This paper investigates the replacement and appointment of top executives in a business highly involved by the government and their consequences on firm performance and corporate governance. It provides a dynamic setting to test the value of political connection as prior studies do not discern government interests and incorporate ambiguous institutions and self-selection problems by cross-section test. Using data of China’s listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs), this paper finds that the state owner is more likely to replace top executives and appoint a politically-connected executive when SOEs encounter economic distress such as poor ROA, earnings loss, high financial risk, or political distress such as SEC regulation violation. It implies that the politically-connected executive may be considered helpful by the government in response to firm distress. Further, it is found that the political top executives improve firm performance following their appointments and reduce the frequency of executives’ illegal actions, by initiating modification of internal governance structures and mitigating manager’s discretion. And those firms do not have preferential access to resources or government assistances such as fiscal subsidies, tax benefits, or the credit market. All these findings support that political executives could serve as a disciplinary or monitoring mechanism in a political economy lack of external market for corporate control and legal protection for investors, instead of being only a form of bail-out. Their efficacy is based on their administrative power, regulatory expertise and accountability to the government interests. These results provide better understanding of government interests and their impact on corporate governance.

This paper explores the empirical results of the implementation of an independent director system in China, and identifies the advisory role of the board. The results show that firms implement board independence by adding extra members, instead of removing inside directors, except in the case where the board size (before the recruitment of independent directors) has already been too large. It has been found that complex (large and diversified) firms prefer a large board with more independent directors on the board. However, the largest shareholders have a strong incentive to organise a small and insider-controlled board. Although there is a negative relationship between board size, board independence and firm performance, Tobin’s Q increases in relation to board size and board independence for complex firms.

This paper uses a unique micro-level data-set on Chinese firms to test for the existence of a "political-pecking order" in the allocation of credit. Our findings are threefold. Firstly, private Chinese firms are credit constrained while State-owned firms and foreign-owned firms in China are not; Secondly, the geographical and sectoral presence of foreign capital alleviates credit constraints faced by private Chinese firms. Thirdly, geographical and sectoral presence of state firms aggravates financial constraints for private Chinese firms (“crowding out”). Therefore it seems that ongoing restructuring of the state-owned sector and further liberalization of foreign capital inflows in China can help to circumvent financial constraints and can boost the investment of private firms.

We investigate how institutional factors influence behavior of distressed firms in emerging markets, where bankruptcy laws are often weak and debtors have greater bargaining power in distress. By studying a comprehensive sample of distressed firms in China, a representative of the cases in other emerging markets, we find that institutional background matters considerably to distress resolution. Distressed companies facing better institutional background (i.e. with less state ownership structure, in regions with better government quality and greater degree of local financial development), display relatively better operating performance, more disciplined capital structure, and higher ultimate recovery likelihood. Our findings provide novel evidence on how institutional factors discipline distressed firm behavior and facilitate distress resolution in emerging markets.

Based on the background of the banking industry in China, this paper establishes Cournot, Bertrand and Stackelberg mixed oligopoly competition models with deposit and interest rates as strategic variables between a representative state-owned bank and a representative foreign bank. We discuss and compare the equilibrium deposits, interest rates and profits in different market structures. More importantly, considering the endogenous timing setup and taking the extended game with observable delay as the basic model, we analyze the competition results of the mixed duopoly at different market structures and make numerical simulations in order to get the outcomes of the extended game. It is found that, under the scenario of endogenous timing, and 1) the assumption that the foreign bank’s deposit return rate is more than twice that of the state-owned bank and 2) the degree of nationalization of state-owned bank is no less that 1/4, the SPNE of deposit extended game is (L, L), i.e. both banks will choose to move later, neither player has so called “first mover advantage” which leads to the Cournot outcome and payoffs. When the degree of privatization is more than 3/4 and both banks have the same deposit return rate, the SPNE of interest rate extended game is (E, L), i.e. the state-owned bank will lead and the foreign bank will follow.

The paper examines the short-run spillover effect of daily stock returns and volatilities between the S&P 500 in the U.S. and Shanghai SSE composite in China. First, we find that a structural break happened in the SSE stock return mean in December 2005. Second, analyzing modified GARCH (1,1)-M models, we find evidence of a symmetric and asymmetric volatility spillover effect from the U.S. to the China stock market in the post-break period. Third, the symmetric volatility spillover effect from China to the U.S. is also observed in the post-break period.

This paper studies the dividend problem when the asset of the company is driven by a diffusion process and the dividend barrier follows a Markov process. The explicit expressions for dividends is derived and a numerical example is given.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to test the presence of GARCH Effects of China stock market. Our method is based on Maximal Overlap Discrect Wavelet Transform (MODWT)that provides a natural platform to investigate the volatility behavior at different time scales without losing any information.The empirical results show that GARCH effects are more significant at short time horizons as compared to long. Furthermore, when compared the modeling results of GARCH-t with that of EGARCH-t, it yields very higher effectiveness to capture the leverage effect of financial time series at relavant time scales.

In recent times, the prices of internationally-traded commodities have reached record highs and are expected to continue growing in the foreseeable future. This phenomenon is partially driven by strong demand from a small number of emerging economies, such as China and India. This paper places the recent commodity price boom in historical context, drawing on an investigation of the long-term time-series properties, and presents unique features for 33 individual commodity prices. Using a new methodology for examining cross-sectional variation of commodity returns and its components, we find strong evidence that the prices of world primary commodities are extremely volatile. In addition, prices are roughly 30 percent more volatile under floating than under fixed exchange rate regimes. Finally, using the capital asset pricing model as a loose framework, we find that global macroeconomic risk components have become relatively more important in explaining commodity price volatility.

This paper explores whether the pricing of the option-type derivative is affected by some of fundamental characteristics, such as size and liquidity of the derivative itself and the underlying asset, which are not involved in the standard pricing theory. Considering the unique status of warrants in China due to the relatively more flexible trading mechanism, I empirically examine the pricing of Chinese covered warrants to develop this study. Empirical results show that market prices of Chinese warrants are significantly higher than theoretical prices predicted by traditional pricing models such as Black-Scholes, Jump-Diffusion, and CEV model. For call warrants, about 25 percent of the market price can not be explained by pricing models, and this figure rises to over 60 percent for put warrants. Further regression tests show that both size and liquidity of warrants and underlying stocks significantly affect warrant pricing errors. The way in which the size and liquidity affect the pricing error depends on the type of warrants. In addition, it is evident that movements of put warrant prices in China do not follow movements of stock prices. To explain the above pricing puzzles,the concept of functional asset pricing is proposed. According to this concept, these pricing puzzles just reflect the existence of functional value of financial instruments that has long been neglected by traditional pricing models. In fact, Due to the high level of liquidity and popularity, the Chinese warrant may well function as a good tool for obtaining short-term profits. The pricing of Chinese warrants by the market may correctly re°ect the value of this function, and thus is rational in essence.