Xiang Hu Bao (XHB), meaning 'mutual treasury' in Chinese, is a novel online mutual aid platform operated by Alibaba's Ant Financial to facilitate mutual risk sharing of critical illness exposures. XHB reached nearly 100 million members in less than one year since its launch and so far has...

Using various indices of economic and financial uncertainties, we document a new stylized fact about the beta anomaly: the negative relation between beta and alpha exists in low-uncertainty periods but not in high uncertainty periods. We show that this finding cannot be explained by sentiment,...

This paper decomposes consumption risk sharing among provinces in China over the 1980-2007 period. We find that 9.4 percent of the shocks to gross provincial product are smoothed by the interprovincial fiscal transfer system. This system also cushions a relatively large fraction of the...