Our study shows that China could contribute to an orderly global rebalancing by a package of policies to stimulate its domestic consumption. These policies include a progressive appreciation of RMB, fiscal stimuli of increasing social expenditures on education, healthcare, social safety net and poverty reduction, income policies to reduce inequality and to strengthen wages income, and reforms of the financial system to improve financial efficiency and mitigate financial constraints. With these policies, China's external surplus can be narrowed along with an improvement of its domestic imbalances. The excessively high saving rate will be lowered and the share of household consumption will increase, even although GDP growth will moderate slightly.

Prior to April 2005, only one third of the shares issued by exchange-listed companies in China are publicly tradable. The other two thirds, mainly owned by Chinese government agencies or government-linked enterprises, are prohibited from public trading. On April 29, 2005, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Committee announced a reform plan that aims to abolish the split-share structure by converting all non-tradable shares to be publicly tradable. We investigate the consequences of this unique event and shed light on how increase in share float affects liquidity, speculation and stock prices. Firstly, we find that tradable A-shares command a 60% price premium on average over non-tradable A-shares and this price premium contains both liquidity and speculation components. Secondly, the share structure reform increases share turnover and dampens speculative trading. Relative to control firms, share turnover of restructured firms increases substantially after the reform, with the largest increase (107 %) in firms that had low liquidity and low speculative trading before the reform. In contrast. there is no increase in share turnover of firms that had high liquidity and high speculative trading. Thirdly. stock prices drop substantially on the day when the supply of tradable shares increases due to the reform. Moreover. the higher increase in the supply of tradable A-shares. the larger drop in the stock price. This indicates that the short-term demand curve is downward-sloping. Fourthly. despite the fall in stock prices. shareholder wealth increases by 15% on average. We find that the largest price drop and the smallest wealth gain occurs in firms with the highest speculative trading before the reform. which suggests that share structure reform dampens speculative trading in Chinese market. Lastly, split share reform also benefits the B-share market despite that the reform involves only A shares: B-share turnover increases after the reform and the well-known B share price discount narrows substantially .

On 21 July 2005 China adopted an undisclosed basket exchange rate regime. We formally assess and envisage the gradual evolution of the renminbi over time. We utilize nonlinear dependencies in the renminbi exchange rate and describe the smooth transition of the renminbi/U.S. dollar (RMB/USD) exchange rate using the family of time-varying autoregressive (TV-AR) models. The results indicate that the forward-looking nonlinear model adequately depicts the gradual reform process underlying the new RMB exchange rate regime.

Recent events in China provide a historical opportunity to study the expropriation of minority shareholders. In this paper, we document the use of inter-corporate loans by controlling shareholders to extract funds from Chinese listed firms. Using accounting information from public sources, we show how tens of billions of RMB were siphoned from hundreds of companies during the 1996 to 2006 period. Specifically, we show the nature and extent of these abuses, evaluate their economic consequences, explore their cross-sectional determinants, and report on the extensive efforts by auditors and regulators that eventually contained this practice. Collectively, our findings shed light on the nature and severity of the tunneling problem in China, and the on-going challenges associated with regulatory reform in the country.

This paper investigates the market response to reform of the Chinese split (A-)share structure using a sample of companies included in the China Securities Index 300. We find the three-day cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) to be negative and significant around government announcement of the reform on 29 April 2005, but not significant around individual companies’ decision to implement the reform. We attribute this change in market sentiment to the release of information during company announcement that the reform will feature some type of consideration to existing shareholders of tradable A-shares. Our results also show that existing holders of tradable A-shares require higher returns when companies pay in warrants or combination methods. However, we find no relation between the level of consideration and CAR suggesting that investors perceive the consideration to be adequate based on the company’s financial and operating conditions at the time of the reform.

An unparalleled feature ownership structures in China is the presence of non tradable shares (NTS). NTS represented a major hurdle to domestic financial market development for its negative effects on liquidity and market transparency. After some failed attempts, in 2005 the Chinese authorities have launched a structural reform program aiming at eliminating NTS. In this paper, we evaluate the stock price effects of the actual implementation of this reform in 368 firms. The NTS reform generated a statistically significant 8 percent positive abnormal return over the event window, adjusting prices for the compensation requested by tradable shareholders. Results are consistent with the expectation of improved economic fundamentals such as better corporate governance and enhanced liquidity.

In 2005 and 2006, the split-share structure reform converted the nontradable shares of most domestic public firms in China to tradable shares. This conversion imparted a drastic supply shock to the public market. Studying this unique event, we provide direct evidence to support an inelastic demand curve for stocks. Abnormal returns of the sample firms resulting from the reform are found to be negatively associated with the size of the supply shock. This finding is free from the confounding information effects present in many prior studies of stock price elasticity. It is also robust after controlling for opposite price impacts of ROA, firm size, and ownership concentration.

A fundamental question in economics and finance is whether and how removing barriers is associated with efficiency gains. We study this question using share issue privatization in China that took place through the split share structure reform as our experimental setting. Prior to the reform, domestic Ashares are divided into tradable and non-tradable shares with identical cash flow and voting rights. Under the reform, non-tradable share holders negotiate a compensation plan with tradable share holders in order to make their shares tradable. We develop a general equilibrium model to help understand the determinants of compensation and the source of gains in the process of privatization. Our key predictions are: a) there is compensation made by the non-tradable share holders to the tradable share holders if and only if the bargaining power of the former is weaker than the bargaining power of the latter; and b) the size of the compensation is decreasing in firm performance. Our second prediction contradicts conventional wisdom that fails to account for improved risk sharing after the reform. Our empirical results are broadly consistent with our model’s predictions. We conclude that better risk sharing is an important consideration in China’s share issue privatization.

This paper investigates the market response to reform of the Chinese split (A-)share structure using a sample of companies included in the China Securities Index 300. We find the three-day cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) to be negative and significant around government announcement of the reform on 29 April 2005, but not significant around individual companies’ decision to implement the reform. We attribute this change in market sentiment to the release of information during company announcement that the reform will feature some type of consideration to existing shareholders of tradable A-shares. Our results also show that existing holders of tradable A-shares require higher returns when companies pay in warrants or combination methods. However, we find no relation between the level of consideration and CAR suggesting that investors perceive the consideration to be adequate based on the company’s financial and operating conditions at the time of the reform.

This paper investigates the market response to reform of the Chinese split (A-)share structure using a sample of companies included in the China Securities Index 300. We find the three-day cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) to be negative and significant around government announcement of the reform on 29 April 2005, but not significant around individual companies’ decision to implement the reform. We attribute this change in market sentiment to the release of information during company announcement that the reform will feature some type of consideration to existing shareholders of tradable A-shares. Our results also show that existing holders of tradable A-shares require higher returns when companies pay in warrants or combination methods. However, we find no relation between the level of consideration and CAR suggesting that investors perceive the consideration to be adequate based on the company’s financial and operating conditions at the time of the reform.