This paper examines the intricate relationship between China’s First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) and the extensive Soviet aid that played a pivotal role in shaping early industrialization and economic policy in New China. Drawing upon both Chinese and Western literature, the study reviews the evolution of planned economy practices and Soviet economic assistance, analyzes the process of plan formulation and the formulation of key industrial targets, and assesses the quantitative and qualitative impact of Soviet aid on the successful implementation of the plan. By employing a multi-perspective literature review, archival research, and statistical data analysis, the paper identifies that Soviet technology, machinery, and planning expertise contributed significantly, estimates suggest that Soviet aid accounted for 30-40% of the capital inputs in key sectors and that this collaboration was instrumental in achieving heavy industry targets before the advent of reform and opening-up policies. Furthermore, the paper explores the subsequent divergence in the economic models of China and the Soviet Union, offering lessons on dependency, technology transfer, and the political dimensions of foreign aid. The findings not only contribute to our understanding of the early stages of China’s economic development but also shed light on the broader dynamics of Cold War-era international economic cooperation.

We identify choke points in global production networks as industries bridging flows across global value chains. These industries exhibit low substitutability: US firms exposed to Chinese choke points during the 2022 Covid-19 lockdowns experienced large and persistent sales declines. The Red Sea crisis demonstrates how negative shocks to water transport, a single choke point, propagate throughout the global network. This structural fragility is priced in global stock markets: firms in choke point industries earn annualized benchmark-adjusted returns exceeding 6%. The premium compensates for aggregate consumption risk, as downturns in choke point industries predict lower future US and global consumption growth.

This study constructs a new mispricing factor for the Chinese equity market. We propose two-, three-, and four-factor models that incorporate this factor alongside the market, size, and value factors. Our models, especially the two-factor version, consistently outperform the Fama and French models and perform as well as other leading models in explaining Chinese anomalies. This study advances asset pricing literature specific to China and offers a promising new framework for analyzing mispricing in emerging markets.

This study investigates the relationship between the number of stock concepts and future returns, as well as the economic mechanisms underlying this association. Using novel collected data, we find that stocks with a greater number of concepts earn significantly higher returns in the subsequent month, generating a six-factor adjusted annualized alpha of approximately 9.6% for a long-short portfolio. Although these stocks exhibit higher turnover, return volatility, and investor attention - features commonly associated with speculative concept-driven trading - an analysis of cross-listed AH twin stocks reveals that concept counts do not widen the AH premium. Moreover, the return premium persists for up to 15 months without significant reversal, whereas firms that engage in opportunistic concept-chasing exhibit pronounced long-run reversals, suggesting that the positive concept-return relation is not driven by speculative motives. The higher returns are primarily attributable to strong industrial policy support and sustained above-expectation operating performance. Firms with more concepts are more likely to receive government subsidies and deliver positive earnings surprises, effects that are amplified when their core concepts receive stronger national policy backing. In contrast, firms that pursue concepts lacking substantive business relevance are significantly less likely to obtain government subsidies and fail to achieve above-expectation growth. Regarding investor composition, institutional ownership of high-concept stocks increases modestly, while ownership by government-guided funds rises substantially - particularly for stocks whose core concepts are strongly supported by national industrial policies. Conversely, concept-chasing behavior by listed firms significantly reduces the ownership ratio of government-guided funds. Overall, our findings indicate that concept stocks in China’s capital market are not purely speculative but signal underlying national policies.

This paper investigates the sales seasonality premium (Gustavo et al., 2020) in the Chinese stock market. We document a significant sales seasonality premium in the cross section of stocks listed on Chinese market. A long-short strategy of buying low-sales stocks and shorting high-sales season stocks generate a monthly return of 0.84% with a Newey-West t statistic of 2.94. The return spreads between low-sales season stocks and high-sales season stocks are robust to well-known anomalies and are larger in magnitude among large-cap companies. We also find that the return spreads are more pronounced within industries with relatively fixed patterns in product demand. The sales seasonality premium in the Chinese stock market is found to be a combined result of investor rationality and irrationality.

This paper examines whether subjective macroeconomic expectations predict equity risk premia in China. Using professional macro forecasts from the Wind database over 2011- 2023, we construct a composite macroeconomic expectation index via PLS. We find that the index significantly and positively predicts future equity premia both in-sample and out-ofsample, implying a countercyclical equity premium. The predictive power is robust to a wide range of macro-financial controls and delivers economically meaningful gains in portfolio allocation. Further analysis shows that controlling for forecast errors does not attenuate predictability, and the subjective index largely subsumes the information in realized macro variables, suggesting that it captures forward-looking macroeconomic conditions rather than belief bias. Cross-sectional and long-horizon results reinforce this interpretation.

