In the developing Chinese capital market which dominated by individual investors and potentially suffer from more behavioral biases, we simultaneously examine the trading and monitoring role of mutual funds (as the largest institutional investor in China) in corporate acquisition activities where there are potentials for a wide disparity of interest between institutional investors and controlling shareholders. We find the level of holding by all mutual funds is not a superiors indicator of deal quality, there are some evidence that the collective holdings by the largest fund management companies positively relate to the deal quality and they potentially play the monitoring role in M&A event. Our paper contributes to the existing literature that “transient investors” can also gain from monitoring in the market where institutional investors has less dominant position.

We study the impact of directors with foreign experience on firms in emerging markets. To establish causality, we use a unique dataset from China and exploit that at different times, Chinese provinces introduced policies to attract highly talented emigrants. These policies led to an exogenous increase in the supply of Chinese individuals with foreign experience in the local labor market and ultimately increased the likelihood that firms in these provinces had directors with foreign experience in comparison to firms with a similarly high demand for these skills elsewhere. We document that hiring directors with foreign experience results in higher firm valuation, productivity, and profitability. Furthermore, corporate governance improves and firms are more likely to make international acquisitions, to export, and to raise funds internationally. These results indicate that the transfer of knowledge to emerging markets occurs not only through foreign investment, but also through labor flows and, in particular, return migration.

This paper investigates the link between firm headquarters location and firm stock return co-movements in a sample of Chinese firms spanning the years 1999 to 2007. The empirical results show a strong co-movement pattern of firms located in the same province. Moreover, both firm-level and provincial-level factors are found to influence this co-movement, including firm size and ownership structure at firm level and GDP per capita and financial depth at provincial level. A subsample of firms listed in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange shows that better firm-level information quality reduces local co-movements.

It has been long that literature in financial academics focuses mainly on price and return but much less on trading volume. In the past twenty years, it has already linked both price and trading volume to economic fundamentals, and explored the behavioral implications of trading volume such as investor’s attitude toward risks, overconfidence, disagreement, and attention etc. However, what is surprising is how little we really know about trading volume. Here we show that trading volume probability represents the frequency of market crowd’s trading action in terms of behavior analysis, and test two adaptive hypotheses relevant to the volume uncertainty associated with price in China stock market. The empirical work reveals that market crowd trade a stock in efficient adaptation except for simple heuristics, gradually tend to achieve agreement on an outcome or an asset price widely on a trading day, and generate such a stationary equilibrium price very often in interaction and competition among themselves no matter whether it is highly overestimated or underestimated. This suggests that asset prices include not only a fundamental value but also private information, speculative, sentiment, attention, gamble, and entertainment values etc. Moreover, market crowd adapt to gain and loss by trading volume increase or decrease significantly in interaction with environment in any two consecutive trading days. Our results demonstrate how interaction between information and news, the trading action, and return outcomes in the three-term feedback loop produces excessive trading volume which includes various internal and external causes. Finally, we reconcile market dynamics and crowd’s trading behaviors in a unified framework by Shi’s price-volume differential equation in stock market where, we assume, investors derive a liquidity utility expressed in terms of trading wealth which is equal to the sum of a probability weighting utility and a reversal utility in reference to an outcome. JEL Classifications: G12, G02, D83 （长期以来，金融学术领域里的文献只注重价格和收益率，却较少研究交易量。在最近的二十年里，金融学术文献已经开始研究价格和交易量两者与经济基本量之间的相互关系，并且探讨交易量的行为内涵，例如投资者对风险的态度、过度自信、不同观点以及关注程度等等。然而，我们还是对交易量的认识知之甚少。本文根据行为分析，用交易量概率来表示市场群体的交易频率，并且通过我国股市来实证检验涉及交易量与价格之间不确定关系的两种适应性假说。实证结果表明：市场群体在每日交易的时间窗口内除了采用简单的经验法则之外，同时还采用有效的适应性方式来从事股票交易，并且逐步倾向于形成一个结果和认同的资产价格；无论该资产价格是否明显地被高估或低估，市场群体在相互作用和竞争的过程中往往能够形成这样一个稳态的均衡价格。这表明了资产价格不仅包含了基本价值同时还包含了非公开信息、投机、情绪、关注、赌博和娱乐等价值。此外，在任意两个连续交易日之间，市场群体在与市场环境的相互作用过程中，通过交易量的增加或减少来有效地适应盈亏。我们的研究结果说明了在由信息、交易与收益结果三项构成的反馈环中，它们之间的相互作用是如何导致了过度交易的，这其中包含了导致过度交易的各种内外因素。最后，我们假设股票市场中的投资者是通过交易财富来产生流动性效用，它等于概率加权效用与相对于结果为参照系的反转效用之和，从而推导出Shi氏价-量微分方程，将市场动力学行为与群体交易行为协调在一个统一的框架体系。）

We investigate how monetary policy in a mixed financial system such as that of China, which is characterized by a juxtaposition of quantity- and price-based policy instruments and the co-existence of regulated and market-determined interest rates, affects bank lending. Using a newly constructed loan-level dataset, we find that loan rates but not loan size are affected by both the regulated and the market-determined interest rates and that loan size is instead affected by an implicit quota that is imposed on aggregate bank lending through window guidance. We interpret this finding to be evidence of credit rationing.

