In recent times, the prices of internationally-traded commodities have reached record highs and are expected to continue growing in the foreseeable future. This phenomenon is partially driven by strong demand from a small number of emerging economies, such as China and India. This paper places the recent commodity price boom in historical context, drawing on an investigation of the long-term time-series properties, and presents unique features for 33 individual commodity prices. Using a new methodology for examining cross-sectional variation of commodity returns and its components, we find strong evidence that the prices of world primary commodities are extremely volatile. In addition, prices are roughly 30 percent more volatile under floating than under fixed exchange rate regimes. Finally, using the capital asset pricing model as a loose framework, we find that global macroeconomic risk components have become relatively more important in explaining commodity price volatility.

This paper explores whether the pricing of the option-type derivative is affected by some of fundamental characteristics, such as size and liquidity of the derivative itself and the underlying asset, which are not involved in the standard pricing theory. Considering the unique status of warrants in China due to the relatively more flexible trading mechanism, I empirically examine the pricing of Chinese covered warrants to develop this study. Empirical results show that market prices of Chinese warrants are significantly higher than theoretical prices predicted by traditional pricing models such as Black-Scholes, Jump-Diffusion, and CEV model. For call warrants, about 25 percent of the market price can not be explained by pricing models, and this figure rises to over 60 percent for put warrants. Further regression tests show that both size and liquidity of warrants and underlying stocks significantly affect warrant pricing errors. The way in which the size and liquidity affect the pricing error depends on the type of warrants. In addition, it is evident that movements of put warrant prices in China do not follow movements of stock prices. To explain the above pricing puzzles,the concept of functional asset pricing is proposed. According to this concept, these pricing puzzles just reflect the existence of functional value of financial instruments that has long been neglected by traditional pricing models. In fact, Due to the high level of liquidity and popularity, the Chinese warrant may well function as a good tool for obtaining short-term profits. The pricing of Chinese warrants by the market may correctly re°ect the value of this function, and thus is rational in essence.

This paper assesses the impact of the recent financial reforms in China. Following the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization, financial liberalisation has picked up considerable momentum. Measures introduced encompass deregulation in the banking sector and refinements in various financial markets, as well as allowing more freedom for Chinese and foreign investors to participate and interact domestically and overseas. Compared to other studies on financial liberalisation, this study focuses on a relatively narrower aspect of financial reforms namely, the impact on stock market liquidity. Using a panel data set drawn from the Shanghai stock market, we find a positive and significant liquidity impact associated with the recent round of measures, which reflects not only an improvement in capital allocation efficiency in China’s equity market but, from a financial stability point of view, also a reduction in its vulnerability. The finding also provides evidence on one of the important channels in which financial liberalisation can be transformed into economic growth over time.

The study aims to analyze the role of institutional investors in mediating the interest conflicts between blockholders and minority shareholders in emerging markets. China’s Non-tradable Share Reform provides us a perfect research environment. Before the reform, the ownership of Chinese public firms was concentrated in one or several blockholders. This part of block shares was non-tradable, and tradable shares were held by minority shareholders and institutional investors like mutual funds. Chinese government launched Non-tradable Share Reform in 2005, giving non-tradable shares liquidity rights. At the same time, non-tradable share owners had to compensate tradable share owners, such as offering a certain percentage of shares to them. The compensation schemes were advanced by non-tradable share owners and must be supported by two-thirds of votes cast by tradable share owners. Our study finds that institutional investors did actively participate in voting, but their number and holdings were reversely related with the compensation level. Our results suggest that institutional investors played shareholder activism in this reform, but their activism served for blockholder’s interests rather than minority shareholders’.

