In a Harvard Business School Working Paper Sean Cao, Charles C. Y. Wang and Yi Xiang from the universities of Maryland, Harvard and The Hong Kong Polytechnic uncover a strange bias in AI-generated financial predictions. We know from prior research investors tend to favour and be more optimistic about companies in their home markets. We […]

Francisco Arizala, Tomohide Mineyama, and Hugo Tuesta, researchers at the IMF writing in a Working Paper have taken a closer look at how Mexico’s import/export dynamic changed in the period 2017~2023. The chart they start the paper with is a corker. Did you know, I didn’t, that Mexico now sends more ‘stuff’ to the U.S. […]

There are a few quality-of-character checks I perform when looking at a company. One of these is a close squint at the biographies of Directors, especially the Independent Non-Executive ones (the INEDs). Red flags include suspiciously young Directors (often family being groomed), suspiciously well paid non-Executive Directors (often family collecting stipends) and INEDs with more […]

In a blog post from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System researchers Sina T. Ates and Sharon Jeon look more closely at China’s innovative capacity. It’s a short piece but the conclusion is unequivocal: “The particular metrics highlighted in this note suggest that China has built tremendous innovative capacity that bodes well […]

The work highlighted today is a ‘Working Paper’ from the IMF. The authors: Daniel Garcia-Macia, Siddharth Kothari, Yifen Tao and Yutong Li have tried to fix a bead on just how Industrial Policy (IP, i.e. subsidies) in China ends up being a net disbenifit. The IMF have urged China to give up this kind of […]

Dr. Samuel Johnson noted in 1775 that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. The justification then, for some of the harder to understand policies of the current U.S. administration should surprise none when they come flag-wrapped as necessary for the promotion of ‘National Security’. There’s a long historical precedent for this kind of […]

Liwei Si (et al.) from the Dalian Ocean University wondered what the environmental impact of offshore wind farms might be? Nobody likes the onshore variety, much. They’re ugly, noisy and kill birds. Offshore facilities seem like a much better idea as they can be built bigger and a long way from people (and many birds). […]

Tongxuan Gao, Virginia Hernanz Martín and Suárez Gálvez Cristina, researchers at the Department of Economics of the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain highlight depressing trends in female employment in China. In 2016 it became possible for all women in China to have a second child (ethnic minorities were already excluded from the one child policy and […]

Jialing Zhao (corresponding author, et al.), from the School of Economics at the Lanzhou University takes a fresh look at ‘Stock Price Crash Risk’ i.e. the likelihood a stock will unexpectedly collapse (nearly always) in response to bad-data hoarding by the company’s owners and/or managers. The ‘fresh look’ here is to see if a company’s […]

I’d have put the conclusion from this work another way. One with more resonance for regular investors than researchers Xiyuan Jing and Mangfei Liu of the Victoria University of Wellington and the Shaanxi Normal University have chosen to. Their summary notes a negative correlation between Employee Stock Ownership Schemes (ESOPs) and stock price crash risk […]

Chen Yihui (et al.) from the Hunan University wondered if engagement with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) would produce a beneficial stock-price effect for companies involved? Further, would the depth of their involvement be reflected by the magnitude of the stock price response? The answer turns out to be yes, and yes. The researchers […]

Computer whizz Dr. Craig S. Wright (University of Exeter; Harvard University; RCJBR Holdings PLC, who may have had something to do with the beginnings of Bitcoin) has written a most engaging essay. It’s so packed with zingers I’ll summarize it quickly but urge you to find the 15-minutes or so the monograph in full will […]

[The paper is dense and I hope the authors will forgive the very crude summary below. It’s missing a lot of nuance and if this subject is of interest you should review the work in full here College Expansion and the Rise of Intergenerational Persistence.] In 1999 (the dotted red vertical line below) China decided […]

Something ‘funny’ happened to China’s reported GDP growth numbers around five years ago, they became more volatile. As you can see, so too did numbers from the rest of the world but in China’s case the discontinuity is stark (look for red along the bottom and on the right). The smoothness of the series prior […]

Justin Ko, Harvard Law School; University of Macau, Faculty of Law, Students, takes a closer look at three of the most successful Chinese EV companies (of 115 now operating) and tries to explain what separates the leaders from the rest. He starts by reminding that much analysis from the West on China’s EV market is […]

Lant Pritchett, a Visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE School of Public Policy London writing in a Working Paper for the Asian Development Bank Institute (Tokyo) tackles a subject I wrangled tangentially with over COVID looking into the origins of modern democratic systems and the development of the most successful of these, the United […]