Not since the 1930s has the world been involved in so many simultaneous trade disputes and the data being generated will providing economists and social scientists study-fodder for decades. The paper highlighted this week is just the first of hundreds that will follow addressing different aspects. This one looks at the retaliatory effects to see […]
Author: Nial Gooding
We’ve all seen that picture of the two Koreas at night; the North a black-hole, the South a supernova highlighting the economic disparity between the two? It follows then that nighttime observations of countries should provide a reliable check on reported GDP and that’s what Yingyao Hu and Jiaxiong Yao decided to try and do […]
It’s a fact of life, all over the world. Good looking people (men and women) get paid better than plain peers. In China it’s possible to advertise stating a preference for gender stressing the importance of appearance so no surprise there’s a bias there. In the paper highlighted today Congcong Li (et al) from the […]
No math-heavy 40-pager this week. A three pager with a very simple message and well worth clicking the link to read. No time? OK, from the Finance and Development department of the IMF comes a ‘think piece’ written by Anthony Anette and Joshua Lipsky and the conclusion sort of says it all; “The bottom line […]
As a twaddle-monger for many years before switching to my current gig I believe I retain a good ear for it. I was persuaded along to ‘Art Basel’ in Hong Kong recently and a noisier nest of twaddle-mongers it would have been hard to find (except at another gathering of contemporary art camp-followers taking place […]
Complicated paper (don’t panic, keep reading) highlighted this week from Jacob Boudoukh, Ronen Israel and Matthew Richardson all associated with AQR Capital which I spotted in the latest edition of No-Life-Bi-Monthly AKA The Financial Analysts Journal. Complicated because it’s taking on one of the biggest myths in financial forecasting. The authors therefore probably felt the […]
Pity the poor Chinese authorities (well, not too much perhaps). They officially floated the Rmb in 2005; but it was then and remained for a long time a float of the very managed variety. So, after many years, it was decided to allow it to move around a bit more. However, their ham-fisted attempt to […]
China’s property markets have been on a three-decade tear; but a combination of spent one-off propellants and the moderating intensity of remaining push-factors suggest more measured progress ahead. ‘Measured’ though, in the context of what for years will remain among the most vigorous economies on the planet, doesn’t capture the still considerable potential these markets […]
The paper highlighted today, prepared by Rod Tyers and Yixao Zhou, is a working paper for the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at the Australian National University. It’s an ambitious attempt to model the outcome of the U.S.-China trade dispute in a number of negative scenarios and to try and figure out what the net […]
Centenarians have been studied in depth in the developing world but less so in developing economies. China, for all its progress, still has many less well developed pockets and one such is Suixi County in Guangdong. Although poor, Suixi County has a surprisingly large number of old-old folk and Dr. Tao Wang of the Shanghai […]
The author of the paper highlighted today, Carmen Reinhart of the Harvard Kennedy School, notes how curious the world we’ve lived in recently has been. Viz; “It is rare …to have a triple boom, or robust capital flows, low interest rates, and high commodity prices, as was the case from 2000 to 2007.” Rare indeed; […]
In the IMF Working Paper highlighted today and published last month Longmei Zhang and Sally Chen survey the scene but in so doing make it clear this is a ‘scene’ that almost defies survey. The big problem is there isn’t a robust definition for ‘digital economy’. The OECD have had a go and on the […]
Strong GDP growth is BAD* for stock investors. Strange; but true. [*This isn’t a new notion and has been discussed for some time. For a very accessible paper on this see Jay Ritter here from 2012.] At a time when analysts are in broad agreement China’s economic growth is on a slowing trajectory this is […]
The authors of work highlighted today have a chilling message about what may lie ahead for China’s developing Social Credit System (SCS). Viz. ‘.. the Chinese government is preparing a much more sophisticated, sweeping version of the SCS that will likely be reinforced by artificial intelligence tools such as facial-recognition and predictive policing. Those developments […]
There’s research that shows U.S. Senators are suspiciously talented stock traders. Finding that government officials, anywhere in the world, use inside information for their own benefit then should surprise only the very young . In the paper highlighted today though Yongqiang Chu from the University of North Carolina (et al.) set out to see if […]
The China Daily newspaper has been the most important tool used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for policy communication for, well, just about ever and researchers Julian TszKin Chan and Weifeng Zhong wondered if patterns of policy shift would appear if it’s content could be machine-drilled? Spoiler alert. They do. Analyzing the contents of […]
[This is a short note because its purpose is to flag an ongoing headache rather than dwell on causes, symptoms or possible cures. I may return to those in due course.] Avoidable Calamity The title of this note should have been the headline for the story that was run by the Financial Times on January […]
This beautiful map from the IMF Working Paper highlighted today, which shows the China-wide county by county cost of transportation infrastructure, is only tangentially relevant to the paper’s conclusion. The point it makes though is self evident. The ubiquity of transportation infrastructure, or lack of it, has a lot to do with the cost/ease of […]
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The Sunday Paper – Buffett’s Alpha
We all know how Wazza’s done it; at least many of us think we do. The paper summarized and linked to today though claims to be the first fully rigorous empirical analysis of Berkshire Hathaway’s results from October 1976 to March 2017 and the conclusions are, in fact, somewhat of a surprise. The paper was […]
Two charts from an IMF Working Paper published last December sum up the problem. The first shows how high the rate remains The second shows just how little progress has been made in recent years in trying to reduce this. Personally I’ve never seen why individuals, or countries for that matter, should ever apologize for […]