Feng Wei (et al.) from the Shandong University has taken a snapshot, 2018, of the largest EV-adopting city in China, Shanghai, to try and calculate the benefits of EV introduction. The paper is filled with fascinating observation of which one is an aside noting not all EVs are equal in terms of their environmental benefit. […]
Author: Nial Gooding
Leona Shao Zhi Li (et al.) from the University of Macau claims the work highlighted today is “..the first comprehensive study to examine the impact of [An] adverse foreign trade policy shock on innovation responses in the source country,..”. I’m sure this is correct, but it’s sad to note only recently has data on this […]
Researchers (in the West) pinned down a long time ago the business of knowing what ‘type’ you are and then inferring political (and all sorts of other, social, religious and etc.) leanings. Nearly all of that work though has been conducted in Western democracies and Xiaoxiao Shen, a doctoral student at Princeton University, wondered if […]
Today’s a holiday in Hong Kong so I thought I’d spend some time to catch up with how the New Economy Speculative Complex And Related (NESCAR) sector has been doing. To remind, my go-to indicator is an index compiled by Goldman Sachs in 2021 of highly valued loss making companies which I wrote about in […]
In a piece for the Annual Review of Economics (a publication by academics, for academics, about what other academics are up to) Zhiguo He of the Booth School of Business and NBER and Wei Wei of the Becker Friedman Institute (both Booth and Becker Friedman at the University of Chicago) review the literature on China’s […]
In an ‘Occasional Paper’ from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center Jason Jia Xi Wu (a Shenzhen native) dissects the Greater Bay Area (GBA) Initiative for what it reveals about central planning in the Xi-Era. His conclusions are not encouraging. It’s a long and dense piece but the short summary, I think, is this: Central […]
Last week I looked at a paper highlighting a ‘persistent-anomaly’, the happy-staff effect. This week I look at another paper featuring another persistent (at least in the U.S.) anomaly, momentum. The U.S. market for many years has rewarded investors who buy things that have gone up (because they reliably go up more, true) and sell […]
First, a relevant aside. If you were to pour water rapidly into a bath of sulfuric acid I can tell you what’d happen next. It’d also happen to someone else doing the same thing and at any time in the future (BTW, please, NEVER DO THIS!). Chemistry is therefore a science. Results of experiments can […]
It’s generally believed firms who regularly meet or just beat earnings forecasts must be manipulating earnings to achieve this. Which makes sense, right; but is it true? Guqiang Luo (et al.) from the Australian National University took a close look at 1,821 Chinese firms reporting between 2004 and 2019 to see if there were reliable […]
From researchers Wanyi Chen from the SILC Business School at the Shangahi University and Liguang Zhang at the Sichuan Agricultural University here’s the summary-answer to the question ; yes, “..tax uncertainty significantly inhibits corporate innovation, and its influence channels operate mainly through corporate financing constraints and managerial shortsighted behavior.” That sounds commonsensical, but as they […]
Robot Investment Assistants (RIAs here, often Robo-Advisors elsewhere); me? Huge fan. As the basic principles of sound investment can be codified and easily applied in most situations what could be better than an algorithm (or suite of them) providing the novice investor with unbiased and proven-successful good-sense tips? The paper today from Huimin Ge, Huihang […]
The work highlighted today from James Kai-Sing Kung (et al.) from the University of Hong Kong is clever but I found it unsatisfying. In it, he and his collaborators attempt to explain why China has been a persistent mega-state for so long. What gave rise to large, organized civilizations across the world was clearly agriculture, […]
The author(s) of today’s paper-in-focus, Ben Li (et al.) from the University of Massachusetts, cite an earlier paper from 2012 to highlight the fact that U.S. China-bashing isn’t new. “Reagan repeatedly criticized President Jimmy Carter for establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. Bill Clinton excoriated the “butchers of Beijing” in the 1992 campaign and promised to […]
[This piece caught my eye as the effects of the global responses to COVID are going to leave deep scars across the social fabric of all societies affected. This study reminds just how long the effects of a societal trauma can persist.] Zhiming Cheng (et al., but from other Aussie institutions) from the Department of […]
There’s an ongoing debate in the academic literature as to whether government control of a company is a good or bad thing [Yes, really]. It’s a topical question as investors in government connected Chinese property companies are probably having a better time of it than those in wholly private entities. Investors in China tech stocks […]
The world’s two largest economies offer different scenarios for stock investors into the second half of 2022; one can now either: a) invest in an uncertain economy where recession may occur; but if it doesn’t an ongoing reckoning of profligate and inflationary government policies, deleterious to corporate earnings growth, will continue. Or, b) invest in […]
This is how the World Bank is now summing up China’s prospects: 2021 was the bounce-back year, 2022 is about finally squishing COVID and 2023 will be about getting back on the front foot. The forecast recovery, it should also be noted, will occur without the inflationary blight the rest of the world is having […]
China’s economic development in the last 40-years has progressed hand in hand with a high degree of corruption. This has led some to suggest that corruption may be a good thing. Perhaps it has a lubricating effect? Xiangyu Shi of the Yale University attempts to see if there’s a relationship between innovation, the lifeblood of […]
[This is the first time I’ve seen the phrase ‘G3’ used to sum the economic world. It refers to the U.S., China and an aggregated (big country) Europe and is a descriptor whose utility will no doubt cause it to stick.] In the paper highlighted today Luis Bauluz (et al.) from the University of Bonn […]
[I’m fond of saying that to understand China properly you have to imagine it, in many regards, about 50-years behind the developed West. After reading this study I think, with regards to financial markets, that glib summary may be too kind.] Grace Xing Hao of the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University and Jiang […]