We conduct a textual analysis and exploit an exogenous event — Google’s 2010 surprising withdrawal from the Chinese mainland — which significantly hampered domestic investors’ ability to access foreign information. Following Google’s exit, Chinese firms’ announcements concerning their foreign transactions become more bullish in comparison to similar announcements prior to the exit and to those that involve only domestic transactions. This finding suggests that firms strategically alter their disclosure behaviors when the channel to transmit information is severed.
Major video and live streaming platforms in China have recently introduced a live commenting feature that allows viewers to post comments in real time during video content consumption. Building on the rich live comment data, this research proposes a novel approach for in-consumption social listening to extract live consumption experience. The approach is demonstrated in the context of online movie watching...
We probe the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent containment policies on business activities in China by exploiting big data on 1.5 billion sales invoices. The average drop in sales was between 23% and 35%, depending on firm size, for the 12-week period after the Wuhan lockdown.
The housing boom and bust cycle has called attention to the volatility of housing prices and its impact on other markets. We challenge the conventional wisdom that housing prices are the present value of future rents and show that housing price uncertainty can affect household property investments, which in turn affect rent. Using data from Hong Kong and mainland China, we find a significant effect of housing price on rent and draw important implications for monetary and macro-prudential policies.
The article discusses how capital accumulation has driven China's transition towards capital-intensive industries, while labor-biased productivity growth has helped China maintain a competitive edge in labor-intensive sectors.