This paper presents exploratory and qualitative research into the evolving decision-making processes of venture capital (VC) investors in China based on field research interviews with 40 VC investors between February 2003 and February 2004. It examines underlying decision-making processes that VC investors have adopted to operate in the Chinese market and to what extent these have been influenced by internal and external factors. A VC investment decision-making process based on the Western VC experience acts as the baseline process to examine the specific context of Chinese decision-making processes, and examines if hypotheses derived from Western VC decision-making hold true in China, a market characterized by high uncertainty, risk, and institutional barriers. Rather than concentrate on one specific part of the VC decision-making in China, this paper view decision-making as an integrated process with inter-linked challenges. This paper highlights key success factors and emerging trends that will shape the future of VC in China.

In this paper, the author observes a stationary volume/price pattern, while studying the relationship between volume and price through the amount of transaction in stock market. The probability of accumulated trading volume (actual supply/demand volume) that distributes over its price range gradually emerges the maximum around the price mean value in a transaction body system when it takes a longer trading time regardless of its price fluctuation path or time series in the time interval. The volume/price behaves a probability wave toward an actual supply/demand equilibrium price, forced by a linear central actual supply/demand potential. In terms of physics, the author establishes a transaction (actual supply/demand) energy hypothesis, defines a measurable actual supply/demand restoring force, derives a time-independent security transaction (actual supply/demand) probability wave differential equation, and obtains an explicit volume/price distribution function, the distribution of absolute zero-order Bessel eigenfunctions, in a stable transaction body system when its supply/demand is in a dynamic state. By fitting and testing the function with intraday real transaction volume/price distributions on a considerable number of individual stocks in Shanghai 180 Index, the author demonstrates its validation at this early stage, and attempts to offer a micro and dynamic actual supply/demand volume/price wave theory.

This paper constructs a new data set of repeated sales of artworks and estimates an annual index of art prices for the period 1875-2000. Contrary to earlier studies, we find art outperforms fixed income securities as an investment, though it significantly under-performs stocks in the US. Art is also found to have lower volatility and lower correlation with other assets, making it more attractive for portfolio diversification than discovered in earlier research.There is strong evidence of underperformance of masterpieces, meaning expensive paintings tend to under-perform the art market index. The evidence is mixed on whether the "law of one price" holds in the New York auction market.

This paper reports the effort of deducing the initial strategy distributions of agents in mix-game model which is used to predict a real financial time series generated from a target financial market. Using mix-game to predict Shanghai Index, we find the time series of prediction accurate rates is sensitive to the initial strategy distributions of agents in group 2 who play minority game, but less sensitive to the initial strategy distributions of agents in group 1 who play majority game. And agents in group 2 tend to cluster in full strategy space (FSS) if the real financial time series has obvious tendency (upward or downward), otherwise they tend to scatter in FSS. We also find that the initial strategy distributions and the number of agents in group 1 influence the level of prediction accurate rates. Finally, this paper gives suggestion about further research.

We investigate the optimal dynamic consumption, housing and portfolio decisions for an investor who receives stochastic labor income and acquires housing services from either renting or owning a house. We find that the investor prefers owning to renting to take advantage of lower owning cost when not liquidity?constrained. More important, when indi®erent between owning and renting, the homeowner holds a higher equity proportion in his liquid financial portfolio (bond and stock), yet a lower equity proportion in his total financial wealth (stock, bond and home equity) than the renter. Further, having the opportunity to own a house tilts a renter’s portfolio towards safe asset, while being able to rent housing services induces a homeowner to increase his stock holding. Denying investors access to either the house owning or rental market can lead to large welfare costs. Empirical evidence from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finance data is broadly consistent with our theoretical predictions.

This article will give an overview of China’s bond market development, its achievements and the future prospects of China’s bond fund market. Furthermore, it will provide some concrete suggestions on how to improve bond market liquidity based on my experience running China’s first bond fund.

Investors who possess information about the value of an IPO can participate in the offering as well as trade strategically in the aftermarket. Both the bookbuilding and the fixed price IPO selling methods require more underpricing when aftermarket trading by informed investors is considered. Bookbuilding becomes especially costly, since the potential for profit in the aftermarket adversely affects investors’ bidding behavior in the premarket. Unless the underwriter building a book can target a small enough subset of the informed investors, a fixed price strategy that allocates the issue to retail investors produces higher proceeds on average, contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature. We therefore find a benefit to limiting access to the premarket and, hence, provide an efficiency rationale for the practice by American bankers of marketing IPOs to a select group of investors.

Motivated by the behavior of internet stock prices in 1998-2000, we present a continuous time equilibrium model of bubbles where overconfidence generates disagreements among agents regarding asset fundamentals. With shortsale constraints, an asset owner has an option to sell the asset to other agents who have more optimistic beliefs. This re-sale option has a recursive structure, that is, a buyer of the asset gets the option to resell it. This causes a significant bubble component in asset prices even when small dierences of beliefs are sucient to generate a trade. The model generates prices that are above fundamentals, excessive trading, excess volatility, and predictable returns. However, our analysis shows that while Tobin’s tax can substantially reduce speculative trading when transaction costs are small, it has only a limited impact on the size of the bubble or on price volatility. We give an example where the price of a subsidiary is larger than its parent firm. Finally, we show how overconfidence can justify the use of corporate strategies that would not be rewarding in a “rational” environment.

This paper provides evidence on the significant impact of illiquidity or non-marketability on security valuation. A typical listed company in China has several types of share outstanding: (i) common shares that are only tradable on stock exchanges, (ii) restricted institutional shares (RIS) that are not tradable and can only be transferred privately or through irregularly scheduled auctions, and (iii) state shares that are only transferable privately. These types of share are identical in every aspect, except that market regulations make state and RIS shares almost totally illiquid. Our analysis focuses on the price differences between RIS and common shares of the same company, using both auction and private-transfer transactions for RIS shares. Among our findings, the average discount for RIS shares relative to their floating counterpart is 77.93% and 85.59%, respectively based on auction and private transfers. The price for illiquidity is thus high, significantly raising the cost of equity capital. This illiquidity discount increases with both the floating shares’ volatility and the firm’s debt/equity ratio, but decreases with firm size, return on equity, and book/price and earnings/price ratios (based on the floating share price). However, RIS share price can either increase or decrease with the quantity being transacted, depending on whether it is through a private placement or an auction.

个人理财服务是国外商业银行中相当成熟的一项服务,而在我国才刚刚起步。本文主要从理财服务质量入手，分析影响服务质量的关键因素，揭示各个因素在服务交付过程不同阶段所起的作用并提出相应的服务营销建议，最后指出今后的研究方向。 Personal financing is a well-developed service in western commercial banks; however, it is still an emerging and immature service in China. With the beginning of the service quality analysis in personnel financing services, this article refines the critical factors effecting customer satisfaction, analyzes the different roles of these factors in different stage of service-delivery process, and finally proposes the conclusions and the direction of the future research.