We examine changes in market values and accounting returns for a sample of publicly traded Chinese firms around announcements of block-share transfers among government agencies (“State Bureaucrats”), market-oriented State-owned enterprises (“MOSOEs”) and private investors (“Private Entities”). We provide evidence that transfers from State Bureaucrats to Private Entities result in larger increases in market value and accounting returns than transfers to MOSOEs. We also find that CEO turnover occurs more quickly when shares are transferred to Private Entities. Moreover, we find that the changes in firm value and accounting returns as well as the likelihood of CEO turnover are all functions of the incentives and managerial expertise of the new block holder. We conclude that corporate governance can be improved at State-controlled firms by improving the incentives and managerial expertise of controlling block holders, and that this is better accomplished by transferring ownership to private investors rather than by shuffling ownership among State controlled entities.

We study the relationship between firm value and related party transactions (RPTs) in China. We find that firm value (as measured by Tobin’s Q) is negatively related to RPTs but the relation becomes insignificant after controlling for corporate governance characteristics. Following Cheung, Rau and Stouraitis (2006), we use abnormal returns in response to announcements of RPTs as a direct measure of the impact of RPTs on firm value. We observe significantly negative abnormal returns before the Share Structure Reform. After the reform, the abnormal returns become insignificant. The evidence suggests that RPTs are not as detrimental to firm value after the reform as they were before the reform. This is consistent with our hypothesis that the reform increases the takeover pressure from external market and thus moderates controlling shareholders’ propensity to tunnel wealth via RPTs.

We examine the diversification patterns of almost all publicly listed non-financial companies in China during the 2001 to 2005 period. More than 70 percent of the firms in our sample are diversified. We document that patterns of diversification strongly depend on firms’ political connections. Former local bureaucrats are more likely than other CEOs to enter multiple industries. This effect is particularly pronounced in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that operate in weak institutional environments. These companies are particularly prone to entering low-growth, low-profitability, and unrelated industries. Consequently, the performance effects of diversification differ sharply across SOEs and private firms. While the latter earn a premium from diversifying their operations, SOEs do not. Our results are consistent with the view that provincial and local governments push Chinese SOEs into unattractive sectors of the economy and that politically connected CEOs use their relationships to build corporate empires.

The 2005 policy decision to change the status of non-tradable state and non-state shares into tradable A shares ushers in a new era in the stock markets of China. Over time all of these shares will be tradable and potentially transferred to foreign and domestic private sector investors. These changes have the potential to significantly alter the monitoring and control of the majority of listed firms that until now have been controlled by tightly held blockholders of non-tradable shares. It is therefore timely to reassess the corporate governance of Chinese listed firms. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical corporate governance literature in China.

The trade size Omega has direct impact on the price formation of the stock traded. Econophysical analyses of transaction data for the US and Australian stock markets have uncovered market-specific scaling laws, where a master curve of price impact can be obtained in each market when stock capitalization C is included as an argument in the scaling relation. However, the rationale of introducing stock capitalization in the scaling is unclear and the anomalous negative correlation between price change r and trade size Omega for small trades is unexplained. Here we show that these issues can be addressed by taking into account the aggressiveness of orders that result in trades together with a proper normalization technique. Using order book data from the Chinese market, we show that trades from filled and partially filled limit orders have very different price impact. The price impact of trades from partially filled orders is constant when the volume is not too large, while that of filled orders shows power-law behavior r-omega^alpha with alpha=2/3. When returns and volumes are normalized by stock-dependent averages, capitalization-independent scaling laws emerge for both types of trades. However, no scaling relation in terms of stock capitalization can be constructed. In addition, the relation alpha=alpha_omega/alpha_r is verified, where alpha_omega and alpha_r are the tail exponents of trade sizes and returns. These observations also enable us to explain the anomalous negative correlation between r and Omega for small-size trades. We anticipate that these regularities may hold in other order-driven markets.

基于心理学的“有限注意”观点，本文检验了我国股市盈余公告后投资者对于不同公布时机盈余信息的不同反应，发现我国盈余公告存在显著的“周历效应”和“集中公告效应”。同时，本文发现我国上市公司在选择盈余信息披露时机时，倾向于在周六公布坏消息以减少投资者的关注程度。