Category: Sunday Papers

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A brief personal preamble. I maintain Chinese banks are among the best run and safest financial enterprises in the world. This view is incontrovertible in only one circumstance i.e. you believe they falsify their numbers. The fact many do* explains the multi-year drubbing valuations have suffered. [*Believe banks falsify numbers not that banks do, in […]