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 […]

Why don’t I buy IPOs (and you shouldn’t either)? In the case of China stocks it’s because they’re nearly always overpriced and more often than not pre-IPO earnings have been manipulated to assist the over pricing. These are now established facts, not opinions. The paper today, from Ziyi Chen of the Hong Kong University of […]

Minority Shareholder Activism (MSA) is all the rage. Fans claim it’s making a difference in Japan and no self-respecting institutional manager can make a pitch now without a few paragraphs devoted to the subject. The paper highlighted this week is therefore of interest in this context. In the work Han Han and Zhibin Wang of […]

[*I think the authors mean China Railway Corporation which changed it’s name to simply China Rail in 2019 CRC reorganization. Perhaps I’m just being a little anorak-and-cheese-sandwich-tastic keen? The paper is a preprint though and not yet peer reviewed so I presume this ambiguity will be fixed in the final version.] China’s High Speed Rail […]

Felix Chang of the University of Cincinnati College of Law; Ohio State University (OSU) – Michael E. Moritz College of Law wants discussion on the greater international use of the Rmb to stop conflating CHIPS, SWIFT and CIPS. They are very different things and, to remind: CHIPS or the Clearing House Interbank Payments System is […]

“Holding value stocks for the long term when sentiment is low will give investors very high returns in the Chinese stock market.” I could stop the summary there. That’s all casual readers need to know. The authors of the paper from which this nugget is extracted, Zhaohui Jiang (et al.), drilled the Shenzhen and Shanghai […]