Author: Nial Gooding

Here’s the key message from the paper highlighted today: “The U.S. is playing a game of catch-up, but rather than supporting its own tech industry it is seeking to slow down China’s progress. The U.S. cannot afford to miss out on AI’s potential to deliver $13 trillion to the global economy.The U.S.-instigated trade war not […]

If you have a practitioner or academic interest in the issue of Corporate Governance in China you need to review the paper highlighted today in full; but, to warn you, it’s a dry old read. For those with merely a general interest I’ll do my best to summarize the main points below. Fuxiu Jiang and […]

The authors of the paper highlighted today, Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee from the University of Warwick, writing in a Discussion Paper for the German based IZA Institute for Labour Economics, want you to understand just one thing: it’s now irrefutably clear, COVID-19 hits the older members of society hardest. They use data from […]

A sure sign a survey is reliable is a wide spread of responses. Stefan Pasch of the Goethe University in Frankfurt notes this when discussing the results of his work which involves asking Chinese people, in China, how they feel about their government (among other things). If people were towing a Party-line or too afraid […]

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 […]

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 […]

The paper highlighted this week is a pre-print from the Lancet and they wish to make it clear that such” Preprints are not peer-reviewed and should not be used for clinical decision making or reporting of research to a lay audience without indicating that it is preliminary research that has not been peer-reviewed.”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

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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’ […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]