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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Are There Gender Differences in the Propensity to Compete in China? An Empirical Investigation

On reading the paper highlighted this week from Gerald Wu, Grace Lordan and Nikita from the London School of Economics and Political Science I was struck by some obvious shortcomings. The sample size is limited, the focus is on a small demographic, the structure of the experiment didn’t convince me it was rigorous and as […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Overlooked Reality of Shareholder Activism in China: Defying Western Expectations

I especially enjoy it when I find a piece that upends an established view. In this case both my own and the majority of those likely to be reading this. We all operate on bias, presupposition, prejudice and received wisdom and it’d be tiresome to spend every day in conflict examining one’s intellectual operating architecture. […]

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Thoughts

Hong Kong – Its Very Best Self

In February 2016 I wrote on Hong Kong and said then I’d probably not write anything more about the place for some time. Eight-plus years is enough time to have left the subject alone, so I’m back with an update. In that 2016 note I flagged most of what has come to to pass, ex […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Does Retail Investor Attention Deter or Promote Earnings Management? Evidence from Interactive Platforms

Yurou Liu, of the Southwest Jiaotong University and Huaxia Chen of the Renmin University wondered if the degree of retail investor attention directed toward a company had a proportional effect on that company’s tendency to manipulate earnings? This question is particularly pertinent in China where so much of the turnover is due to retail investors […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Case for Artificial Intelligence Regulation in the Financial Industry

Miquel Noguer i Alonso and Foteini Samara Chatzianastasiou from The Artificial Intelligence in Finance Institute [Which seems to be an entity of their own creation] take us through the how, why and to what extent AI is being considered by the world’s regulatory authorities in regard to finance. The paper focuses on three main areas, […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Science and the Nation-State: What China’s Experience Reveals about the Role of Policy in Science

If, like me, you believed scientific progress was in some way intertwined with the development of open and democratic societies this paper should upend your thinking. Surely, it’s obvious, scientific progress developed in the West at the same time as the West was enjoying a Renaissance an Enlightenment or busy circumscribing the power of its […]

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Thoughts

Acres of Diamonds – Review: 44% Annual Return from Nothing(s) Special

Six months ago today, frustrated by the nuts-cheap valuations of stocks in the Hong Kong market, I wrote a note on the subject (please, revisit it here Acres of Diamonds). The main point was that value often presents itself very simply. There’s rarely a need to scour the world’s obscure market segments or rummage about […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Making of China’s ‘Inalienable Territory’. How Mineral Resources Shaped the Territorialization of Xinjiang, 1700s-1960s

Tao Ren, at the School of Public Affairs of the Zhejiang University, presents an analysis of how Xinjiang has moved from ‘barbaric frontier’ in the 1700s to the ‘inalienable territory of China’ it’s regarded as today. The shift has a complex history but the discovery of significant mineral resources and territorial horse trading with the […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – How the Rise of China Led the United States to Wreck the World Trade Organization

Professor Daniel C. K. Chow of the Ohio State University lays out in detail America’s beefs with China that’ve led to its crippling the work of the WTO. The process was initiated by the Obama administration in 2016 and completed in 2019 under the Trump regime by America refusing to appoint representatives to the Appellate […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Are Chinese State-Owned Enterprises Undervalued?

Investors in China’s Non State Owned Enterprises (NSOEs) have been keelhauled in recent years. Starting with scorched-earth in the for-profit-education sector the shellacking continued through the New Economy cabal and most recently portfolios exposed to the property sector have been hammered. Not unnaturally, there’s a growing sense that State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) may be a […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – ESG, Party Building Activities and Stock Market Performance: Evidence of Listed Companies in China

Honggang Xue (et al.) from the Xi’an Jiaotong University uses the lens of ESG benefits to take on the sensitive issue of whether or not Party involvement in running companies in China is a good thing. Since 2018 Company Law in China has mandated a Party structure inside State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and many Privately […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Understanding Corporate Governance in China

That Corporate Governance (CG) differs in China from both the Anglo-American and German-Japanese models is not news; but the how and why of this is the subject of a paper from Fuxiu Jiang of the Renmin University of China – School of Business and Kenneth A. Kim of the Tongji University – School of Economics […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Trading Without Meeting Friends: Empirical Evidence from the Wuhan Lockdown in 2020

Yichu Huang from the East China University of Political Science and Law (et al.) recognized a natural experiment presented itself in the form of the Wuhan lockdown in 2020. They wondered, what would be the effect on retail investor activity during a period when smaller investors were prevented from meeting Face to Face (F2F)? The […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Slowdown

There’s no argument about whether or not China’s GDP growth rate has slowed (above). Professor Barry Eichgreen from the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkley (writing in the KDI Journal of Economic Policy) wants to go deeper into the cause(s). The professor decided to test seven popular hypothesis about the reason(s) […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Do Government Subsidies Affect Analyst Forecast Accuracy?

The paper sidesteps the broader issue of whether or not subsidies are a good or bad thing but gets into whether or not there’s information in their granting that researchers can use? Yiyuan (Ian) Sun, from the School of Management at the Jinan University (et al.) took a close look at Chinese listed companies from […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – What is Preventing China from Achieving Crucial Breakthroughs that Pioneer New Science and Technology?

Shixiong Cao from the School of Economics at the Minzu University in Beijing pulls no punches in trying to answer the question. He begins by noting although China publishes more research than any other nation their tally of science related Nobels (2 in the last 120-years) is tiny and many so-called advances touted as world […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – An Inquiry into the North-South Management Gap in China

Always nice when academics supply proof for prior suspicion. In this case the ‘superiority’ of Southern China based firms versus Northern China peers. As a rough guide I’ve always drawn a line along the Yangtze to demarcate North from South in China. The researchers in the paper highlighted today have taken their line from the […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Does Agricultural Endowment Impede Structural Transformation?—An Empirical Examination

Classic economic theory posits that being richly endowed with good quality arable land will retard an economy’s transformation to higher value added industrial activity. Just as diamonds, gold and oil have cursed economies some have suggested agricultural land might be as much of a problem. Until the paper highlighted this week however nobody had conclusively […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – ESG Rating Results and Corporate Total Factor Productivity

This paper may quickly become an historical artifact. It’s input, Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) ratings, and it’s output, algorithmic derivations of results using machine learning are analytical tools changing at such a pace as to condemn almost all research using them to obsolescence upon publication. Moreover I, and many other investors, have spotted a […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – To What Extent Can Urbanisation Mitigate the Negative Impact of Population Ageing in China?

Writing in a working paper for the Brussels based think tank Bruegel, Alicia Garcia-Herrero and Jianwei Xu contribute usefully to the question of what effect China’s ageing population may have on productivity? The short answer is ‘not much’, at least until 2035. Even after that the ageing population isn’t a guaranteed productivity retardant. As a […]