In a Working Paper from the IMF researchers Serkan Arslanalp, Barry J. Eichengreen and Chima Simpson-Bell take a look at the U.S.-Dollar (U$) this century in terms of its use as a reserve currency. Lets start with one of the few things that’s crystal clear: The share of U$ being held by the world’s central […]
Author: Nial Gooding
A year ago I took a look at the components of an index of unprofitable new-economy companies Goldman Sachs put together in early 2021. [NESCAR Watch – Slow Pile Up: So Far] I described these stocks then as a window into a much bigger group, the New-Economy Speculative Complex And Related (NESCAR). Since then we […]
I think the researchers (Chen Xi from the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, et al.) may be taking themselves a little too seriously with this paper that draws a line between climate change and future movie attendance in China (and by implication elsewhere). There’s a useful point though in terms of how weather […]
I’ve flagged work before that highlights some of the dis-benefits for towns connected to China’s High Speed Rail (HSR) network and the paper today is in a similar vein. Yao Ge (et. al.) from the School of Management of the Xiamen University has taken a look at how an HSR connection affects firms near and […]
Gary Dushnitsky and Lei Yu from the London Business School and the Sun Yat-sen University in Shenzhen had to crunch five separate databases together in order to extract an answer to the question ‘What drives corporate venture capital (CVC) decisions in China?’ This has never been done before and the resulting answer will be a […]
Investors in Chinese growth stocks have been keelhauled over the last 18-months, especially in those U.S. listed China shares they were persuaded were facsimiles of companies they were already familiar with (does this sound familiar? It’s the so-and-so of China, and etcetera). Let’s not dwell on that foolishness. On then to the next foolishness. Or […]
The paper highlighted today is a neat companion to last week’s on the subject of how high status women on company boards in China led to better corporate governance (CG) and less corporate shenanigans. This weeks offering, from Qurat Ul Ain of the Xi’an Jiaotong University (et al.), takes a look at another key indicator […]
Analysis of the effectiveness of women on company boards remains a tangled mess. Some studies show they make no difference to financial outcomes whilst others point out the problems of ‘tokenism’ rendering analysis a flawed proposition from the get go. Researchers of the paper highlighted today wanted to narrow the focus of inquiry to the […]
The paper highlighted today from Emmie Hine of the University of Oxford – Oxford Internet Institute and Luciano Floridi of the University of Oxford – Oxford Internet Institute; University of Bologna- Department of Legal Studies, attempts a dissection of policy papers from both China and the U.S. on AI to isolate differences in emphasis and […]
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Time, Perhaps, for a Vacation in Rome?
The citizens of Pompei weren’t wiped out by the sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They were treated first to an 18-hour rain of pumice during which many fled with belongings and lives preserved. Only after this unpleasant but unequivocal harbinger of something far nastier did the pyroclastic flows, from which no escape was possible, commence […]
The latest IMF China Country Report was published on February 4th (the full 84-pager is here IMF China Country Report 220204) and was a generally upbeat summary. It took a closer look at six topics and below I’ve extracted what I think are the key points from each. In the order in which the topics […]
What do Milton Friedman and Xi JinPing have in common? They agree that the job of regulating society, for good of course, is something for governments not corporations to busy themselves with. Milton Friedman elaborated on this in the 1970s (see link below) pointing out that if firms concern themselves with social good at the […]
Social scientists disagree about the relationship between material prosperity and ‘happiness’. It’s an especially lively debate in China where material well being has been on such a persistent upward trajectory. Taking just the prosperity-marker of ‘digital life’ as a specific variable Xiaoqian Zeng from the Jinan University and Fan Zeng of the Shanghai University of […]
Lei Gao (et al.) from the George Mason University (Virginia, USA) took a sample of domestically listed Chinese stocks from 2010~2018 and wanted to see if there was a reliable relationship between short-selling activity and their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) credentials? As this is a summary and you can read the work in full here […]
The Chinese currency (Rmb) doesn’t free-float against the U.S.-Dollar (U$), it goes where Chinese planners want it to; and recently that’s been up. Two years ago 1-Rmb bought 14.5-U$ cents, today it buys 15.7-U$ cents which is a strengthening of around 8.5%. What’s the fundamental economic rationale for this move? Why have the Chinese authorities […]
Post-lunch napping is still big in China. In a study, 94% of college students interviewed confirmed the habit. It wasn’t uncommon in the West but has now all but died out. Even in Western countries famous for the practice its not as common as it once was; but is it a bad thing? The answer […]
Finance theory assumes investors buy stocks after considering their return potential, which makes sense. In reality they do anything but. In fact, one of the most common reasons for stock purchase, especially among retail investors, is a look back at where a stock’s price has come from. Using a unique database, the EastMoney GUBA forum […]
There are competing theories as to whether letting outsiders into domestic stock markets is a good or a bad thing. On the one hand they bring best practices that assist in a market’s orderly development; but, on the other, they may introduce volatility that results in an undesirable higher long-term cost of capital. Writing in […]
How many times do we hear ‘Chinese buyers are pushing up property prices’ in Manhattan, Sydney, Cheju, London or wherever? But is it true? Do flows of money from Chinese buyers really and noticeably affect real-estate prices in certain areas? In the first study of its kind (I’ve seen) to isolate ‘unofficial’ Chinese capital flows […]
More monograph than research the highlighted piece today from Alicia García-Herrero, the Asia Pacific Chief Economist for Natixis with affiliations to Bruegel (a Brussels based think-tank) and the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, is a chilling piece if your business is selling mid/high-tech products to China. It’s only 12-pages so I’d urge a […]