Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Will the Beijing Consensus Replace the Washington Consensus?

Raghuvir Kelkar at the Silk Road School of the Renmin University of China and Zhengxu Wang from the Department of Politics at the School of Public Administration, Zhejiang University take a look at the so-called ‘Washington Consensus (WC)’ and what’s replacing it. Pronouncing the WC dead, they move on to consider how a ‘Post Washington […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Why Are China’s Households in the Doldrums?

Jeff Dawson, an international policy advisor in International Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group has written a useful piece in the Bank’s blog ‘Liberty Street Economics’ on this topic of concern to all of us at present. China needs to persuade its citizenry to spend more, and this […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Root Cause of Japan’s 30-year Stagnation: Implications for the U.S., Europe, and East Asia

Professor Fumio Hayashi of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo makes a no-nonsense argument in the paper this week about why Japan has spun its wheels for the past 30+ years. This is just “..what one would expect for any country experiencing a population aging as rapid as Japan’s.”. Moreover, his […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The US-China Trade War and the Relocation of Global Value Chains to Mexico

With access to confidential data from the Mexican government for the period 2015~2021 researchers Hale Utar of the Grinnell College, Luis Bernardo Torres Ruiz of the Dallas Fed. and Alfonso Cebreros Zurita of the Bank of Mexico address the question ‘has Mexico been a beneficiary of the U.S.-China trade war begun in 2018/19?’. The short […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Do Short-Sale Constraints Inhibit Information Acquisition? Evidence from the US and Chinese Markets

Previous studies on short selling have focused on how investors use information to drive trades. The work highlighted today, from Lixin (Nancy) Su (et al.) of the Hong Kong Polytechnic School of Accounting and Finance, looks instead at the mechanisms that drives that information acquisition. The team looked at events in the U.S. and China […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Job Preferences and Outcomes for China’s College Graduates

Just because the number of college graduates employed by the state has, necessarily, fallen in recent years this isn’t, necessarily, what many would have preferred. In a follow up to the paper highlighted last week about where China’s happiest workers are found the paper this week, from Hongbin Li (et al.) of Stanford University, looks […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Are State-Owned Enterprise Employees Happier than Private Enterprise Employees: Analysis Based on the 2016 China Labor-Force Dynamic Survey

Studies elsewhere in the world have been inconclusive on this question. Possibly because working for the government means different things in different locales. Li He (et al.) decided to take a closer look at China. As they point out only the tobacco and electricity distribution industries are now entirely state run so private/public comparison in […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Confucian Cultural Impact on Hedge Fund Performance: Evidence from China

By measuring the number of Confucian temples and academies within a 100-kilometer radius of a hedge fund’s location the authors of the paper highlighted today believe they’ve been able to isolate a beneficial ‘Confucian influence’ on investment performance. Specifically it’s the principle of ‘Doctrine of the Mean’ i.e. progress of a middle way in all […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – [Can] Skilled Analysts Decrease the Stock Price Crash Risk? –Evidence from Listed Firms in China

The value of stock-analysts has often been questioned (not much by themselves of course!). Some work has found they have a beneficial effect as guardians of corporate governance, but other literature notes they can collude with companies and increase market risk by trend following and over-hyping fundamentally shabby propositions. Recognizing the absence of value in […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Old Boys’ Club and Board Gender Diversity: Evidence from the Anti-Corruption Campaign in China

Corporate Board gender diversity is a hot topic globally. There seems no reliable consensus though as to what causes the imbalance in the first case. Some studies have noted that golfers and smokers, activities that less women than men seem drawn to, get promoted by bosses who they share time with in these activities. Could […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The BRICS as an Alternative Anchor for Global Economic Governance: A Comment

Dan Ciuriak, of Ciuriak Consulting and a three-decade veteran of the Canadian civil service, takes apart the notion of BRICS (+ friends) emerging as a alternate to the Global North in the paper highlighted today. First, he unpacks the convergence myth. He notes that in the 1980s ‘developed’ countries were about 25% of the world’s […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Prisoner of Victimhood: China’s Costly Reunification

A interesting take on why it wouldn’t suit China to initiate hostilities against Taiwan (of course, in the event of a declaration of independence by the Taipei government all bets would be off). In the short monograph highlighted today Aaron J. Chan of the Australian National University writing in the Princeton Journal of East Asian […]

Categories
Thoughts

Tracking Improving Domestic and Overseas Investors’ Sentiment Toward China Stocks

Summary Sentiment towards China stocks is improving. A closer look at trend components suggests the momentum is likely to persist. Preamble Throughout this note I’m going to use stock prices as a sentiment-gauge acknowledging they’re far from perfect; but they’re not that bad either. A rough guide to how non-domiciled investors have fallen in, and […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Cash in the Darkness

Only an academic could write “..cash is favored by criminals because of its real-time clearing of transactions..”, but we know what they mean. Haohan Ren of the School of Management at the Fudan University (et al.) examined a dataset of 165m bank cards used in 222-cities in China to see if late night activity would […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Does Foreign Experience Matter for Analysts’ Forecasting Performance?

Yangyang Chen (et al.) of the City University in Hong Kong – Department of Accountancy, wondered if financial analysts with overseas experience did a better job of forecasting than stay at home peers? China’s a good place to study this as there are more than a few analysts who’ve been overseas (to study or work) […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Neoclassical Growth of China

China’s development path, so far, neatly fits the established track records of Korea, Japan and Taiwan. This isn’t a new observation, but in the paper highlighted today from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Lee Ohanian and Wen Yao of the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA and Tsinghua Universities respectively, the researchers have boiled causality down to its most essential […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s 40 Years Demographic Dividend and Labor Supply: The Quantity Myth

Everybody knows China’s been able to become the workshop of the world because it’s harvested a massive ‘Demographic Dividend’. Right? Xin Meng, from the Australian National University writing in a Discussion Paper for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, after taking a closer look at the data, begs to differ. As the work shows, an […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – High-Speed Rail in Shrinking Cities: A Weapon for Downturn or a Catalyst for Change

It’s no secret, one of the most challenging areas for future development in China is the Northeast or ‘Dongbei’ area. This former industrial region is a poster-child for post-industrial decay, and the population movement out of the area in recent years is a matter of public record. What a great place then to study the […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Naval Balance Between the United States and the People’s Republic of China: A Note

First, a look at the bald comparison: Scaremongering reports have focused on the headline number of total vessels where China appears to knock the U.S. into a cocked hat. However, as the author of today’s analysis (not really an academic paper, mea culpa) Nader Elhefnawy from the Miami-Dade Community College explains, this is a misleading […]

Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Building Tall, Falling Short: An Empirical Assessment of Chinese Skyscrapers

China has built 1,575 buildings with a height in excess of 100-meters (hereafter ‘skyscrapers’) since the year 2000. This makes the country (by far) the leader in terms of construction, and therefore a great place to analyze the benefits of these types of development. Jin Wang (et al.) of the Hong Kong University of Science […]