Are the returns of Chinese American Depositary Receipts (ADR) more affected by the U.S. stock market or their underlying home market? Since there is non-synchronous trading between U.S. and the Chinese stock markets, we decompose the Chinese ADR daily returns into day and night returns to investigate the different market factors in Chinese ADR pricing. This paper also attempts to separate "homeless" ADRs from home-based ADRs to see if they are affected differently by market factors. We include a sample of 76 Chinese ADRs with the daily data from January 2000 to July 2010. Through regression and Vector Autoregressive analyses, we find that the U.S. market dominates the day returns of Chinese ADRs. We also find the Hong Kong market factor dominates the ADR night returns over the mainland China market for the whole sample. These results are particularly strong for “homeless” ADRs.

We study whether firm name has an effect on firm valuation. Some Chinese firms listed on U.S. stock exchanges have the word "China" or "Chinese" included in their company names ("China-name stocks"), whereas others do not ("non-China-name stocks"). During the China stock market boom in 2007, we find that China-name stocks significantly outperform non-China-name stocks. This is not due to differences in firm characteristics, risk, or liquidity. We also find a significant increase in both abnormal returns and trading volumes of existing China-name stocks to the listing events of new Chinese initial public offerings. This "China-name effect" is largely consistent with the hypothesis that optimistic investor sentiment during the China stock market boom drives up China-name stocks more than non-China-name stocks.