Category: Sunday Papers

Researchers Xu Chen, Meifen Qian, Juan Yao and Bin Yu from the Zhejiang and Sydney universities have uncovered an interesting ‘tick’ in terms of how women allocate money to mutual funds (at least in China). Using data from over 97,000 mutual fund investors the paper highlighted today shows female investors have an affinity for female-managed […]

The briefing paper highlighted today was produced by the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy and is a good summary of where China is today. It flags the major outstanding issues and, where possible, what can be done about them. The blue line below is the Incremental Capital Output Ratio (ICOR) or how much has […]

Alicia García-Herrero, multi accredited academic and Chief Economist for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East at Natixis takes a closer look at China’s most pressing economic conundrum. China produces more than it can consume. The idea has been consumers will eventually catch up in this process and that production, logically, must proceed consumption. The problem with […]

It’s just a bit of fun, right? Horoscopes, tea-leaf reading and in China Feng-shui are followed by a large portions of global populations. The map below from a household survey shows the distribution of Feng-shui believers in China in 2018. Justin J. Hong and Yuheng Zhao from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology […]

In a recent note from the U.S. Federal Reserve the China Shock 2.0 is discussed. This is the period from 2018 to today when China’s global trade has re-surged and differs markedly from the China Shock 1.0, the post WTO-accession period from 2000 to 2007. The China Shock 2.0 has been characterized by a rise […]

Writing in a CESifo Working Paper researchers tackle the question ‘Do tariffs encourage/discourage Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)?’. They discover a range of answers depending on the specific conditions. The situation in the real world is complicated, as we’ve just learned via the tariffs set by the Trump administration in the U.S. There initial tariff rates […]

A research team at the The School of Economics and Management at Anhui Normal University examined Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) reporting from Chinese A-shares for the period 2015 to 2024 to see if “The topic complexity of ESG reports is positively associated with firms’ ESG scores.” They discovered it is, and from this they […]

Justin Ko, (whom I take to be a student) at the Harvard University – Harvard Law School; University of Macau, Faculty of Law has produced a really useful primer on China’s biggest banks. Who cares? Investors should have (but so many haven’t!) as these have been great investments. Below you see a personal holding over […]

Xiao Chen, Jie Deng and Junbian Yu from the South China Agricultural University, Jinan University and the Shenzhen MSU-BIT University note a body of academic literature on the benefits of connectivity and better operating markets. However, until now studies have been mostly on the benefits of air and High Speed Rail links. The researchers wanted […]

In a paper produced for the National Bureau of Economic Research researchers believe they have collated the most comprehensive database of China’s foreign ownership to date. They analyzed over 161,000 firms in 159 countries over the period 2012~2021 and unlike prior studies that followed reported Foreign Direct Investment numbers they’ve gone deeper. Looking through holding […]

Working out if sanctions are effective is difficult because those sanctioned tend to be secretive in terms of their response; Iran and N. Korea for example. China however was hit in 2007 by the ‘China Military Catch-All Rule’ from the United States and because sanctioned products were clearly identified it’s been possible to follow up […]

Cunyi Yang from the Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) – Lingnan (University) College; The University of Hong Kong – Faculty of Business and Economics (et al.) have created a new index, the War Related Diplomatic Sentiment Index (WDSI) as a way of getting ahead of events via official government rhetoric. There are already a number of […]

Justin Ko, from the Harvard University – Harvard Law School; University of Macau, Faculty of Law has produced a useful and timely piece on China’s energy dynamic which explains two much asked-of-late questions. First, why hasn’t China tapped into its oil and gas emergency reserves (this last occurred in 2021) and second, why hasn’t the […]

Jian Liu and Xianfeng Ma at the Wuhan university looked at 3,350 domestically listed firms in China from 2019~2024 to see if they could add usefully to the debate about firm value and ESG scoring. The problem with this kind of analysis in the past is that there are a number of ESG-ranking providers whose […]

Pablo Fajgelbaum of the University of California, Los Angeles & NBER and Amit Khandelwal of the Yale University & NBER have looked closely at 2025 to see what, if any, the effects of tariffs were on the U.S. economy. We’re by now all familiar with some version of this chart: At the end of 2025 […]

Xin Chen (et al.) from the Shenzhen Audencia Financial Technology Institute at the Shenzhen University address an issue that’s especially pertinent right now. Why, in times of elevated economic uncertainty, are markets often so often ‘quiet’? In academic terms the question repeats as ‘Why, in times of high economic policy uncertainty (EPU), is volatility low […]

Alicia Garcia Herrero writing in a recently published Financial and Economic Review from the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (Hungarian Central Bank) addresses perhaps most important economic question of our age. Will China run out of puff, Japan style; or not? There are worrying parallels: both economies suffer from low private consumption, high savings and ‘significant economic […]

The authors of the paper highlighted today have taken a look at the three cutting edge technologies which are, and will continue, shaping our world i.e. AI, quantum computing and semiconductors, to see where the world’s largest economic blocs rank in terms of progress. They’ve hand-cranked, with the help of an LLM, a look at […]

Ralph Ossa and Stephen Redding from the Zurich and Stanford universities writing in a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper get straight to the point: “Empirical findings from the recent waves of U.S. tariffs suggest that most of the incidence of these tariffs has been borne by U.S. importers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers […]