The paper highlighted this week is a first. It shows, conclusively, when women are given real control in a company they are better managers than men. Prior studies have looked mainly at Western models and tried to describe an arc between women on the board or in a CEO/CFO position and performance. Those studies have […]
Category: Sunday Papers
What’s missing from this picture of the broad outline of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? A significant part of the world whose leadership believe trade is mostly a one-sided deal and in which in any agreement there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. This view, that would shame even the smallest of small town medieval European […]
In seeking to contrast explanatory variables for stock price movements in the U.S. and China the authors of the paper highlighted this week turn up some extremely valuable perspectives on China stocks for investors. Jianan Lu, Robert F. Strambaugh and Yu Yuan, all affiliated with the Wharton Business School, wanted to see if ground breaking […]
There’s long been a debate about, particularly in developing markets, whether or not political connections help or hinder the development of the corporate sector? On the one hand it’s been established politically connected entities have better access to credit and a generally lower cost of capital. On the other hand its also been found companies […]
Sort of what we intuitively know; the larger the noise around an IPO the better it’s likely to do. What this paper adds is by taking a new approach to quantifying ‘noise’ it can predict more accurately other short and long term trading characteristics. Kun Chen from the Southern University of Science in Shenzhen and […]
Another IMF Working Paper. I noted last week, summarizing the one highlighted then, how IMF recommendations on China have a habit of ending up as official domestic policy. So these papers are especially worth paying attention to. In this one, from January this year, IMF staffers Sally Chen and Joon Shik Kang begin by reminding […]
The IMF and China have enjoyed a cozy relationship for some time; the former providing strategic road-maps the latter seem to like following. Papers from the IMF therefore on the subject of China should be read closely because they’re often policy-action harbingers The Working Paper highlighted today was published last November and it’s authorship gives […]
Itzhak Ben-David of The Ohio State University and NBER, Francesco Franzoni from USI Lugano and the Swiss Finance Institute and Rabih Moussawi from the Villanova University and WRDS, University of Pennsylvania set about the question in a Fisher College of Business working paper last updated in November 2017. By looking at before and after effects […]
Well, is there? The authors of the paper highlighted this week, Tianhao Zhi et al, from the Business School of the Sun Yat Sen University, start with trying to pin a definitive tail on the donkey in terms of defining what a ‘bubble’ is. They believe property markets can have two types of bubble. The […]
The math in this paper will be beyond most mortals; but the conclusion is straightforward if depressing. The authors, Huangnan Shen Jim from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London et al, wanted to re-visit the old chestnut of why China’s SOEs remain so powerful and so un-reformed. They believe the answer lies […]
Writing in the January-February edition of Foreign Affairs Oriana Skylar Mastro, assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University, updates some old thinking about China’s perceived attitude to it’s fractious ‘ally’ N. Korea. There are three major misconceptions about Beijing’s position. First, China and North Korea are not ‘allies’ in any meaningful sense today. Second, […]
You need to be afraid of ETFs. They are, most likely, the soil in which the seeds of the next financial crisis (there’s always another one) are being planted. How do I know this? I don’t for sure; but they look very like other financial innovations that started out (and, in fairness, after convulsion came […]
Sometimes I come across a paper that in seeking to highlight one issue is helpful to me as an investor in inadvertently shedding light on another. The paper this week, from Donghui Wu and Qing Ye of the Chinese University (H.K.) and Sun Yat Sen University (Guangzhou) respectively is a good example. The researchers wanted […]
I object to Dual-Class Share Structure* (DCSS) companies as they violate the natural justice of the One Share One Vote (OSOV) principle. I believe they give management an extra mechanism to treat minorities unfairly and ultimately the share prices of companies with these structures will trade at a discount to peers with OSOV structures. These […]
There seems to be a consensus among academics, based on work done on the U.S. stock market, that investor sentiment is a good long-term forward reverse-indicator for stock markets. Which makes intuitive sense. Maximum-bullish is often a very good time to bring chips in; maximum bearish usually a good time to get them back on […]
Banks face three types of risk. The biggest is credit which accounts for the bulk of it, but there are also market and operational risks. When setting aside capital they must allocate for each. Because of it’s impact much work has been done on credit risk but, probably because banks are especially unwilling to share […]
Foreigners bring less patent infringement cases to Chinese courts than domestic plaintiffs because the deck is stacked against them. Chinese courts are biased in favor of protecting Chinese interests and even when foreigners get a judgement in their favor damages awarded are piffling. To make matters worse judgements are opaque leaving lawyers in the dark […]
There’s a view among some fund managers that corporate site visits are unnecessary. A good company, the argument runs, should be providing via it’s regular reporting sufficient information on its operations to allow investors to make informed decisions about their prospects. Perhaps this is the case in developed markets where a mature culture of corporate […]
Using data from the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock markets Chun-Da Chen, Chiao-Ming Chen and Riza Demirer from the Lamar University (Texas), ZhiDao Financial Services and the Southern Illinois University respectively set out to test if oil price volatility had any predictive power for stocks when combined with a simple momentum strategy? They finger momentum as […]
Academics writing about curbs to academic freedom are likely to have a bias. However, the paper highlighted this week from Carole J. Peterson of the University of Hawaii and Alvin Y. H. Cheung from the NYU is reasonably balanced. They detail the way in which academic freedom has been compromised in Hong Kong since the […]