Using the staggered intercity but within-province deregulation of local banks in China as exogenous variations, we evaluate the effect of banking integration across geographical segmentation on capital misallocation. Based on an administrative data set comprehensively covering Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that for firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), the integration increases physical capital by 19.3%, and reduces MRPK by 33.1% relative to low MRPK ffrms. Our findings are more pronounced for non-statedowned firms and firms with higher exposure to integrated banks. Integration also significantly increases the responsiveness of firms’ investments to deposit shock on other cities within the same province.

This paper examines whether China’s switch back and forth from fixed to floating exchange rates in 2005 and 2008 changed the contribution to stock price discovery by foreign and domestic investors. During that time, mainland investors could only trade the RMB-denominated A-shares in the domestic Shanghai and Shenzhen markets, while the dual-listed HKD-denominated H-shares were available only to overseas investors. Using intraday data on overlapping trading hours, we find that the switch from a fixed rate to managed floating in July 2005 increased the H-shares’ contribution to price discovery; while the exchange rate regime reversal in July 2008 allowed the domestic stocks to regain their dominance in information shares. These results imply that, in a market subject to restrictions on capital flows, a flexible exchange rate regime increases the propensity of investors to trade foreign-issued stocks to speculate on the RMB exchange rate, which raises overseas investors’ contribution to price discovery.

Studying China’s credit market, we find improved price efficiency and, paradoxically, worsening segmentation as perceived government support for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) caused non-SOE credit spreads to explode rather dramatically relative to their SOE counterparts amid government-led credit tightening. Interestingly, the post-2018 credit-market stress helped improve price efficiency within non-SOEs, while SOEs saw no such improvement and instead became sensitive to issuer-level measures of government support, marking a shift of SOE premium beyond the SOE label. We further document the real impact of the deepening credit misallocations: non-SOEs in aggregate are losing their long-standing advantage in profitability over SOEs in China.

China repos trade in the over-the-counter interbank market as well as the stock exchange. This paper examines the behaviours, sources, and drivers of the spread between China’s exchange and interbank reporates from December 2006 to June 2018. After adjusting for different day-count quoting methods, I dissect the exchange to interbank repo spread into two components: cross-market segmentation between exchange and interbank markets for non-depository institutions (NDIs), and within-market counterparty segmentation between NDIs and depository institutions (DIs) in the interbank market. The 1-day repo markets are found to be more segmented, with the spread mainly driven by the cross-market segmentation for NDIs, reflecting the two different market mechanisms and trading frictions that prevent NDIs from effectively arbitraging across the two markets in the shorter tenor. On the other hand, the 7-day repo markets are found to be less segmented, with the spread mainly driven by the counterparty segmentation between NDIs and DIs within the interbank market, reflecting greater counterparty credit and liquidity risks for NDIs relative to DIs. Further analysis uncovers the impacts of quarter-end effect, monetary policies, and shadow banking activities on the cross-market and within-market segmentations in China’s repo markets.

China’s financial prices are informative enough for the PBC to introduce a monetary policy framework centered around interest rates. While bond yields are not fully efficient—reflecting regulation, liquidity, and segmentation—we find they contain considerable information about the state of the economy as well as evidence of an emerging transmission channel: changes in PBC rates influence the structure of Treasury, financial, and corporate bond yield curves, which are then associated with changes in growth and inflation. Coporate spreads are also a leading indicator of growth and inflation. While further liberalization will strengthen both efficiency and transmission, several necessary elements to move towards indirect monetary policy are already in place.

