Housing is by far the most important asset in Chinese households' balance sheets. However, despite forceful and frequent government interventions, the rise in Chinese housing prices has not been contained as much as intended, a trend that has not been reversed by the COVID-19 shock. In this...

China has been intensively launching opening-up policies since November 2014. Among these policies, the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect offers international investors an approach to investing directly in Mainland China stock markets. At the same time, Mainland China capital can gain access to...

We obtain a unique dataset to examine the effect of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program, which allows foreign investors from Hong Kong to buy stocks listed in Shanghai (northbound) and domestic investors from mainland China to buy stocks listed in Hong Kong (southbound). There is a...

Local governments play a significant role in China's public finance and fiscal operations. The size of local government debt has grown rapidly over the past years, exceeding the stock of sovereign debt in China. How does this development compare to other countries and what policies can foster...

We document a puzzling phenomenon, namely that overnight returns in Chinese stock markets are on average statistically and economically significantly negative. This finding seems to violate conventional asset pricing theory, yet the anomaly is robust to the choice of stock exchange, type of...

Research on capital structure has broadened its scope from a single capital structure decision (the debt/equity choice) to various attributes of the debt in firms' capital structure. This study examines the effects of growth opportunities, debt maturity and liquidity risk on leverage, making use...

We investigate the impact of short selling and margin trading on measures of price efficiency, characteristics of stock returns distributions, and price clustering in the Chinese equity market. Short selling and margin trading was permitted on selected stocks from March 31, 2010 and was...

From the 1994 bailout policies to the 2015 Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the policy impact on the Chinese stock market has changed over time. By May 2015, global investors can directly invest in a more legalized and normalized Chinese stock market, whereas they are still concerned about the...

How does labor risk affect corporate’s bond financing? Using the unique institutional feature of government regulations in China, we provide robust evidence that firms with a larger employment size have significantly better access to bond credit. This effect is more pronounced in times of...

We study financial reporting and disclosure practices in China using survey methods similar to prior studies of U.S. firms (i.e., Graham, Harvey, and Rajgopal, 2005; Dichev, Graham, Harvey, and Rajgopal, 2013). Comparing earnings features, motives to manage and smooth earnings, and voluntary...