We compare the differences between the Chinese and U.S. bond risk premia. We find that the expectations hypothesis fails in the two bond markets: We identify the Chinese and U.S. bond time-varying risk premia by forecasting the corresponding excess return of n-year bond using the n-year forward rate and n-year forward spread, respectively. To focus on the systematical forecasts, we then combine the forward rates at different maturities as the return-forecast factors. Unlike the one-factor model introduced by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005), a two-factor model including level- and slope-based factors explains significantly Chinese bond premia with R2 up to 68%. More importantly, the slope-based factor sharply improves the performance of test. The results are robust with respect to measurement errors, multicollinearity and small-sample biases. Out-of-sample tests show that, in recent years, the U.S. bond market changes drastically, and tends to be like the Chinese market. We use the empirical results to calibrate the parameters of affine model, and find that the differences of bond premia between the two markets are caused by the differences of dynamics of state variables and risk attitude of investor.

This paper studies the information interpretation of return synchronicity in the context of corporate bond market and examines the specific event intensity rationale that underlie the relationship between bond synchronicity and bond level information environment. We find that investment-grade bonds, bonds without rating splits, and bonds issued by public firms present higher levels of bond return synchronicity. These results hold after we control for bond level characteristics, industry and year fixed effects. By using credit rating change announcements as a unique measure of bond specific event intensity, we corroborate that security under better information environment has lower likelihood of specific event surprise occurrence, and thus is more synchronous with the market. We also verify that once rating change announcements did take place, the corresponding return synchronicity would be lower. Such impact would be more pronounced when the rating is downgraded compared with upgrade rating changes.

Using a proprietary dataset from 2016 to 2019, we find that order flows from foreign investors, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns in the Chinese market. Most surprisingly, foreign investors possess the ability to process local firm-level public news, whereas their informational advantages regarding global market-level information are relatively muted. Further, the predictive power of foreign investors is particularly strong on large price movement days when the implications of firm-level information is likely most pronounced. Finally, regulatory reforms that generally relax investment access requirements further improve foreign investors’ predictive power

We examine how sell-side equity analysts strategically disclose information of differing quality to the public versus the buy-side mutual fund managers to whom they are connected. We consider cases in which analysts recommend that the public buys a stock, but some fund managers sell it. We measure favor trading using mutual fund managers’ votes for analysts in a Chinese “star analyst” competition. We find that managers are more likely to vote for analysts who exhibit more “say-buy/whisper-sell” behavior with these managers. This suggests that analysts introduce noise in their public recommendations, making the more-precise information provided to their private clients more valuable. Analysts’ say-buy/whisper-sell behavior results in information asymmetry: the positive-recommendation stocks bought by the managers who vote for the analysts outperform the stocks sold by these managers after the recommendation dates. Our findings help explain several puzzles regarding analysts’ public recommendations.

We document a novel platform effect caused by the emergence of FinTech platforms in financial intermediation. In China, platform distributions of mutual funds emerged in 2012 and grew quickly into a formidable presence. Utilizing the staggered entrance of funds onto platforms, we find a marked increase of performance-chasing, driven by the centralized information flow unique to FinTech platforms. This pattern is further confirmed using proprietary data from a top platform. Examining the platform impact on fund managers, we find that, incentivized by the amplified performance-chasing, fund managers increase risk taking to enhance their probability of getting onto the top ranking.

Exploiting staggered COVID-19 lockdowns and reopening across different regions in China, we study how lockdowns affect the investment decisions of venture capital (VC) investors and whether such changes are temporary or enduring in the post-pandemic era. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that lockdowns exacerbate the “tyranny of distance” (i.e., VCs avoid investing in remote ventures), our findings suggest the “death of distance”: VCs invest in remoter ventures during a lockdown and such effects persist even after the economy reopens. Such lockdown effects are more pronounced when there is better internet infrastructure, when the level of information asymmetry between VCs and entrepreneurs is lower, and when VCs are more experienced. The lockdown effects can be explained by the advancement and adoption of remote communication technology as a response to the social distancing requirements. As geographic boundaries of VC investment are shattered by remote communication technology, local competition among VCs has been intensified, the monopoly power of VCs has been curtailed, and the regional inequality of entrepreneurial access to VC financing has been mitigated.

We examine the impact of mixed ownership on the performance of venture capital (VC) firms in China. We use successful/unsuccessful exits from VC-financed entrepreneurial companies and number of patent applications by VC-financed companies as proxies for VC firms’ performance. Consistent with existing research on the inferior performance of SOEs relative to non-SOEs, we find that on average government-controlled VC firms (GVCs) underperform domestic private investors-controlled VC firms (PVCs). More importantly, we find that introducing minority private investors (i.e., mixed ownership) helps improve the performance of GVCs. However, we find no evidence that introducing minority government investors (i.e., mixed ownership) helps improve the performance of PVCs. Our results provide relevant information to the ongoing debate on the role of the government investors and private investors in developing the VC industry in emerging markets.

In recent years, with the rapid expansion of commercial banks' non-standardized business, the systematic correlation between shadow banking and commercial banks in China has been gradually enhanced, which enables the partial liquidity crisis of shadow banking to spread rapidly to commercial banks, leading to the increased vulnerability of China's financial system. Based on this, we built shadow banking indexes of trusts, securities, private lending and investment, introduced the dynamic correlation coefficient calculated by the dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model into the improved CoVaR model, and used the DCC-BEKK-MVGARCH-Time-Varying CoVaR Model to measure the risk overflow contribution of shadow banking in China. We find that shadow banking and commercial banks have an inherent relationship. Due to their own risks, different types of shadow banking contribute to the risk spillover to commercial banks in different degrees. The risk correlation between shadow banking and commercial banks fluctuates.

We examine the effects of controlling shareholder stock pledge on corporate acquisition decisions and associated performance. Consistent with our aggravated expropriation hypothesis, we find that pledging firms in China initiate more takeovers, but these acquisitions conducted by pledging firms experience lower announcement returns. We adopt the difference in differences and the instrumental variable approaches to establish causality. Channel tests further reveal that pledging acquirers overpay for the deals and are more likely to be involved in related party transactions. Cross-sectionally, we find that the relations between the share pledge and corporate acquisitiveness and returns are more pronounced for non-SOEs and firms with high-level excess cash. Lastly, we document that pledging acquirers underperform in the long-run in terms of lower ROAs and a greater likelihood of goodwill impairment. Overall, our findings indicate that controlling shareholders increasingly expropriate minority shareholders through self-serving corporate takeovers after the stock pledge.

Ghysels, Horan, and Moench (2017) show that extracting principal component (PC) factors from real time as opposed to revised macro variables substantially reduces their power in forecasting bond excess returns. In this paper, we propose a predictive principal component (PPC) approach to extract factors from information pertaining to expected bond excess returns contained in real time macro variables. In so doing, the new PPC factors remove common noises in real time data and exhibit significant bond return predictability. The inand out-of-sample R2s improve by more than 50% relative to the PC factors. Moreover, the forecasted bond excess returns are countercyclical, consistent with standard asset pricing models.