This study investigates the role of contextual cues in memory-based decision-making within high-stakestrading environments. Using trade records from a large Chinese brokerage firm and a novel dataset on COVID-19 quarantines, we find that quarantine periods trigger the recall of previously traded stocks, increasing the likelihood of subsequent orders for those stocks. The observed patterns align more closely with similarity-based recall than with alternative channels. Welfare analysis reveals that these memory-induced trades lead to an annualized loss of approximately 70 percentage points for the representative investor’s portfolio. We also find evidence at the market level: when the geographical distribution of quarantine risks is recalled, the probability of recalling the cross-sectional stock return-volume distribution from the same day increases by 1.6 percentage points. This study provides causal evidence from a real-world setting for memory-based theories, particularly similarity-based recall, and highlights a novel channel through which COVID-19 policies affect financial markets.

This paper investigates how foreign institutional investors, specifically Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs), influence the investment strategies of Chinese mutual fund management companies (FMCs) in which they hold shares. By analysing panel data from 1,766 mutual funds managed by 44 foreign-invested FMCs in China between 2005 and 2021, we explore whether QFII-invested FMCs (Q-FMCs) learn more from their domestic counterparts (D-FMCs) than other foreign-invested FMCs (NQ-FMCs). Our findings show that Q-FMC-managed mutual funds exhibit portfolio allocations more closely aligned with local DFMCs than those managed by NQ-FMCs. This imitation is particularly pronounced when selecting new stocks, enhancing portfolio performance, but not when rebalancing existing positions. Additionally, Q-FMCs trade more actively than NQ-FMCs. Robustness checks confirm these results across various ownership structures, fund characteristics, market conditions, and regulatory changes. These findings highlight the dual role of QFIIs as both investors and learners in China’s evolving financial landscape, offering insights into how foreign capital integrates into emerging mutual fund markets, informing regulatory policy aimed at fostering cross-border financial development.

This paper examines how China allocates its newly accumulated foreign assets by analyzing the long-run relationship between net national savings, foreign exchange reserves, and outward direct investment (ODI). Using quarterly data from 2005 to 2023, a cointegrated vector autoregression framework shows that ODI—particularly through state-owned enterprises— has emerged as an important channel for recycling national savings abroad. Although short-run reserve fluctuations persist, sustained reserve accumulation has become less central to China’s external asset management. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the institutional role of state ownership in shaping cross-border investment patterns and by identifying ODI as a strategic mechanism for channeling national savings internationally. The findings shed new light on China’s evolving approach to external asset allocation and its broader economic and geopolitical implications.

Periods of market crisis are often accompanied by heightened fear and information overload, which can induce information avoidance behaviors such as the ostrich effect. While prior research has documented investors’ tendency to avoid unfavorable information, little is known about how different information sources—and trust in those sources—jointly shape such behavior under extreme uncertainty. Drawing on Granular Interaction Thinking Theory (GITT) and employing Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics, this study examines how investors’ regular securities-related information sources is associated with the ostrich effect during the 2022 market downturn in China, and how these associations are conditioned by trust. Using survey data from 1,451 Chinese individual stock investors, we model investors’ recalled frequency of temporarily disengaging from stock investing as an indicator of information avoidance. The results show that regularly consulting professional sources, financial newspapers, and online forums is associated with information avoidance, whereas reliance on personal relationships and company disclosures is not. Importantly, trust moderates these relationships in distinct ways. Higher trust in professional sources is associated with reduced information avoidance, while higher trust in financial newspapers and online forums amplifies avoidance behavior. Among all sources, the interaction between trust and information referral is strongest for financial newspapers. These findings suggest that trust does not uniformly mitigate fear-driven avoidance. Instead, when combined with high-entropy information sources, trust can exacerbate cognitive and emotional strain, increasing investors’ propensity to disengage. By highlighting the joint roles of informational entropy and trust, this study advances behavioral finance research and offers practical insights for investors, policymakers, and regulators seeking to improve decision-making resilience during periods of market crisis.

In the Chinese context, the term “overseas” refers to countries and regions outside the sovereignty and jurisdiction of China. Overseas listing is an important strategy for firms to integrate into global capital markets and enhance their corporate investment efficiency. Using data from 600 Chinese companies listed exclusively overseas and 860 domestically listed firms for the period 2009–2023, this study analyzes the impact of overseas listing on corporate investment efficiency using empirical research methods, underlying mediating mechanisms, and the moderating role of economic policy uncertainty. The findings show that overseas listing improves Chinese firms’ investment efficiency. Compared to listing on the United States securities market (Nshares), listing on the Hong Kong securities market, (H-shares) has a pronounced effect on enhancing investment efficiency. Enhanced information disclosure quality improves the investment efficiency of Chinese enterprises listed overseas. Economic policyuncertainty can strengthen the positive impact of overseas listing on corporate investment efficiency. This study shows that overseas listing improves investment efficiency of firms in developing countries and offers new insights into advancing micro-level opening-up in these countries.