It has been long that literature in financial academics focuses mainly on price and return but much less on trading volume. In the past twenty years, it has already linked both price and trading volume to economic fundamentals, and explored the behavioral implications of trading volume such as investor’s attitude toward risks, overconfidence, disagreement, and attention etc. However, what is surprising is how little we really know about trading volume. Here we show that trading volume probability represents the frequency of market crowd’s trading action in terms of behavior analysis, and test two crowd’s trading behavioral hypotheses relevant to the volume uncertainty associated with price in China stock market. The empirical work reveals that market crowd trade in simple heuristics and efficient adaptation, gradually tend to achieve agreement on an outcome or an asset price widely on a trading day, and generate such a stationary equilibrium price very often in interaction among themselves no matter whether it is highly overestimated or underestimated, suggesting that asset prices include not only a fundamental value but also private information, speculative, sentiment, gamble, and entertainment values etc. In addition, market crowd adapt to gain and loss by trading volume increase or decrease significantly in interaction with environment in any two consecutive trading days. Our results demonstrate how interaction between information and news, the trading action, and return outcomes in the three-term feedback loop produces excessive trading volume which includes various internal and external causes. Finally, we reconcile market dynamics and crowd’s trading behaviors in a unified framework by Shi’s price-volume differential equation in stock market where, we assume, investors derive a liquidity utility expressed in terms of trading wealth which is equal to the sum of a probability weighting utility and a reversal utility in reference to an outcome. JEL Classifications: G12, G02, D83 (长期以来，金融学术领域里的文献只注重价格和收益率，却较少研究交易量。在最近的二十年里，金融学术文献已经开始研究价格和交易量两者与经济基本量之间的相互关系，并且探讨交易量的行为内涵，例如投资者对风险的态度、过度自信、不同观点以及关注程度等等。然而，我们还是对交易量的认识知之甚少。本文根据行为分析，用交易量概率来表示市场群体的交易频率，并且通过我国股市来实证检验交易量与价格之间不确定关系中关于群体交易行为的两个基本假说。实证结果表明：市场群体在每日交易的时间窗口内采用简单的经验法则和有效的适应方式来从事交易，并且总是逐步地倾向于形成一个结果和认同的资产价格；无论该资产价格是否明显地被高估或低估，市场群体在相互作用的过程中往往能够形成这样一个稳态的均衡价格，这表明了资产价格不仅包含基本价值同时还包含非公开信息、投机、情绪、赌博和娱乐等价值。此外，在任意两个连续交易日之间，市场群体在与市场环境的相互作用过程中，通过交易量的增加或减少来有效地适应盈亏。我们的研究结果说明了在由信息、交易与收益结果三项构成的反馈环中，它们之间的相互作用是如何导致了过度交易的，这其中包含了导致过度交易的各种内外因素。最后，我们假设股票市场中的投资者是通过交易财富来产生流动性效用，它等于概率加权效用与相对于结果为参照系的反转效用之和，从而推导出Shi氏价-量微分方程，将市场动力学行为与群体交易行为协调在一个统一的框架体系。)

This study analyses financial consequence of the moral hazard activities of the controlling shareholder. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during 2002 to 2009, we find that firms with a wider divergence between the controlling shareholder’s control rights and cash flow rights are more financially constrained and the cost of equity is significant higher in these firms. Our results suggest that potential tunneling and other moral hazard activities of the controlling shareholder are facilitated by his excess control rights. These activities have a real impact on corporate financial outcomes.

We investigate how a firm’s political connections may affect its corporate policies. We propose and test the hypothesis that firms’ political connections enhance investors’ endorsement of managerial decisions, which elevates firm investment and encourages equity issuance and less cash payout. Using a sample of non-state owned Chinese firms, we find strong evidence in support of this hypothesis. Specifically, politically connected firms are less likely to pay dividends and pay less if they pay. The dividend announcement returns are significantly lower in connected firms than in otherwise similar but unconnected firms. Investors prefer firm investments to cash payouts by politically connected firms with high growth opportunities, and tend to value these firms’ investment decisions significantly higher. Finally, connected firms are also more able to tap public equity market for external funds. Our evidence is more consistent with political connections being an investor endorsement device rather than the expropriation device as suggested in the prior literature.

This study examines how corporate governance influences short-term and long-term bidder returns from China’s domestic mergers and acquisitions during 2001-2010. We examine a range of corporate governance measures covering ownership structure, board structure, insider ownership and managerial incentives while controlling for bidder and deal characteristics. Our initial results from events analyses show that market responses differ in ways which suggest a difference in how the market’s assessment of share price from the perspectives of short run and long run. Bidders obtain significant positive abnormal returns over the five-day event period but suffer significant wealth losses for two years following the deal completion. Our further analyses on factors driving the price difference show that executive ownership (positive) and state ownership (negative) exert opposite effects on the announcement period returns. The returns further differ by way of payments with positive (negative) effects from stock (cash) financing. Our long-term regression analyses show that the positive impact of executive ownership remains. Independent directors record a negative effect on abnormal returns. Nevertheless, board independence measured by the composite corporate governance index exerts a significant, positive effect on shareholder wealth. Our study highlights the need for the state to accelerate the share structure reform and formulate policies that encourage executive ownership and sound corporate governance.

Working with unique data on land values in 35 major Chinese markets and a panel of firms outside the real estate industry, we estimate standard investment equations that yield no evidence of a collateral channel effect. This is markedly different from previous work on the United States and Japan which finds economically large impacts. One reason for this appears to be that some of the most dominant firms in China are state-owned enterprises (SOEs) which are unconstrained in the sense that they do not need to rely on rising underlying property collateral values to obtain all the financing necessary to carry out their desired investment programs. However, we also find no collateral channel effect for non-SOEs when we perform our analysis on disaggregated sets of firms. Norms and regulation in the Chinese capital markets and banking sector can account for why there is no collateral channel effect operating among these firms. We caution that our results do not mean that there will be no negative fallout from a potential real estate bust on the Chinese economy. There are good reasons to believe there would be, just not through a collateral channel effect.