Author: Nial Gooding

Before reading the paper highlighted today I didn’t know what a ‘wicked problem’ was (more here if you care, Wicked Problems). Apparently planners, policy-makers and legal experts come across them all the time, hence the need for a term to describe them. A wicked problem doesn’t involve witches, of the West or elsewhere, it’s one […]

Has China’s last poverty alleviation effort, the one that claimed to have finally eradicated extreme poverty, ended up just giving away fish or did it really teach people how to fish? Huifu Nong of the Guangdong University of Finance writing in a Discussion Paper Series for the Deutsche Post Foundation assisted IZA Institute of Labor […]

Preamble I have a 5-year-rule for IPOs i.e. I won’t buy a company that’s been listed for less. The discipline has been handy as most of the value destruction that’s taken place in the China space this year has occurred via the stocks of companies listed (at least in Hong Kong) with shorter track records. […]

Assisted by collaborators at the Jiaotong University in China Danling Jian of the Stony Brook University in New York tried to fix a bead on the relationship between firm value and where a company’s center of operations are located. I found fault with the analysis based mainly on sample size (1,083 firms in 35-cities using […]

Using nearly 4.4m onsite records from prospective property buyers in China and cross referencing this data with 620, 000 transactions (collected from 2013~2017) Maggie Hu (et al.) from the Chinese University in Hong Kong set out to see if viewing activity would reveal anything useful about ultimate property-buyer behavior? That people who make site visits […]

From the Economic Research arm of the U.S. Federal Reserve in a ‘FEDS notes’ post from June earlier this year researchers Hunter L. Clark and Anna Wong take a closer look at this important question. The data is problematic for two main reasons. First, it’s clear U.S. importers found a way to massage down the […]

Thomas Piketty, perhaps the world’s most famous living economist (aided here by Li Yang, both of the Paris School of Economics) has turned his attention to the subject of Hong Kong. Specifically, he’s looked at the period from 1981 to the present and notes the significant increase in income and wealth inequality. He further notes […]

[The link here Hedge Fund (Absence of) Performance will take you to the paper direct but if you’re a CFA Charterholder you’ll fine the same in your latest edition of No Life Monthly (P.109) a.k.a. The Financial Analyst’s Journal.] Researchers Nicolas P.B. Bollen, Juha Joenvaara and Mikko Kauppila revisit a now familiar, and proven beyond […]

Chee Keong Low, Associate Professor in Corporate Law at the CUHK Business School in Hong Kong and Tak Hay Low of the University College London have had another look at a case familiar to most Hong Kong investors. [For those not familiar here’s a quick synopsis. China Forestry Holdings listed in Hong Kong in 2009. […]

Thanks to the explanation in the paper highlighted today from Shen Wei and Liyang Hou, both of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, I now understand why China’s version of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or the Digital Currency Electric Payment (DCEP), may be a damp-squib. They point out that Central Banks in general have […]

Zeyu Geng of Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange; University of Queensland takes us on a tour of where we are now in China in terms of the development of Fuel Cell Heavy Duty Vehicles* (FCHDVs). China is important because where it goes will be where the rest of the world will, most likely, follow. [* […]

With regard to COVID, there’s been a ‘Western’ response very different to China’s approach. In Western democracies there was initially scrambling to establish best practice and even now many voices are heard contributing to a public debate about correct next-steps. China, as we’re now aware, has adopted a more top-down model and these two approaches, […]

Not an academic paper highlighted this week but a feel-good article from the IMF in their Finance and Development series from researchers Benedict Clements, Sanjeev Gupta and Saida Khamidova (the full article is here Military Spending In the Post-Pandemic Era). The authors note military spending, globally, has been in a long term decline with health, […]

Hui Huang at the Department of International Development of King’s College London conducted interviews with platform-based food-delivery drivers in China to get a picture of their lives and working conditions during the pandemic; and that picture was/is not a pretty one. The two largest operators, Meituan Waimai and Ele.me (backed by Tencent and Alibaba respectively) […]

It’s been a mystery for many years, at least to the casual observer, how low ranking Chinese officials manage to get by on their official compensation. No mystery to those, especially businesses, that directly interact with them though. A well established system that implicitly requires “an affectionate reciprocation of our excellent services.” as one cadre […]

Are Chinese companies that choose a U.S-listing, as a group, ‘dodgy’? The collapse of Luckin Coffee and the kind of investigative journalism that turned into what Forbes called “The Most Important Film of 2018”, The China Hustle (watch it here if you haven’t seen it China Hustle), provides ample grist for a mill that concludes […]

[Normally I write a summary; but the author of the piece in focus this week, Mr. John Mueller of the Cato Institute, has prepared such a great one I’d only undermine the many important messages his piece contains if I tried. So, below is his summary in full.] “Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth […]

First, an aside. The Chinese government have all but declared war on the property market in the last few months as memories of the post-GFC runaway seem to be informing policy making. Not only have they moved to restrict developers’ access to funding they’ve also issued harsh rules for how property developers may progress their […]