Gift expenditures grow swiftly in rural China and may adversely affect people's welfare. While gift-giving helps to maintain social status and connections, gift competition may create a predicament: people must spend more and more to "keep up with the Joneses." As a result, the escalating gift expenses crowd out spending on other important consumption and become increasingly burdensome to people in rural areas, particularly to the poor.
Using a unique Chinese data set capturing the trading behavior of particularly aggressive investors, we provide new evidence that is consistent with the presence of informational advantages. Critically, an advantage of our data is that we can also directly identify several plausible channels through which such an informational advantage could arise. Specifically, return predictability around key value-relevant events is most pronounced in the presence of aggressive traders who share the same geographic location as the firms in which they trade.
We propose a method to estimate the perceived likelihood of an uncertain increase in tariffs using the rise in trade flows in advance of the uncertainty resolution. We apply this framework to the uncertainty surrounding the U.S.’s annual renewal of China’s most-favored-nation (MFN) status in the 1990s. By matching the observed rise in imports in advance of U.S. Congress votes on the renewal, we find that the probability...
In a 2019 survey jointly administered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University (Tsinghua PBCSF), more than 90% of Chinese public firms report that they closely monitor the stock market for the purposes of learning information to guide real investment decisions and of accessing external financing. These findings provide direct evidence for the wide existence of market feedback via a learning channel and a financing channel, suggesting that the Chinese stock market is not just a side show, but instead, affects the real economy.
In sharp contrast with the market-and-disclosure based system in the US, IPOs in China are subject to strict regulatory rationing and control. We investigate the pricing implications of China’s IPO regulations for its publicly listed companies. We find that these regulations will give rise to significant market frictions with economic consequences for the prices, returns, and even investment decisions of China’s publicly listed companies.