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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Education and Innovation: The Long Shadow of the Cultural Revolution

In the paper highlighted today Zhanghai Huang from the Tsinghua University (et. al.) takes a look at the long term consequence on business innovation of denying managers a college education. China’s a good place to study this as one of the greater wickednesses of the so-called Cultural Revolution was to close down all institutes of […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Is Financial Globalization in Reverse after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis? Evidence from Corporate Valuations

Craig Doidge (et. al.) from the University of Toronto has taken a look at company valuations around the world, pre- and post-GFC, to see how they’ve altered relatively and if the world got financially ‘flatter’ in the process? However as the study period, from 2001-2007 before the GFC and 2010-2018 after the GFC, was associated […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Trends in Fat Intake and Their Impacts on Body Weight and the Risk of Overweight and Obesity Among Chinese Adults

The paper highlighted this week is a pre-print from the Lancet and they wish to make it clear that such” Preprints are not peer-reviewed and should not be used for clinical decision making or reporting of research to a lay audience without indicating that it is preliminary research that has not been peer-reviewed.” OK? Fat, […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Eating Breakfast or Attending Extracurricular Tutoring, Which One is More Effective in Improving Student’s Performance? An Empirical Study Based on the Data from A Large-Scale Provincial Survey

For many families a choice doesn’t have to be made between more food and more instruction for their children; but, for a surprisingly high number in a study highlighted today from Jiangsu province in China, resources have to be juggled. As Yanliu Liu of the Nanjing Normal University (et.al) points out the jury remains out […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Will [The] Coronavirus Pandemic Diminish by Summer?

Qasim Bukhari and Yusuf Jameel of M.I.T. qualify their work in the paper highlighted today by reminding their sample is only from January 22nd to March 21st and over this period 83% of testing has taken place in non-tropical i.e. countries in a latitude 30-degrees North or above. Moreover 90% of positive results have come […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – A Behavioral Signaling Explanation for Stock Splits: Evidence from China

‘Because people are idiots!’ is something you hear in finance when something happens that, well, shouldn’t. However the real world is filled with examples of things that finance-theory says are ‘wrong’ and ‘shouldn’t happen’ but happen anyway. An outstanding example is the stock-split. This is when a company has done so well its stock price […]

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Thoughts

Absent a Horseman, or Three – Why A Recovery, in Financial Markets, From the Effects of the COVID-19 Outbreak Will Be Faster Than From Past Dislocations

All happy markets are alike; each unhappy market is unhappy in its own way. Having said that, a look back at the big market dislocations of my career (the first being 1987) reveals recurrent commonalities. Turbulence in financial markets can be traced to one of four root causes; let’s call them the Four Horsemen of […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Mathematical Recommendations to Fight Against COVID-19

Chenlin Gu of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, France) and colleagues (the authors of today’s highlighted paper) admit they’re not medical practitioners, they’re numbers geeks. Nor do they represent (as far as I can tell) any special-interest political group and this makes their work especially pertinent as it comes without implied partisanship. In this short […]

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Thoughts

Just Sayin’

I’m a fan of Einstein, and who isn’t? One of his most applicable quotes to finance is the one about everything needing to be simple; but not too simple. In recent weeks, and ones to come, we’ve heard and will hear a lot of talk about markets from people who, mostly, haven’t a clue what […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – On the Drivers of Persistence in Stock Market Volatility in China

Previous studies have noted China’s stock markets are more volatile than more developed peers; but the paper highlighted today, from Julia Darby and Jinkai Zhang at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, addresses the why of this. By analyzing the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets from 2010 to 2017 and comparing them to the U.S. and […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Automated Detection of Chinese Government Astroturfers Using Network and Social Metadata

Know what an ‘astroturfer’ is? Media manipulators have been employing these for some time and in the West the tobacco and oil industries are among the special interest groups caught red-handed in the practice. An astroturfer is an agent employed to post comment on the interweb as if they were a ‘grass-roots’ real-life person genuinely […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Climate, Diseases, and the Origins of Corruption

An absence of economic progress, in some countries around the world, seems to go hand in hand with the level of corruption in these places. It’s also been observed that hot countries seem to be more often afflicted with this problem versus ones in more temperate climes; but nobody can really agree on the ‘why’ […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Hard to Get: The Scarcity of Women and the Competition for High-Income Men in Urban China

China has way more marriageable men than women. Surely then women seeking men should be in luck? In theory, yes. In practice though, and especially for higher educated and earning women, this is demonstrably not the case. The phenomenon of ‘leftover women’ is evident throughout economically better developed Asia but the researchers, David Ong, Yu […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – High Anxiety: How Washington’s Exaggerated Sense of Danger Harms Us All

Americans, since the end of the Cold War, have been reassured by their politicians that they continue to live in grave danger when, in fact, they do not (and probably never did in the first place?). As John Glasser and Christopner A. Preble conclude in a piece for the (often described as ‘libertarian’) Cato Institute […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Keeping Them Honest: The Long-term Effects of Protestant Missionaries on Honesty and Corporate Tax Avoidance in Modern China

Why would education have a bearing on honesty? The answer, in economic terms, is that the opportunity cost of being found out to be a shabby operator is higher for those with more of it. This observation is just one of several fascinating asides in the paper highlighted this week. Jiapin Deng from the Sun […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Socioeconomic Inequalities in Disability-free Life Expectancy in Older People from England and the United States: A Cross-national Population-Based Study

The study highlighted today from the Journal of Gerontology by Dr. Paola Zaninotto (et. al.) from the University College London claims to be the first to look at how socioeconomic factors relate to longevity and the quality of later life in both the U.K and the U.S. It seems the researchers set off to prove […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Global land change 1982-2016

Does the world have more or less trees today than 40*-years ago? Congratulations if you answered more. It’s a fact, as the paper today from Xiao-Peng Song (et. al.) from the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, clearly demonstrates. Over the 35-year period studied total tree cover, globally, rose by 7.1% (*I’m […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – By Accident or Design? Shenzhen as a Global Hub for Digital Entrepreneurs

Within half a generation a green field has turned into the second most important city in the world in terms of new-technology development. Kirsten Lundberg from Columbia University, the author of the paper highlighted today, asks the question could governments elsewhere in the world foster such an outcome? Rather than answering directly the author takes […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – And an Algorithm to Bind Them All? Social Credit, Data Driven Governance, and the Emergence of an Operating System for Global Normative Orders

In fairness to the author of the essay highlighted today the work is advertised as a ‘Think piece’ which gives them some latitude in terms of making a taught argument (they don’t!). Despite the long ramble there’s some serious thinking here and some very serious issues raised. Let me try and condense Larry Catá Backer […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – High-Skilled Services and Development in China

[How to read this table (below).] What you see here are major economies when their respective PPP per capita GDPs were the same as China’s is today. So, for example, U.S. data is taken from 1940, the United Kingdom from 1954, Argentina from 1995 and so on. The question the researchers who wrote the Working […]