This paper focuses on evidence from stock markets as it investigates the spillovers from the United States to mainland China and Hong Kong SAR during the subprime crisis. Using both univariate and multivariate GARCH models, this paper finds that China's stock market is not immune to the financial crisis, as evidenced by the price and volatility spillovers from the United States. In addition, HK's equity returns have exhibited more significant price and volatility spillovers from the United States than China's returns, and past volatility shocks in the United States have a more persistent effect on future volatility in HK than in China, reflecting HK's role as an international financial center. Moreover, the impact of the volatility from the United States on China's stock markets has been more persistent than that from HK, due mainly to the United States as the origin of the subprime crisis. Finally, as expected, the conditional correlation between China and HK has outweighed their conditional correlations with the United States, echoing increasing financial integration between China and HK.

There are many similarities between the US, the UK and the Chinese housing markets, including the movements of interest rates and house prices. Some Chinese banks, especially the Bank of China, have been exposed to the US mortgage securitization market. These have triggered a serious concern as to whether the US credit crunch and housing market crisis may be replicated in China. This paper shows that there are some significant differences between China and the West, especially the US and the UK. Compared with the US and other western industrialized economies, the booming house market in China has been supported by fast economic growth, rapid urbanization and high domestic savings. In addition, Chinese banks are less exposed to mortgage defaults than their western counterparts because house buyers are mainly urban and high income residents who are required to have high down payments. These Sino-Western economic and social differences suggest that the US credit crunch and housing market crisis may have some negative impacts on Chinese commercial banks and the overall economy but are unlikely to cause a similar financial and housing crisis in China despite the current struggling Chinese stock markets and a slowdown of house price growth.

The expected equity risk premium is a key input of many asset prcing models in finance. There exist a number of methods to estimate the risk premium. It is also well documented that the risk premium is time-varying. This paper briefly reviews two different approaches. More specifically, the historical average and relative estimation are taken into closer examination. The first approach is applied to estimate equity risk premium for stock markets in Great China when the stock markets were recovering from the bottom. Then the relative estimation approach is also adopted to empirical data to justify the findings in the first one, which takes into consideration the lower required rate of return for Chinese investors due to lack of investment opportunities. After making these adjustments, we find that risk premium in mainland China is close to risk premium for Hong Kong and Taiwan markets. All of those markets have higher risk premium compared to US market. The risk premium for Shanghai and Shenzhen market are about 8% and 10% respectively. For Hong Kong and Taiwan these numbers become 8% and 9%, where the long-term forward-looking risk premium for US market is about 4%.

The paper examines the price impact of mutual funds in the Chinese equity market from 2000 to 2007. We find there is strong positive correlation between stock returns and mutual fund holding and trading, and the price impact is more significant in mutual-fund buying than mutual-fund selling. Our findings support the hypothesis that the price impact is due to the information advantage of mutual funds.

Recent theoretical studies (Aggarwal and Wu,2006; Mei,Wu and Zhou,2004) show that trade-based stock price manipulation is a possible source of the momentum effect. This paper proposes three sets of testable hypotheses and provides empirical evidence for a manipulation-based explanation of momentum.Using weekly data on 14 CITIC industries in the Shanghai A-share market from 1997 to 2006, our analysis of industry momentum shows that cumulative returns first increase then decrease across holding periods, and the returns monotonically decrease across formation periods. This return pattern is consistent with a so-called”pump and dump”scheme,where momentum is created by manipulators and chased by speculators. We attribute the source of momentum to the positive own-autocorrelation, which dominates the cross-autocorrelation effect of industry returns. We also find that momentum profits are higher in the bull than in bear market, and most of the profits come from the gains of winning industries rather than the losses of losing industries. These empirical results,when related to some well-documented behavioral biases of Chinese speculators,tell us a possible stock-market manipulation story of momentum.

This paper investigates what drives the price disparity to vary in the “twin” shares (A shares traded largely by domestic investors while B- and H- shares traded mainly by foreign investors) in China. Extending the variance decomposition framework of Vuolteenaho (2002), we decompose the unexpected price disparity into two terms: difference in expected return news and difference in cash flow news. Our results show that difference in expected return news overwhelmingly dominates difference in cash flow news in driving the variation of the price disparity. This suggests that to a large extent, market or macro news, rather than firms’ specific news, moves the price disparity of the twin shares.

This paper studies the optimal scale and asset allocation of Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), taking China’s SWF as an example. We use the AR (1) process to simulate the future foreign exchange earnings of China and generate three patterns of the future earnings. With these three scenarios and based on Deaton’s precautionary saving model, we find that the optimal scale and asset allocation of China’s SWF mainly depend on the expected trend and fluctuation of the future foreign exchange earnings and expected yields that SWF can get. When foreign exchange earnings shows an upward trend, the scale of SWF should not be expanded even the expected investment yield is very high, and ratio of risky assets should be kept stable and high. When foreign exchange earnings is stabilized as its growth rate slows down, the scale of SWF has the positive correlation with the degree of earnings fluctuation and expected yield of investment, and also ratio of risky assets is generally lower. When foreign exchange earnings decrease, the scale of SWF should be expanded even the expected investment yield is not so high, and the ratio of risky assets is dependent on the characteristics of expected investment yields. We also conclude that investment policy of China’s SWF should follow Temasek’s investment model, under the current trend of China’s foreign exchange trend, and strive for high yield investment chances.

We empirically examine the role of venture capital in VC-backed listed firms in Mainland China. It is found that the VC-backed firms experience higher underpricing as the investors in the second market are too optimistic about the prospect of the VC-backed firms, but not about the lower pricing in the primary market. In addition, the pre- and post-IPO operating performance of VC-backed firms are found to be significantly better than that of non VC-backed ones. The result supports the monitoring model. Meanwhile, there is no evidence to support the certification model. Furthermore, it is consistent with the grandstanding model proposed by Gompers that high-reputation VC-backed firms have a better post-IPO operating and market performance compared to low-reputation VC-backed ones.

由于过多的资金流入会使基金的规模变大从而难以有效地管理，基金公司暂停旗下某只基金申购的现象越来越多。基金公司暂停申购的公告中大多宣称是为了控制基金规模，使前期表现好的基金可以维持其良好的业绩表现，从而保护投资者的利益。但是，我们对国内暂停申购的开放式基金进行实证研究后发现，暂停申购的基金未能维持其良好表现，暂停申购未能保护投资者利益。做出暂停申购的决定更可能是基金公司为了得到溢出效应（spillover effect）：基金公司通过关闭旗下的一只基金来引起投资者注意并促使其投资于公 司旗下的其他基金。有证据表明这种暂停申购的策略能有效的引起更多的资金流入该基金公司。

We study corporate philanthropy using an original database that includes firm-level data on cash giving, political connection, and institutional environment in corporate contribution after Sichuan Earthquake at 12, May, 2008. Results provide support for the theory that political connection enhances corporate philanthropy, as firms with political connection tend to adopt giving practices to generate insurance-like protection of relational wealth; meanwhile firms that condition high levels of law enforcement environment and low risks of loss political connection give less to charity. However, much of our evidence indicates that mangers adopt corporate philanthropy to maintain personal political connection with governments which mask their personal benefits from philanthropic contribution and philanthropy insurance-like protection theory combined with agency costs play a prominent role in explaining corporate giving. Firms with political connection, larger boards of directors and higher interest conflicts among controlling shareholders and other investors are associated with significantly more cash giving. The empirical work considers the impact of institutional environment as well as risks of loss political connection on corporate giving and the relationship between political connection and corporate social responsibility.