Under China’s transition toward high-quality financial development, this study investigates the tail dependence among media sentiment, investor attention, and stock market returns using the M-Clayton Copula. Comparative model fitting tests demonstrate that the M-Clayton Copula outperforms both single Copula models and M-Copula models in characterizing asymmetric negative dependence structures. It is particularly effective in capturing both upper-lower and lower-upper tail dependencies, thereby providing a more comprehensive analysis of their interdependencies. The empirical results reveal three key findings. First, a significant positive tail dependence exists between media sentiment and stock market returns, suggesting that they tend to move together under extreme conditions, with notable asymmetry in the strength of co-movements. Second, media sentiment and investor attention exhibit negative tail dependence, with the lower-upper tail dependence coefficient exceeding its upper-lower counterpart, suggesting higher probability of rising investor attention following media sentiment decline than vice versa. Third, a pronounced negative tail dependence emerges between stock market returns and investor attention, particularly showing strong lower-upper tail correlation, implying substantial likelihood of increased investor attention subsequent to market downturns.

The global financial system is currently navigating a profound transformation driven by digitalization and the rise of decentralized financial innovations. In response, central banks are increasingly exploring or implementing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a sovereign digital evolution of fiat money. This study investigates the dual nature of CBDCs, evaluating whether they represent a strategic opportunity to modernize the economy or a systemic threat to existing financial stability. Employing a qualitative methodology, the research analyzes official policy frameworks from the IMF and BIS alongside diverse real-world case studies, including China’s e-CNY, the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, Nigeria’s eNaira, and the European Central Bank’s Digital Euro. The findings suggest that while CBDCs offer significant benefits—such as enhanced payment efficiency, reduced transaction costs, and improved financial inclusion—they also introduce critical risks. These include the potential disintermediation of commercial banks, heightened cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and concerns regarding individual data privacy and government surveillance. The study concludes that the successful integration of CBDCs is not merely a technical challenge but a social and strategic one. Adoption is heavily dependent on infrastructure, digital literacy, and public trust. Ultimately, the research highlights that there is no "one-size-fits-all" model; the future of money will be shaped by how effectively individual nations balance technological innovation with the preservation of financial architecture.

On October 10, 2025, Bitcoin fell 9.1% in thirty minutes on Binance following a geopolitical shock, contributing to a 16.0% peak-to-trough drawdown over 33 hours. Using minute-level Binance and Bybit data across spot, perpetual futures, and mark price feeds for BTC, ETH, and SOL, this paper situates the event within an empirical distribution of 62 BTC drawdowns exceeding 3% over 30 minutes during 2024–2026. October 10 ranks first of 62 on every microstructure metric simultaneously: a SOL futures-spot drawdown gap of 11.0 percentage points (z = +7.65), a BTC basis swing of $1,367 (z = +6.18), and a mark to-spot undershoot of $2,507 (z = −4.21). It also ranks first on multivariate anomaly measures (Mahalanobis distance 7.70; sum of absolute z-scores 45.9, 2.4 times the runner-up). A parsimonious conceptual cascade model identifies the mark price oracle as the crypto-specific amplifier.

Firms frequently overstate digital transformation in public disclosures while committing less in observable investment, a phenomenon known as digital catering. We examine whether digital public financial infrastructure can discipline such symbolic behavior. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design on Chinese A-share listed firms over 2014--2024, we find that exposure to China's e-CNY pilot reduces digital catering by roughly 14% relative to the sample mean. The decline is driven almost entirely by reduced rhetorical digital transformation, while balance-sheet-based digital commitment rises only marginally: the e-CNY pilot is associated with substantially less digital talk, but not with a commensurate increase in digital walk in the short run. The effect operates through lower agency costs and reduced information asymmetry, and follows an amplification--substitution pattern---stronger among digital-sector and accounting-opaque firms, weaker where internal controls and institutional ownership are already strong. The evidence identifies financial-transaction verifiability as a novel source of discipline over corporate cheap talk: CBDC-related infrastructure constrains unsupported symbolic claims without immediately accelerating substantive digital investment.