Some have predicted that the next ‘Big N' international firm could be a Chinese CPA firm. Our primary research motivation has been to explore how far this view is shared and whether it is realistic to suppose that one or more Chinese firms, however large they may grow domestically, or even as...

This paper offers a framework to understand informal financing based on mechanisms to deal with asymmetric information and enforcement. We find that constructive informal financing such as trade credits and family borrowing that relies on information advantages or an altruistic relationship is...

The study investigates the role of financial development in boosting the investment efficiency of firms' investments in China. Using a large sample of firm-level financial data and country level economic data over the period 2004-2015, present study creates a link between financial and real...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

Despite fundamental market reforms, the Chinese financial system has remained a mixed system. From the perspectives of the mainstream doctrines of financial liberalization, this system is easily judged to be entailing serious allocative inefficiencies. Nevertheless, from alternative theoretical...

What made finance develop in the West but not in China? We argue that long before modern finance, China chose to rely on the kinship-based Confucian clan, whereas the West chose the corporate entity combined with impersonal instruments, to deal with the challenges of interpersonal risk sharing...

Japan, an isolated, backward country in the 1860s, industrialized rapidly to become a major industrial power by the 1930s. South Korea, among the world's poorest countries in the 1960s, joined the ranks of First World economies in little over a single generation. China now seems poised to follow...

The existence of information asymmetry in automobile insurance market has been studied extensively, yet the previous work mainly focus on different characteristics of insureds, and less frequently on different types of claims. We make use of a unique and complete dataset, which enable us to test...

Using a proprietary database from a large Chinese state-owned bank, we examine whether information evolved from banking relationships predicts commercial loan default by industrial firms. We find that the bank's relationship information is significantly linked to the incidence of default, and...