄日荷意的学术刊物及专著上广泛发表。

Professor Ma's research interests include banking and financial institutions, corporate finance, financial contracting, financial regulations, internationalization of Chinese currency renminbi, and Hong Kong's exchange rate and banking systems. He has published widely in international leading finance and economics journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Labour Economics, Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Économies et Sociétés, Review of International Economics, Review of Development Economics, Econometric Theory, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Jingji Yanjiu (Economic Research Journal,《經濟研究》), Journal of Financial Research 《金融研究》, and Journal of World Economy《世界經濟》. He has also published in the working papers series of NBER, IMF, CEPR, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. His research works have been published in France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mainland China, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. 

The main findings of his research have been shared with policy makers in the World Bank, State Foreign Exchange Administration (SAFE) in Beijing, and European Central Bank (ECB), and were reported by Wall Street Journal (Real Time Economics), Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, VoxEU, and Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). Professor Ma was invited to visit Princeton, Oxford, INSEE (Paris), European University Institute, and Hong Kong Monetary Authority for research collaborations. His textbook entitled Natural Resource and Environmental Economics has been adopted in more than 30 countries worldwide and translated into both Chinese and Russian.

He has won the Best Paper Award of the Jensen Prize (the First Prize) by the Journal of Financial Economics in the area of corporate finance and organizations in 2011.

The Erdős number of Yue Ma is 4, as is demonstrated by the following 4 references:

4) Yue Ma and S Liu, 1996. A Double Length Regression Computation Method for the 2SGLS Estimator of Rational Expectations Models. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 58(2), 423-429.

3) SW Drury, S Liu, CY Lu, S Puntanen, GPH Styan, 2002. Some comments on several matrix inequalities with applications to canonical correlations: historical background and recent developments. Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics, Series A, 453-507.

2) Norman J. Pullman and George P. H. Styan, 1973. The convergence of Markov chains with nonstationary transition probabilities and constant causative matrix. Stochastic Processes and their Applications, 1(3), 279-285.

1) Louis Caccetta, Paul Erdős, Edward T. Ordman, Norman J. Pullman, 1985. The difference between the clique numbers of a graph. Ars Combinatoria 19, A, 97-106.

Paul Erdős (1913-1996) was the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century (with more than 500 collaborators). Studies have shown that leading mathematicians tend to have low Erdős numbers. For example, the median Erdős number of Fields Medalists is 3. Background on the folklore in mathematics about the Erdős number is here: http://www.oakland.edu/enp/

The American Mathematical Society provides a free online tool to determine the Erdös Number: http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/collaborationDistance.html

• corporate finance, banking and financial institutions, financial contracting, financial regulation

My prediction of current Euroland crisis made 16 years ago!

Cultural Clash as a Threat to Fragile Euro: How long can it survive?

Yue Ma 
(an edited version of this article was published in Economic View column, South China Morning Post, 31 January 1999) 

Since 1st January 1999, local currencies of the 11 European countries have been linked to euro at fixed exchange rates. These first round participating countries include Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. 

Euro is the single currency of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). All central banks of the 11 participating members have surrendered their control of money supply to the European Central Bank located at Frankfurt. There are four European Union members not participating in the euro's first round. They are Denmark, Greece, Sweden and the UK. 

The euro bloc with 11 participating countries has a larger total population size than the US and is the 2nd largest economy after the US in the world. It was understood the benefits of the single currency include the elimination of currency risks within the euroland and therefore encouraging cross border businesses such as investment and trade. 

However, economists have argued forcefully for a long period of time about the potential costs of forming such a single currency. For example, the 'optimum currency area' theory developed by Robert Mundell and Ronald McKinnon in 1960s established a presumption that in a monetary union the adjustment mechanism will rely more on factor mobility than on real exchange rate flexibility. Whilst the economic integration within Europe and the new single currency may induce more factor mobility such as capital flows, the existence of heterogeneous cultural and language barriers may prevent labour mobility. 

In a successful monetary union such as the US, an automatic fiscal transfer mechanism is also primarily important to support the viability of the union in the case of asymmetric regional shocks. However, the EMU is lack of such mechanism. For example, a German tax payer is unlikely inclined to pay an unemployed in France. A young worker in the Netherlands is doubtfully willing to support a pensioner in Italy. Furthermore, all countries are still facing different risks against currencies outside euroland depending upon individual country's trading and debt structures. 

