In this paper, due to the important influence of corporate governance on corporate financial behaviors and from an angle of corporate governance, we develop six hypotheses based on overseas and home relevant researches and data of Chinese listed companies from 1999 to 2003, and then we do hypotheses testes with regression models to examine the impact of share percent of the top 5 shareholders and counterbalance mechanism among blockholders on cash dividend distribution of listed companies, and to explore influence and counterbalance mechanisms in tunneling of cash dividend which derived from the special phenomena of “same shares same rights but different price”. We find that share percent of top 5 shareholders, control ability (or combined control ability) and balance degree (or combined balance degree) of blockholders have important influence on tunneling of cash dividend distribution. Lastly, the paper proposes five suggestions to restrict controlling shareholders to enlist private interests from tunneling of cash dividend and to protect rights and interests of small and medium shareholders.

The paper, based on the samples of 2003, makes empirical analyses of China listed companies from the perspective of Chinese Corporate Governance Index ( ) and its six dimensions: the index of controlling shareholders’ behaviors, board governance index, top management governance index, information disclosure index, stakeholders’ governance index, supervisors committee governance index, and find that is positively associated with return on assets (ROA), net assets per share (NAPS), earnings per share (EPS), operating cash flow per share (OCFPS), total assets turnover (TAV), rate of total assets growth (ITA) and Z-score. These indicate that good corporate governance mechanisms improve profitability, stock expansion ability, operating efficiency, growth and development potential, as well as financial flexibility and safety of listed companies. Corporate governance mechanisms of controlling shareholders, board of directors, top management, information disclosure, stakeholders and supervisors committee are largely responsible for decision-making and decision-execution mechanisms, and furthermore, they have direct and profound effects on the performance and value of listed companies.

In this paper, the relationship between firm performance’s combinations and differences as well as the timeliness of actual and scheduled third-quarter report disclosures is examined by regressing on data extracted from the semi-annual and the third-quarter reports of Chinese listed companies between 2003 and 2004. After controlling for the possible impact of semi-annual report disclosures, stock exchanges, firm size, ratios of tradable A-shares and B-shares, and so on, the results indicate that managers of listed companies may have the incentive to manipulate information in the actual and scheduled third-quarter report disclosures; the rule of “releasing good news earlier than bad news” is thus not strictly complied with. This paper further indicates that a firm’s performance, its combinations and differences, have a significant impact on the timeliness of disclosures of these two reports. I therefore suggest minimising the probability of information manipulation of listed companies, boosting investor relation management to safeguard the rights of small and medium shareholders, and enhancing the timeliness of information disclosures of Chinese listed companies.

Businesses often face the problem of providing incentives for agents to work effectively together on projects that develop over time. The agents' costly and unobservable effort jointly affects the survival of the project and thus the expected value of its cash now. A key feature of many contracting problems with multiple agents is that the agents exert effort at different times: some at the outset and some over time. The optimal timing of compensation reflects the timing of effort with payment for up-front effort preceding compensation for continuous effort. Deferring payment for agents exerting effort over time improves their incentives without impairing incentives for the up-front effort because this effort is sunk once the project is set up. The exact pattern of compensation between the agents with continuous effort depends on the relative severity of their moral hazard problems. In a special case where moral hazards are equally severe, the agents equally split the cash flow once it becomes available. This study suggests an approach to understanding a broad set of contracting problems in economics and finance. It rationalizes business conventions such as deferred compensation for top executives, the 50:50 split between law firm partners, and profit shares of influential directors (or lead actors) and residual claims of producers in the movie industry. Furthermore, the model predicts business failures such as the crisis in the mortgage industry due to the lack of characteristics suggested in the optimal contract.

Financing of and investing in R&D are prone to risks of appropriation by competitors, information asymmetry, and agency problems. Although legal protection of intellectual property (IP) rights at the national level is necessary to encourage investing in R&D, we show that the effective enforcement at the local level is also critical. We concentrate on the impact of IP rights enforcement at the provincial level on the financing of and investing in R&D, using a unique and rich sample of high technology firms. These firms are located in twenty-eight provinces/districts throughout China. The enforcement of IP rights differs at the provincial level, although the firms are under the same set of national and international laws. Controlling for provincial institutional factors such as economic development, banking system development, legal system performance, and local government corruption, we find that the enforcement of IP rights positively affects firms’ ability to acquire new external debt (including formal and informal financing) and external equity. The firms in provinces with better enforcement of IP rights invest more in R&D, generate more patents, and produce more sales from new products. We also find better enforcement of IP rights helps mitigate the problem of appropriation by local partners in foreign and ethnic joint ventures. Our evidence confirms that enforcement of IP rights matters even in China. Furthermore, our results support that the enforcement of IP rights affects the growth in the economy via the channels of financing of and investing in R&D.

