This study highlights asymmetries in liquidity risk pricing from the perspective of heterogeneously informed traders facing changing levels of preference uncertainty. We hypothesize that higher illiquidity premium and liquidity risk betas may arise simultaneously in circumstances where investors are asymmetrically informed about their trading counterparts’ preferences and their financial firms’ timely valuations of assets . We first test the time-varying state transition patterns of IML, a traded liquidity factor of the return premium on illiquid-minus-liquid stocks, using a Markov regime-switching framework. We then investigate how the conditional price of the systematic risk of the IML fluctuate over time subject to changing levels of preference uncertainty. Empirical results from the Chinese stock market support our hypotheses that investors’ sensitivity to the IML systematic risk conditionally increase in times of higher preference uncertainty as proxied by the stock turnover and order imbalance. Further policy impact analyses suggest that China’s market liberalization efforts, contingent upon its recent stock connect and margin trading programs, reduce the conditional price of liquidity risk for affected stocks by helping the incorporation of information into stock prices more efficiently. Tighter macroeconomic funding conditions, on the contrary, conditionally increase the price of liquidity that investors require.

Analyzing data from 3,616 Chinese listed firms, we find a strong positive relationship between policy uncertainty and firms’ exchange rate exposure. This result remains robust after controlling for macroeconomic conditions and addressing endogeneity issues. Notably, policy uncertainty’s impact is significantly stronger for firms with a higher degree of international involvement and for poorly-governed firms. Interestingly, firms use financial hedging more intensively and reduce their operational hedging in high-uncertainty periods. Our results suggest that policy uncertainty exacerbates the impact of currency movements on firms’ financial performance, as firms become increasingly involved in international operations. Consequently, firms should strengthen their corporate governance and make effective use of hedging tools.

Bank stress tests can be an effective information disclosure policy in persuading stakeholders to avoid “attacking” a bank, thereby decreasing the probability of bank failure during distress. This paper studies stress test design along two dimensions: strength and frequency, assuming stakeholders are privately informed and move sequentially. We characterize all robustly persuasive stress tests that ensure all bank stakeholders disregard private information and coordinate actions perfectly based on test results (“pass” or “fail”). Our ffndings indicate that more frequent stress tests can substitute for increased test strength in making the stress test result robustly persuasive. We then identify the optimal stress test policy and investigate how the optimal frequency and strength depend on macroeconomic conditions, bank idiosyncratic characteristics, and endogenous maturity choices of banks. Finally, we discuss how other regulatory measures may complement the stress test policy.

We study the relationship between common factor betas and the expected overnight versus intraday stock returns. Using data from the Chinese A-share markets, we find that the Fama-French five-factor betas and expected returns exhibit contrasting relationships overnight versus intraday. The market, value, and profitability factors earn positive beta premiums overnight and negative premiums intraday, while the size and investment factors’ beta premiums behave oppositely. The night and day factor beta premium differentials are more muted among stocks with higher investor sophistication and vary across macroeconomic conditions. The contrasting day and night beta premiums extend to some other common factors and Chinese B shares, and vary their signs for some factors in the U.S. market.

This study examines the role of regional develop imbalance on China’s mutual funds investment behaviours after controlling for various firm attributes. Consistent with evidence from developed markets, we find that China’s mutual funds prefer large liquid stocks with better governance arrangement, higher visibility, growth perspective and prudent features. More importantly, our results show that macroeconomic conditions of stock locations affect mutual funds investment decisions. In particular, mutual funds overweight stocks from the emerging inland regions in response to the “development campaign of the western regions”, and they are able to pick out the “Western Stars” to obtain superior performance. Further investigation of stocks from the nine coastal regions suggests that there exists an “invest towards the neighbour south” phenomenon within the developed coastal regions. Although mutual funds are rational by investing into their southern neighbours, the reason of this anomaly remains a puzzle for further investigation.