We study how financial constraints affect the process of firm agglomeration and, in particular, the creation of conglomerates and firms with subsidiaries. We focus on the constraints related to the geographical segmentation of the debt market. We argue that conglomerates/firms with subsidiaries are born as the outcome of a process of agglomeration around less financially constrained firms. This has three major implications: a) conglomerates (firm with subsidiaries) should be less financially constrained than single-segment (no-subsidiary) firms, b) the headquarters – in general the seat of the aggregating company – should be the least financially constrained unit of the new entity and therefore firms with subsidiaries should be more likely to borrow at the headquarters level, c) if conglomerates (firms with subsidiaries) are less financially constrained than the average firm in the market, their Tobin’s Q should be lower than that of the single-segment (no-subsidiary) firms in the same industries – i.e., they should display a “conglomerate (firm with subsidiaries) discount”. We test these hypotheses employing a novel – and exogenous – geographical-based measure of financial constraints. We focus on the US corporations from 1997 to 2004. We show that firms headquartered in less financially constrained areas are more likely to be headquarters of conglomerates/firms with subsidiaries and that conglomerates/firms with subsidiaries are less financially constrained. At the moment of agglomeration (M&A) we document a significant negative relation between the difference in a degree of financial constraints between the bidder and the target and the probability of choosing the target as well as the value created in M&A. In the years following the acquisition Tobin’s Q of acquirers are decreasing relative to their peers which is consistent with the fact that access to lower cost of financing allows to implement projects with marginal Q lower than the average Q of existing projects. Next, we find that the less financially constrained is the headquarters compared to the subsidiaries, the higher is the percentage of the total financing that takes place at headquarters level. Finally, we document a strong positive correlation between the difference in financial constraints of the conglomerate (firm with subsidiaries) and the average degree of financial constraints of the single-segment (no-subsidiary) firms and the conglomerate (firm with subsidiaries) discount. Our findings suggest that conglomerates/firms with subsidiaries are less constrained because less constrained firms take over more constrained ones.

With a sample of 504 IPO issuers over a period of 2002-2008 in China, this paper studies a previously ignored issue by examining the relationship between pre-IPO earnings management and underwriter reputation for issuers with different level of marketization. We document that underwriter reputation is negatively related to pre-IPO earnings management only if the issuer is highly marketized. Specifically, we find a significantly negative relationship between pre-IPO earnings management and underwriter reputation if the issuer is a non-state-owned enterprise (NSOE) issuer, a small-size issuer, or is listed on the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Board. No significant association is found for the state-owned enterprise (SOE) issuers, the large issuers, or Main Board issuers. We argue that the results are driven by the fact that issuers in the NSOE, small-sized, or SME market segment have more incentives to signal their earnings quality to avoid adverse selection by the investors, and/or reputable underwriters are more influential over their clients in mitigating earnings management.

This study adopts the Markov-switching ARCH (hereafter SWARCH) model to examine the volatility nature and volatility linkages of four segmented Chinese stock indices (SHA, SZA, SHB, and SZB). Our empirical findings are consistent with the following notions. First, we find strong evidence of regime shift in the volatility of four segmented markets and SWARCH model appears to outperform standard GARCH family models. Second, although there are some common features of volatility switch in segmented markets, there exist a few difference: (i)compared with the A-share markets, B-share markets are more volatile and shift more frequently between high- and low-volatility states; (ii) B-share markets have longer stays at high volatility state than the A-share markets; (iii) the relative magnitude of the high volatility compared with that of the low volatility is much greater than the case in two A-share markets. Third, B-share markets are found to be more sensitive to international shocks, while the A-share markets seem immune to international spillovers of volatility. Finally, analyses of volatility spillover effect among the four stock markets indicate that the A-share markets play a dominant role in volatility in Chinese stock markets.

We document the changes in dynamic stochastic structure of the various industrial sectors of the Chinese A, B share markets and the Hong Kong share markets. We utilize a robustly estimated VECM-MV-GARCH model to test for possible co-integrating vectors between the market segmentations pre and post deregulation of the Chinese B share market. Our results suggest that before deregulation there is weak evidence of co-integration between the A and B share markets however, post deregulation the situation changes and the segments appear to be significantly co-integrated. MV-GARCH results suggest that the conditional correlations of market/sector shocks also increase significantly over the sample period.

Using the daily data of Chinese 7-day repo rates from January 1, 1997 to December 31, 2008, this paper tests a variety of popular spot rate models, including single-factor diffusion, GARCH, Markov regime-switching and jump-diffusion models. We document that Chinese spot rates are subject to both market forces and administrative forces. GARCH, regime-switching and jump-diffusion models capture some important features of the dynamics of Chinese spot rates, but all models under study are overwhelmingly rejected. We further explore possible sources of model misspecification using diagnostic tests.