Category: Sunday Papers

There’s an important caveat that qualifies the work highlighted today from Yufei Zhang at the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Kyoto in Japan. Viz.: “..our results can only be understood under the Chinese special institutional background, where the most important economic resources are controlled by public sectors (including governments, SOEs and state-owned […]

[Another contribution to the ‘why China never made it to an industrial revolution whilst the West did’ discussion.] Ruanzhuo Zhai from the Renmin University and Xiaoyang Luan from the HKU Business School have identified a period in China’s comparatively recent history, from the 10th to the 14th century, when a mercantilistic school of Confucianism flourished. […]

I’m flagging the ‘paper’ this week despite it being poorly written, un-reviewed, lacking rigor and by somebody who’s claimed affiliation (London School of Economics) I have a question mark over. Having said all that, Neha Baid in the monograph linked to below, makes such a startling, counterintuitive point about the state of relations between the […]

[At a banquet in China a while ago I was (sadly, by dint of age) placed next to the most senior manager of the company visited. This meant all eyes would be on me when it came to the toasts, of which there were likely to be many, but I don’t drink. In my best […]

If you wanted to study the effect of the introduction of automated manufacture on societal well being and happiness China would be a good place to start. No other major economy has been as enthusiastic in bringing in robots to help out as the charts below show. Shangkun Xie and Siyuan Fan of the Nankai […]

Researchers at the IMF, Diego A. Cerdeiro ; Parisa Kamali ; Siddharth Kothari and Dirk V Muir in a ‘Working Paper’ for the organization take a look at de-globalization (the euphemism used throughout is ‘de-risking’) and try to calculate what the cost would be if present trends and proposals were more vigorously progressed. In a […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 […]

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 […]