There has been an intention to absorb some, if not all, of eastern European countries into the EMU. That would exaggerate the problems I mentioned above. We only need to look at the situation in eastern Germany after the reunification to find support for this argument. 

Finally, the sustainability of a monetary union also requires a strong political support that is weak and fragile in the existing structure of the EMU. The most dramatic historic example is that the union, surprisingly again, in the US was maintained by the military forces during the Civil War. 

In conclusion, it was expected that the euroland will prosper when the business climate is promising but will have serious economic and political crises when there are adverse shocks to, maybe just some of, those economies. The sooner that shock comes, the shorter the life of the euro will be. 

-THE END-

我16年前预言欧元困境成事实！

文化冲突下的脆弱欧元：欧元的生命力有多久？

马跃

英文原文发表于香港南华早报，1999.1.31. 

中文译文见香港城市大学EMBP(中文)课程官方微信网站, 2015.7.4, 译者：杜婷婷、马跃.

1999年1月1日，欧元在欧盟11个成员国家中正式启动。这11个国家包括：奥地利、比利时、法国、芬兰、法国、德国、爱尔兰、卢森 堡、意大利、荷兰、葡萄牙和西班牙。 

欧元是欧洲经济货币联盟（EMU）国家的单一货币。11个国家的货币政策从此统 一交由设在德国法兰克福的欧洲中央银行来负责。有四个欧盟国家并不在欧元的创始国之列，它们是丹麦、希腊、瑞典和英国。 

作为一个经济体，11个创始国家所构成的欧元区，人口数量超过美国，经济总量仅次于美国，为全球第二大经 济体。那时候人们普遍认为，实施单一货币政策有利于消除区内国家间的汇率风险，降低跨国交易成本 ，从而促进欧元区内商品和资本市场的融合。 

但在学术界，单一货币的潜在成本正是经济学家们长期争 论的焦点之所在。比如，在20世纪60年代，罗伯特·蒙代尔(1999年获诺贝尔经济学奖、“欧元之父”)和罗纳德 ·麦金农率先提出了“最优货币区理论”。他们认为，在单一货币区内，调节经济的机制更依赖于生产要素的流动 性而不是汇率的浮动性。 尽管欧洲经济一体化和单一货币的推行会提高资本流动性，但区内各成员国 的文化差异以及不同语言的障碍，则可能阻碍相互间劳动力的自由流动。

另外，在诸如美国这样 成功的货币联盟内，自动的财政转移机制在应付各个地区的非对称冲击也至关重要。譬如，当 加州的硅谷经济蓬勃发展的同时，底特律的经济也许面临失业萧条的困境，所以联邦政府的财政自动转移可以适当调节其经济矛盾。 但在欧元区内，恰好缺少这种自动机制。还有，一个德国的纳税人也许不太会情愿为法国社会的失业现象买单，一个荷兰的年轻就业 者也并不大可能愿意去赡养意大利的一位退休老人。同时，根据欧元区各个国家的区外贸易和债务结构 ，所有国家仍然面临着或大或小的区外汇率风险。 

至于吸纳部分东欧国家加入欧元区的意图，我认为，这只会 加剧上述矛盾。关于这点，我们只要看看柏林墙推翻之后，东德是如何完全倚仗德国政府的财政“输血 ”、特殊补助政策以维持经济发展的状况就足以明白。 

最后，一个货币联盟 的可持续性，需要其政治领袖拿出非凡的政治智慧和敢于承担的政治勇气来维持。但在目前的欧元区内，这恰好是它非常脆弱和缺少 的致命弱点。历史上最具戏剧性的一幕是在美国南北战争期间，各方利益和诉求的不同，导致最后不得不通过军事武力来维持 整个联盟的统一。 

总之，当经济大环境向好的时候，欧元区将会保持繁荣；而一旦某些 个成员国的经济形势发生逆转，在各主权国家利益泾渭分明的情况下，将会对欧元区带来严重的经济和政治危机，欧元本身的生命力 也将受到严重挑战。 

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