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 […]
Category: Sunday Papers
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The author of today’s paper [Technically, more of a monograph] Dan Ciuriak has an axe, clearly. But he presents his argument well and given his many years at the coal-face of international economic policy making is worth taking the time to consider. He pulls no punches, “Starting with the Trump Administration and continuing under the […]
The literature on how, and why, China and Europe developed different social and political organizations is large; but, to summarize in the smallest of nutshells, the big theme is centralization in China and fragmentation in Europe. The paper today, from Joel Mokyr of the Northwestern University and Guido Tabellini of the Bocconi University, Milan follows […]
State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are not just a China phenomenon. According to the paper in focus this week, from researchers Sung C. Bae (Bowling Green State University), Taek Ho Kwon and Chenyang Liu (both from Chungnam National University), they account for up to 22% of global market capitalization* and 50% of total global GDP. [*Of […]
Many will be familiar with points touched on in this paper. It may be the first though to take a comparative approach of norms in the U.S. and compare those habits, point by point, with what happens in China today*. [*Actually the China surveys were conducted in 2017 and 2020 but little will have changed […]
A lot that’s questionable about the analysis in the paper highlighted today is visible in the chart below. Before I come back to that let me summarize work from Alejandro Lopez-Lira and Yue Hua Tang, both of the University of Florids, which is the subject of this week’s paper. Quantie-folk, for years, have employed models […]