Chinese companies report year-end earnings and dividends simultaneously, so when the two sets of news are in conflict, the relative importance of earnings versus dividends can be disentangled. Chinese dividend announcements take precedence over earnings news, as revealed by Cumulative Absolute...

This paper investigates the determinants of credit spreads (levels and changes) via credit derivatives, using an Australian sample. We incorporate a number of different relationships to assess the contributions of various market-wide and firm-specific factors in determining levels, and changes...

This paper examines why firms choose to pay stock dividends. Using a sample of listed Chinese firms, we find that younger, more profitable firms, with lower leverage, high levels of retained earnings, private ownership prior to listing, investing more in fixed assets and operating in regions...

We analyze the relationship between flows and performance of Chinese mutual funds that trade in a volatile market environment. Consistent with existing literature, we find that the net flow to a fund is positively related to past fund performance. Contrary to previous studies using samples in...

Using a quasi-natural experiment that mandates a subset of listed firms to issue corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, this paper examines the effect of mandatory CSR disclosure on market information asymmetry in China, where we estimate information asymmetry using high frequency trade...

This paper examines whether politically connected firms engage more or less in corporate philanthropy than politically unconnected firms. We argue that political connections have countervailing effects on corporate philanthropy and that the study of publically traded firms (“public firms”)...

Using novel transaction-level data on Chinese business groups, this study provides the first direct evidence of the coinsurance theory of business groups, by investigating when different types of internal resources are transferred within a business group. We find that in Chinese business groups,...

Has the value of firms' political connections declined during the course of China's market transition? Some argue that China has experienced a tipping point after which the importance of political connections in conducting business has diminished, whereas others expect the value of political...

This study investigates the impact of the bank-firm relationship on IPO underpricing in China, an emerging economy with a bank-dominated financial system. With loan data from 902 IPO firms from 2004 to 2011, we document that the bank-firm relationship reduces the degree of IPO underpricing. Both...

We study favoritism via hometown ties, a common source of favor exchange in China, in fellow selection of the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering. Hometown ties to fellow selection committee members increase candidates' election probability by 39 percent, coming entirely from the...