This paper investigates information transmission and price discovery mechanisms in informationally linked and non-synchronous trading markets within the multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity framework. Using daily data for copper and soybean contracts from the Chinese futures and spot markets, as well as the London Metal Exchange (LME) and Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) futures markets, we show that there are asymmetric lead-lag relationships between any two of the three markets. We also find that the volatilities spill over from one market to another for both cases of copper and soybeans. However, the copper and soybean markets exhibit quite different patterns of information transmission. Further, we highlight the remarkable role of the Chinese futures markets in the price formation process, though the LME/CBOT futures markets are the main driving force in price discovery.

This study analyzes the effect of social pressures on CEO compensation focusing on social interactions within 60 miles of the firm. Social premiums in CEO pay are in excess of what can be explained by firm performance and characteristics, corporate governance, and local economic variables. Using the S&P 500 companies during 1994-2005, we show that the average social premium in a social circle with 31 CEOs (the 75th percentile of social circles) is $1.29 million higher than that in a circle with six CEOs (the 25th percentile). Golfing, sharing directors, and comparing mansions are likely avenues of social interactions.

This paper investigates market effects associated with China Security Index 300 (CSI 300) reconstitutions with sample period from April 2005 to Feb 2008. Several findings are listed as followings: Firstly, cumulative abnormal returns for added stocks increase slightly after announcements, while the returns for removed stocks decrease significantly though reverse immediately after index reconstitutions. Considering the whole event period, prices for deletions do not fall dramatically; it’s consistent with asymmetric change of investors’ awareness proposed by H Chen et al (2004). Secondly, both the results of cumulative abnormal returns and volume ratios do not provide evidence to support price pressure hypothesis or index membership hypothesis. We attribute those results to few funds tracking stock indices exactly with the same components and weights as which in the underlying indices in emerging markets, i.e., enhanced index funds are more familiar. Thirdly, the percentage of the additions’ (or deletions’) shares held by funds is not affected obviously by CSI 300 reconstitutions. Finally, we examine index change effects due to IPO that frequently occur in emerging markets, and find that additions witness a full reversal after the first trading day.

By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii) behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii) the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions, the logperiodic power law (LPPL) model has been developed as a flexible tool to detect bubbles. The LPPL model considers the faster-than-exponential (power law with finite-time singularity) increase in asset prices decorated by accelerating oscillations as the main diagnostic of bubbles. It embodies a positive feedback loop of higher return anticipations competing with negative feedback spirals of crash expectations. We use the LPPL model in one of its incarnations to analyze two bubbles and subsequent market crashes in two important indexes in the Chinese stock markets between May 2005 and July 2009. Both the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite index (US ticker symbol SSEC) and Shenzhen Stock Exchange Component index (SZSC) exhibited such behavior in two distinct time periods: 1) from mid-2005, bursting in October 2007 and 2) from November 2008, bursting in the beginning of August 2009. We successfully predicted time windows for both crashes in advance [24, 1] with the same methods used to successfully predict the peak in mid-2006 of the US housing bubble [37] and the peak in July 2008 of the global oil bubble [26]. The more recent bubble in the Chinese indexes was detected and its end or change of regime was predicted independently by two groups with similar results, showing that the model has been well-documented and can be replicated by industrial practitioners. Here we present more detailed analysis of the individual Chinese index predictions and of the methods used to make and test them. We complement the detection of log-periodic behavior with Lomb spectral analysis of detrended residuals and (H, q)-derivative of logarithmic indexes for both bubbles. We perform unit-root tests on the residuals from the log-periodic power law model to confirm the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck property of bounded residuals, in agreement with the consistent model of ‘explosive’ financial bubbles [16].

In the last decade hundreds of companies from emerging markets have listed and issued their shares on American and European stock markets. Brazil, Russia, India, and China have been the main origins of issuers, and stock exchanges in the US, UK, and Luxembourg the main destinations involved in the process. These four home and three host markets are the empirical focus of our paper. We present an economic geography perspective on foreign listing, grounded in the geography of finance and the world city network approaches, emphasising the sub-national origins of foreign listed firms, the role of intermediaries, and competition for foreign listings. Our analysis, based on comprehensive up-to-date datasets on foreign listings and foreign equity issues, shows that issuers listing their shares abroad are predominantly large firms, coming from relatively high-growth, internationally oriented sectors, and headquartered overwhelmingly in the leading economic centres of their home countries. Key intermediaries in the foreign listing process are the global investment banks, operating out of the very same centres where the cross-listing firms and the host stock exchanges are located. Competition between host stock markets is affected significantly by the direct and indirect costs of foreign listing, including disclosure and corporate governance requirements. Both host markets and intermediaries exhibit a significant degree of specialisation in terms of the size, sector, and geographical origin of the issuers they serve. The market for foreign listing differs significantly between the BRIC countries, with the Chinese market offering the greatest potential, but facing considerable uncertainty.