Western contract law and the principle of freedom of contract are based on two premises: private ownership and a free market. This paper argues that freedom of contract is not applicable to Chinese state-owned enterprises due to the unique economic conditions surrounding Chinese SOEs:...

The Chinese Civil Code was enacted on May 28, 2020 and will become effective on January 1, 2021 as the first civil code in the Communist China. Half a century of codification effort finally resulted in this much anticipated code. It utilized state-of-the-art codification techniques and presents...

Pure economic loss has been a frontier tort law issue both in Europe and the United States. There are two rules to follow: one would exclude pure economic loss from recovery; the other would allow it. It totally depends on the jurisdiction one is in. However, the mystery is that one cannot...

This paper studies the role of mutual fund yield in driving investor flows and performance of bond funds. Using two common measures, the SEC yield and 12-month distribution yield, we find strong evidence that investors tend to chase bond funds with higher yields, even after controlling for total...

We document large, persistent exposures of hedge funds to downside tail risk. For instance, the hardest hit hedge funds in the 1998 crisis also suffered predictably worse returns than their peers in 2007-2008. Using the conditional tail risk factor derived by Kelly (2012), we find that tail risk...

In the late 1990s, the Japanese government initiated a number of reforms that resulted in lower transaction costs and made the Japanese equity market more attractive for foreign institutions. Following these changes, foreign institutional holdings more than doubled, providing an opportunity to...

This paper shows a strong link between granular information contained in individual stock prices and sectoral movements. Using machine learning algorithms, we find that a predictor that aggregates the price movements of a broad cross-section of individual stocks predicts sector ETF returns...

We propose a new measure of time-varying tail risk that is directly estimable from the cross section of returns. We exploit firm-level price crashes every month to identify common fluctuations in tail risk across stocks. Our tail measure is significantly correlated with tail risk measures...

Whenever a court enforces a bargain, it does so against someone who regrets having made it. Why should he be bound? Our thesis is that, in principle, a contract of exchange should be enforced when it is economically fair and voluntary. It is economically fair when the performance that each party...

We study the trading performance of actively-managed mutual funds from 16 domicile countries investing in 42 equity markets over the period 2001-2014. In the aggregate, funds achieve particularly poor returns in U.S. equity: after adjusting for style, the stocks they buy underperform those they...