In 2005-08, over a dozen put warrants traded in China went so deep out of the money that they were certain to expire worthless. Nonetheless, these warrants attracted a speculative frenzy: for each warrant, billions of Yuan traded with an average daily turnover rate close to 300%, and at substantially inflated prices. The publicly observable underlying stock prices make the zero warrant fundamentals common knowledge to all market participants. This warrants bubble thus presents a unique opportunity to study bubble mechanisms, so far only available in laboratory environments. We find evidence supporting the resale option theory of bubbles: investors overpay for a warrant hoping to resell it at an even higher price to a greater fool.

This paper examines the role of earnings management in the underpricing and long-term performance of Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) issued during the 1998-2003 period. It tests the earnings extrapolation hypothesis that naive investors extrapolate pre-issue earnings without fully adjusting for potential manipulation of accounting accruals, thereby inflating the initial trading price. If the hypothesis holds, underpricing will be positively related to initial earnings management. However, since the latter is subsequently corrected over time, it will lead to inferior long-term stock performance. The empirical evidence is consistent with both the earnings extrapolation and the long run underperformance hypotheses for our sample of 506 IPOs.

In this paper, we examine the cost of equity capital for politically connected firms. After controlling for several firm- and country-level determinants, our results show that politically connected firms have a lower cost of equity capital than their nonconnected peers. Our results are robust to alternative measures and proxies for the cost of equity capital. We thus provide strong evidence that investors require a lower cost of capital for politically connected firms, suggesting that these firms are generally considered to be less risky than non-connected firms. Our findings imply that the benefits of political connections outweigh their costs. We conjecture that this perception is fueled by the soft budget constraints generally enjoyed by politically connected firms, and by their lower default probability, given the assurance of corporate bailout in the event of financial downturns.

This paper examines the association between ownership structure and the extent of Web disclosure of 1056 listed companies of differential privatization stage in China. Literature suggests that state controlled economies are expected to have restricted forms of information disclosure and blockholder’s equity can reduce the needs for information disclosure. Our results show that state ownership will curtail the extent of Web disclosure in the post-privatization stage and private block shareholding is positively related to Web disclosure for low privatization firms, but not for highly privatized companies. The findings indicate that state and private blockholders have diverse Web reporting policies during ownership evolution and information asymmetry may exist in post-privatization stage. The results suggest that reinforcement of the institutional environment and continuous scrutiny of a company’s reporting practices in the post-privatization stage should be emphasized.

Property casualty insurance insurers’ investment in risky assets appears to be cyclical. Insurance investment cycle is correlated with underwriting cycle. Insurers invest less in stocks in hard markets and more in soft markets. Nevertheless, the correlation between investment and underwriting cycles exists only for stock insurers, not for mutual insurers. Furthermore, investments of mutual and stock insurance firms react differently to capital market indicators reflecting investor sentiment, such as equity market indices and aggregate newly issued equity.

In a series of cross-country comparisons, we show that national culture is statistically significant in differentiating countries with different corporate governance systems. Using the Schwartz cultural value model and data on corporate governance systems, we analyze the impact of national culture on six dimensions of corporate governance. Countries that have stronger emphasis on the dimensions of Embeddedness, Hierarchy and Mastery are more likely to have a bank-based system, countries with a stronger emphasis on Autonomy, Egalitarianism and Harmony tend to have market-based systems. The findings suggest several implications for the ongoing debate on convergence and divergence of corporate governance systems.

Numerous papers in the “law and finance” literature have established that countries with better functioning legal institutions enjoy better developed capital markets, and that legal origin is a fundamental determinant of legal institutions (La Porta et al. 1997, 1998, 2006; Djankov et al. 2007). In this study, we test whether banks are willing to grant more credit to the private sector when they enjoy superior legal protection. We test this hypothesis using bank-level data from 45 emerging-market countries and a random-effects model that controls for bank heterogeneity. We find that lenders allocate a significantly higher portion of their assets to loans (i) where they enjoy English legal origin rather than French or Socialist legal origin; (ii) where enforcement of debt contracts is more efficient and (iii) where banks enjoy fewer restrictions on their operations. These support our hypothesis that superior legal protection leads to more bank credit, which, in turn, should lead to higher economic growth.

In contrast with the evidence for the US and UK, the percentage of Chinese firms that pay dividends is increasing. We find that the level of dividend payment is positively related to ownership concentration but is negatively related to the percentage of outside directors. We further determine that after paying dividends, these firms issue new equity more often than non-payer while enjoying higher market-to-book ratios. These findings suggest that dividends might substitute for board monitoring for Chinese firms and hence contributes to resolving the conflict of interest between the controlling and minority shareholders.

In this paper, we examine investors’ valuations of corporate cash hoardings and dividend payout to explicitly isolate the monitoring effect from the information effect of corporate disclosure activity. In a sample of 951 firms from 38 countries, we find that cash resources are rewarded with higher market valuation when greater disclosure improves a firm’s transparency. These results suggest that extensive disclosure enhances external monitoring and thus limits insiders’ ability to accumulate cash to expropriate minority shareholders. In further support of the monitoring effect of strong disclosure, we find that dividend payout is valued at a premium in opaque firms where cash is more vulnerable to consumption of private control benefits. Overall, our findings support the disciplinary role of firm-level disclosure policy in corporate governance mechanisms.

Previous studies find mixed results on the relation between exchange rate movement and stock return. We revisit the issue by exploring the effect of market efficiency and heterogeneous investor’s reaction to exchange rate changes using the recent event of Chinese currency appreciation. Our results show that different investor groups react differently to the exchange rate appreciation and that this can be explained by the differences in information access and demand elasticity. In addition, we find that investors with limited investment opportunities react more positively to exchange rate appreciation. Our results suggest that it is important to consider the issues of market efficiency and the differences among investors when one analyzes the relation between exchange rate movement and stock return.