This paper examines the role of institutional investors in shaping pricing dynamics within China’s nascent infrastructure Real Estate Investment Trust market. Introduced in 2021, China’s REITs have rapidly gained policy and market attention as a tool for financing large-scale infrastructure projects through equity-based securitisation. Unlike mature REIT markets, China’s infrastructure REITs are characterised by a high concentration of institutional ownership dominated by state-owned financial institutions. Using panel data on first 9 REITs from May 2021 to April 2024, we find that institutional ownership significantly boosts the premium to net asset value. This effect operates primarily through two channels: reduced market liquidity and increased idiosyncratic return volatility, likely reflecting institutions’ trading activity and informational advantages. The findings highlight how institutional capital serves as a confidence signal in China’s emerging REITs ecosystem. The study contributes to the global REITs literature by offering insights from an emerging market context and provides policy recommendations to guide China’s REITs market development toward greater transparency, diversity, and long-term resilience.

This paper examines biodiversity risk transmission to US agricultural futures markets. We find: (1) all futures exhibit moderate-to-high biodiversity sensitivity, with coffee showing highest response through transparent price transmission mechanisms; (2) wavelet analysis reveals time-frequency heterogeneity, where tropical crops maintain strong long-term synchronization with biodiversity risk, intensified during COVID-19; (3) frequency-dependent asymmetric correlations emerge, with grains shifting from positive long-cycle to negative short-cycle correlations; (4) systemic spillover analysis indicates moderate interdependence, with soybeans as primary risk receiver and sugar as dominant transmitter, revealing differentiated transmission roles.

We construct the China Crude Oil Volatility Index (CNOVX)—the first model-free, optionimplied measure of forward-looking oil price risk for China—using INE crude oil options from 2021 to 2024 and an adapted CBOE methodology that accounts for sparse strike availability via smooth interpolation and extrapolation. Our results show that CNOVX increases with trading activity in the futures market, declines with option volume, and is strongly predicted by the 30-day realized variance of the SC crude oil futures contract. External shocks, including the Russia–Ukraine conflict and the Geopolitical Risk Index, significantly elevate CNOVX levels. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mortality risk intensifies the volatility-amplifying role of futures trading and strengthens the volatility-dampening effect of options, while confirmed case counts have weaker influence. We further document a pronounced asymmetric leverage effect: negative futures returns raise CNOVX more than positive returns of equal size. However, volatility feedback effects are negligible, as changes in implied volatility respond primarily to contemporaneous market conditions. Overall, CNOVX serves as a timely and informative benchmark for monitoring risk in China’s evolving crude oil derivatives market, with valuable implications for investors, hedgers, and policymakers.

We construct a Housing Purchase Intention Index (HPII) using the Baidu Search Index, which captures online search behavior directly reflecting households’ housing purchase intentions. We assess the predictive power of the HPII for the growth rate of housing transaction volume and further examine factors influencing housing purchase intention. The results show that the HPII has significant predictive ability and enhances real-time forecasting accuracy, highlighting the role of search behavior as a behavioral signal in the housing market. We also find that housing purchase intention is shaped by policy, economic, demographic, and supply factors. Specifically, purchase restriction policies exhibit an inverted U-shaped effect; moderate mortgage-rate hikes dampen purchase intention, while persistent increases may induce anticipatory buying. In addition, rising wages, increasing population concentration, and expanded residential land supply consistently strengthen housing purchase intention. These findings provide new behavioral evidence on the drivers of housing demand and underscore the value of search-based indicators for understanding household decision-making in the real estate market.

This study investigates the impact of Total Factor Productivity(TFP) growth in China's high-tech industry on household consumption, examining the distinct roles of labor and capital factor productivity from the perspective of biased technological progress. We innovatively construct a sequential proportional NDDF-Luenberger index. This index not only provides a theoretically consistent measure of TFP but also enables its precise decomposition into labor factor productivity and capital factor productivity, allowing for the quantitative identification of the degree and direction of technological bias. Our analysis yields three key findings. First, China's high-tech industry TFP evolved through a three-phase pattern of "surge–retreat–recovery," characterized by persistent capital-biased technological progress. Second, at the national level, improvements in overall TFP, labor factor productivity, and capital factor productivity all significantly promote household consumption, validating the theoretical pathway where supply-side efficiency gains stimulate demand. Third, significant regional heterogeneity exists: the Eastern region exhibits a "capital-led" growth pattern with weaker consumption effects from labor productivity; the Central and Western regions show "factor synergy," where both productivities contribute to consumption; whereas the Northeastern region suffers from a blocked transmission mechanism, where technological progress fails to significantly boost local consumption due to insufficient integration with the regional economy. By integrating supply-side TFP with demand-side consumption through the lens of biased technological progress, this research provides critical insights for fostering a virtuous cycle between innovation and domestic demand, offering valuable implications for industrial and regional policy design aimed at sustainable and inclusive growth.