Motivated by the growing importance of the Chinese domestic economy for the global economic condition, we test whether the consumption risk of China matters for the cross-section of U.S. equity returns. We find that the two-factor international assetpricing model with both U.S. and Chinese consumption risk explains 40% of the crosssectional variation in U.S. equity returns. We also find a sizable risk premium of 7.08% per annum. This finding is robust to different estimation approaches, portfolio groups, controlling for other equity factors, and using individual equities. For economic mechanism, we find that it is the discount rate channel that is related to investors’ risk aversion, sentiment, and economic uncertainty through which Chinese consumption matters for the U.S. equity returns. Also, the result is not entirely driven by Chinese investors participating in the U.S. Overall, we present equity market-based novel evidence of the importance of Chinese macro fundamentals for the U.S.

We propose a new joint model of intraday returns and durations to study the dynamics of several Chinese stocks. We include IBM from the U.S. market for comparison purposes. Flexible innovation distributions are used for durations and returns, and the total variance of returns is decomposed into different volatility components associated with different transaction horizons. Our new model strongly dominates existing specifications in the literature. The conditional hazard functions are non-monotonic and there is strong evidence for different volatility components. Although diurnal patterns, volatility components, and market microstructure implications are similar across the markets, there are interesting differences. Durations for lightly traded Chinese stocks tend to carry more information than heavily traded stocks. Chinese investors usually have longer investment horizons, which may be explained by the specific trading rules in China.

This paper investigates the dynamic and long-run relationships between monetary policy and asset prices in China using monthly data from June 2005 to September 2010. Johansen’s cointegration approach based on vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality test are used to identify the long-run relationships and directions of causality between asset prices and monetary variables. Empirical results show that monetary policies have little immediate effect on asset prices, suggesting that Chinese investors may be ‘irrational’ and ‘speculative’. Instead of running away from the market, investors rush to buy houses or shares whenever tightening monetary actions are taken. Such seemingly irrational and speculative behavior can be explained by various social and economic factors, including lack of investment channels, market imperfections, cultural traditions, urbanization and demographic changes. The results have two important policy implications. First, China’s central bank has not used and should not use interest rate alone to maintain macro-economic stability. Second, both monetary and non-monetary policies should be deployed when asset bubbles loom large to avoid devastating consequences when they burst.

This paper investigates the dynamic and long-run relationships between monetary policy and asset prices in China using monthly data from June 2005 to September 2010. Johansen’s cointegration approach based on vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality test are used to identify the long-run relationships and directions of causality between asset prices and monetary variables. Empirical results show that monetary policies have little immediate effect on asset prices, suggesting that Chinese investors may be ‘irrational’ and ‘speculative’. Instead of running away from the market, investors rush to buy houses or shares whenever tightening monetary actions are taken. Such seemingly irrational and speculative behavior can be explained by various social and economic factors, including lack of investment channels, market imperfections, cultural traditions, urbanization and demographic changes. The results have two important policy implications. First, China’s central bank has not used and should not use interest rate alone to maintain macro-economic stability. Second, both monetary and non-monetary policies should be deployed when asset bubbles loom large to avoid devastating consequences when they burst.

This paper investigates the dynamic and long-run relationships between monetary policy and asset prices in China using monthly data from June 2005 to September 2010. Johansen’s cointegration approach based on vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality test are used to identify the long-run relationships and directions of causality between asset prices and monetary variables. Empirical results show that monetary policies have little immediate effect on asset prices, suggesting that Chinese investors may be ‘irrational’ and ‘speculative’. Instead of running away from the market, investors rush to buy houses or shares whenever tightening monetary actions are taken. Such seemingly irrational and speculative behavior can be explained by various social and economic factors, including lack of investment channels, market imperfections, cultural traditions, urbanization and demographic changes. The results have two important policy implications. First, China’s central bank has not used and should not use interest rate alone to maintain macro-economic stability. Second, both monetary and non-monetary policies should be deployed when asset bubbles loom large to avoid devastating consequences when they burst.

This paper investigates the dynamic and long-run relationships between monetary policy and asset prices in China using monthly data from June 2005 to September 2010. Johansen?s cointegration approach based on vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality test are used to identify the long-run relationships and directions of causality between asset prices and monetary variables. Empirical results show that monetary policies have little immediate effect on asset prices, suggesting that Chinese investors may be ?irrational? and ?speculative?. Instead of running away from the market, investors rush to buy houses or shares whenever tightening monetary actions are taken. Such seemingly irrational and speculative behavior can be explained by various social and economic factors, including lack of investment channels, market imperfections, cultural traditions, urbanization and demographic changes. The results have two important policy implications. First, China?s central bank has not used and should not use interest rate alone to maintain macro-economic stability. Second, both monetary and non-monetary policies should be deployed when asset bubbles loom large to avoid devastating consequences when they burst.

This study examines for evidence of peer effects in the trading decisions of individual investors from Mainland China, a country whose cultural and social structures are vastly different from those of Western countries. Cultural differences, as widely documented, play a significant role in social interactions and word-of-mouth behavior. In contrast to U.S. studies, we find robust evidence that the trading decisions of Chinese investors are influenced, via word-ofmouth, by those of their peers who maintain brokerage accounts at the same branch, but not by those whose accounts are maintained at another branch located in the same city.

This paper investigates the potential benefits of international diversification with short selling constraints from the perspective of Chinese investors. Based on a stream of time-rolling realized portfolios, we show that Chinese investors can gain substantially from international investments. In particular, the expected portfolio returns as well as the risk-adjusted returns can be greatly enhanced by diversifying over emerging markets, and the portfolio risk can be largely reduced by investing in developed markets in comparison with purely domestic investments. The results are robust when the out-of-sample tests are employed and when investors start with a more mean-variance efficient domestic portfolio. In addition, our analysis illustrates that optimal portfolio weights vary significantly over time due to fluctuations in the correlations among international markets, suggesting that international portfolios need to be rebalanced frequently in order to generate the greatest possible diversification benefits.

As the launch of the China’s first stock index futures (SIF) approaches with no exact date for its eventual introduction. The Chinese stock market has increased dramatically due to this expectation recently, especially the futures contracts related stocks have raised significantly which are good examples of this influence. As the stock index futures is a new financial product, Chinese investors cannot help wondering whether the launch of the stock index future will have a positive or negative impact upon the underlying stock market. On the other hand, the new instruments which, will be followed by the introduction of other derivatives, will require broker-dealers to upgrade their systems and invest in new technology. Therefore, it has become pertinent to investigate the opportunities and challenges this eagerly awaited derivative instrument has to offer to fund managers in the booming Chinese economy.

The expected equity risk premium is a key input of many asset prcing models in finance. There exist a number of methods to estimate the risk premium. It is also well documented that the risk premium is time-varying. This paper briefly reviews two different approaches. More specifically, the historical average and relative estimation are taken into closer examination. The first approach is applied to estimate equity risk premium for stock markets in Great China when the stock markets were recovering from the bottom. Then the relative estimation approach is also adopted to empirical data to justify the findings in the first one, which takes into consideration the lower required rate of return for Chinese investors due to lack of investment opportunities. After making these adjustments, we find that risk premium in mainland China is close to risk premium for Hong Kong and Taiwan markets. All of those markets have higher risk premium compared to US market. The risk premium for Shanghai and Shenzhen market are about 8% and 10% respectively. For Hong Kong and Taiwan these numbers become 8% and 9%, where the long-term forward-looking risk premium for US market is about 4%.