China’s financial prices are informative enough for the PBC to introduce a monetary policy framework centered around interest rates. While bond yields are not fully efficient—reflecting regulation, liquidity, and segmentation—we find they contain considerable information about the state of the economy as well as evidence of an emerging transmission channel: changes in PBC rates influence the structure of Treasury, financial, and corporate bond yield curves, which are then associated with changes in growth and inflation. Coporate spreads are also a leading indicator of growth and inflation. While further liberalization will strengthen both efficiency and transmission, several necessary elements to move towards indirect monetary policy are already in place.

Given that the impact of the world economy on the China economy and its stock market may have increased substantially in the last few decades, we examine whether US economic variables can predict the Chinese stock market. We find that although before China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the end of 2001, the US economic variables generally do not show significant predictive power on the Chinese stock market, they do provide significant predictive power after 2001. Moreover, we show that the US economic variables can be used in conjunction with China economic variables to achieve better return forecasts for the Chinese stock market, which turn out to be economically important from an investment perspective.

This paper applies a variety of short‐run and long‐run time series techniques to data on a broad group of Asia‐Pacific stock markets and the United States extending to 2010. Our empirical work confirms the importance of crises in affecting the persistence of equity returns in the Asia‐Pacific region and offers some support for contagion effects. Post‐Asian financial crisis quantile regressions yield substantial evidence of long‐run linkages between the Shanghai market, the US market and many regional exchanges. Cointegration is particularly prevalent at the higher end of the distribution. Our results suggest that the enormous growth of the Shanghai market in the new millennium has been accompanied by a meaningful level of integration with other regional and world markets in spite of ongoing capital controls.

We examine the impact of renminbi revaluation on foreign firm valuations, considering two surprise announcements of changes in China’s exchange rate policy in 2005 and 2010 and employing data on some 6,000 firms in 44 economies. Stock returns rise with renminbi revaluation expectations. This reaction appears to reflect a combination of improvements in general market sentiment and specific trade effects. Expected renminbi appreciation has a positive effect on firms exporting to China but a negative impact on those providing inputs for the country’s processing exports. Stock prices rise for firms competing with China in their home market but fall for firms importing Chinese products with large imported-input content. There is also some evidence that expected renminbi appreciation reduces the valuation of financially-constrained firms, presumably because appreciation implies reduced Chinese purchases of foreign securities. The results carry over when we consider ten instances of market-perceived changes in prospective Chinese currency policy.

This paper investigates the dynamic and long-run relationships between monetary policy and asset prices in China using monthly data from June 2005 to September 2010. Johansen’s cointegration approach based on vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality test are used to identify the long-run relationships and directions of causality between asset prices and monetary variables. Empirical results show that monetary policies have little immediate effect on asset prices, suggesting that Chinese investors may be ‘irrational’ and ‘speculative’. Instead of running away from the market, investors rush to buy houses or shares whenever tightening monetary actions are taken. Such seemingly irrational and speculative behavior can be explained by various social and economic factors, including lack of investment channels, market imperfections, cultural traditions, urbanization and demographic changes. The results have two important policy implications. First, China’s central bank has not used and should not use interest rate alone to maintain macro-economic stability. Second, both monetary and non-monetary policies should be deployed when asset bubbles loom large to avoid devastating consequences when they burst.

This paper examines the impact of renminbi revaluation on foreign firm valuation and, by implication, firm prospects. To deal with the potential endogeneity of exchange rate movements, we consider not just official announcements of exchange rate policy but also 27 instances of market-perceived changes in China’s currency policy driven by domestic or foreign political pressure. Using information on 12,300 firms in 44 countries, we find that stock returns increased with renminbi revaluation expectations. This reaction was related as much to improved market sentiment as to specific trade channels, however. In terms of trade channels, we find that expectations of renminbi appreciation reduce the relative stock returns of firms providing components and raw materials to China as inputs for the country’s exports. There is also some evidence that expectations of renminbi appreciation reduce the stock prices of financiallyconstrained firms.

This study examines the degree of price-integration between aggregate equity market indices of Hong Kong, the Chinese Shanghai and Shenzhen A and B share markets, and the international Brent crude oil price. The application of Vector Autoregressive methods reveals that the regions markets are generally price-segmented with the prominent exception of Shanghai B market which is price-integrated with the domestic A share markets in both Shanghai and Shenzhen. The evidence would suggest that Chinese markets are more heavily influenced by domestic events in the long term than external influences.

This paper empirically models China’s stock prices using conventional fundamentals: corporate earnings, risk-free interest rate, and a proxy for equity risk premium. It uses the estimated long-run stock price misalignments to date booms and busts, and analyses equity market reforms and excess liquidity as potential drivers of these stock price misalignments. Our results show that China’s equity prices can be reasonable well modelled using fundamentals, but that various booms and busts can be identified. Policy actions, either taking the form of deposit rate changes, equity market reforms or excess liquidity, seem to have significantly contributed to these misalignments.

This paper assesses the impact of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) on the stock market of China. Our results indicate that the Chinese stock market reacts rapidly to the SARS epidemic. We provide strong empirical evidence that the epidemic has an immediate impact on the pharmaceutical and tourism industries. In particular, pharmaceutical companies are benefited from the outbreak of SARS, while the tourism sector is adversely affected. Our results imply the existence of a profitable trading rule during an epidemic.

We investigate, for China’s investable companies, the relation between stock returns and firm characteristics, and the impacts on the relation of the 2001-2003 financial reforms to further liberalize stock markets. For the first time in the literature, we document coexistence of a positive size effect and a growth effect, and the importance of liquidity and positive earnings for returns; and we also show that they underwent a structural break upon the reforms. These results are robust across 12 alternative panel model specifications with different ways of estimating and controlling for the market beta, different proxies for market portfolios, the problem of outliers considered, and the January effect allowed for.