From a somewhat unexpected source comes new work on the age-old question of why the East failed to industrialize and why the Industrial Revolution was a Euro-centric affair. Rafael Torres Gaviria, from the Department of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia believes the answer, in a nutshell, is Mongols. The mystery is more […]
Category: Sunday Papers
To liberalize or not to liberalize, that is the question many developing markets wrestle with. If you open up your markets you could be opening up to chicanery, volatility and a noncompetitive increase in the cost of capital as a result. If you don’t, you could lose the benefits of better actors and the improved […]
Heng Wang and Ross P. Buckley of the University of New South Wales, in a paper for a forthcoming edition of the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, bring us up to date on China’s progress with their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or as it’s mostly now referred to the e-CNY. If the subject is […]
Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan, both of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (a Washington based think tank), take a closer look at “The CHIPS and Science Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on August 9, 2022, [Which, in their words] represents the biggest US foray into industrial policy in 50 years.” […]
Unsurprisingly, for-profit providers of shared e-bike services claim they reduce carbon emissions; but is this true? Qiumeng Li (et al.) of the University of Cambridge notes in the paper highlighted today there’s (until now?) no real consensus on this among the scientific community. The problem is if they’re being used instead of a regular bike […]
Social science and economics researchers love ‘exogenous shocks’ or what the rest of us call ‘bolts from the blue’. These shocks allow them to look for patterns the slow creep of orderly progress often mask. Zhenshu Wu (et al.) from the Tilberg University of the Netherlands has used the shock of the COVID-19 stock market […]
Hanming Fang, at the University of Pennsylvania – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (et al.), isn’t claiming the paper highlighted today is revelatory. There’s no doubt people feel better and spend more when home prices rise than when they fall. What’s new in this work however is the data being compared and, […]
Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Yuanchen Yang of the IMF, writing in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.), supply a fresh and perhaps the most up to date look at China’s residential property market. The focus of the paper is not the widely reported-on Tier 1 […]
Since 2010 a widely accepted index of employee satisfaction has been available in China from CSR-analysis service provider Hexun.com. Using this information Professor Xu Xixong (et al.) from the School of Economics and Business Administration at the Chongqing University set about finding out if there was a relationship between Chinese firm stock-price crash-risk and happy […]
The attack on a gas pipeline in Europe recently reminds there are a lot of assets that run under oceans, and top of them, that are all also vulnerable. Christine A. McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong of the George Mason University – Mercatus Center, have had a closer look at Taiwan in this regard focusing on […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]