With the liberalization of the financial service sector mandated by China's access to the WTO, China's credit card market has received a great deal of attention from global financial institutions. This paper examines the enormous growth opportunities and key barriers facing the development of...

Using a vector autoregressive model with monthly data from 1988 through 2001, this study investigates the factors that drive the excess returns on a widely followed mortgage-backed securities (MBS) index. We find that eight important economic variables (industrial productions, new home sales,...

Using the comprehensive 2000 and 2002 surveys of Chinese entrepreneurs conducted by the National Association of Private Entrepreneurs and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, we examine the characteristics and financial performance of private enterprises in China. Entrepreneurs, on average,...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between volume and return volatility using the transaction data. We introduce transaction and volume imbalance measures to capture the information content of trades. These two information measures are shown to have a strong explanatory power for return...

Using a bivariate GARCH model, we examine patterns of information flows for three commodity futures traded in both the developed U.S. market and the emerging China market (copper, soybeans and wheat). For copper and soybeans, the two commodities that are subject to less government regulation and...