Alternative index products often achieve improved performance at the cost of increased exposure to risk. In this study, we propose a portfolio tilting strategy that alleviates the risks inherent to alternative indices by projecting fundamental factors on risk factors to purge the influence of...

In the absence of market imperfections, the mutuality principle leads to efficient risk sharing and the Pareto optimal asset allocations. With market imperfections such as transaction costs and information asymmetry, risk-sharing becomes costly, and it can even lead to financial crises. We...

We use supervised machine learning to develop a financial sentiment dictionary from 3.1 million Chinese-language financial news articles. Our dictionary maps semantically similar words to a subset of human-expert generated financial sentiment words. In validation tests, our dictionary scores the...

State-controlled listed firms in China receive preferential treatment when borrowing from commercial banks; in contrast, private controlled firms rely on informal finance and on trade credit. We argue for and find evidence that private firms located in higher social trust regions use more trade...

We examine the causes and consequences of falsified financial statements in China. Using bivariate probit regression analysis, we find that firms with high debt and that plan to make equity issues are more likely to manipulate their earnings and thus have to restate their financial reports in...

As market stabilization funds (MSFs) are usually established to stabilize a short-term stock market disaster, most of them will “retreat” after crashes. However, there is an exception, i.e., the Chinese MSFs, which still hold a large number of shares even after crashes. This paper...

Previous studies rarely discuss the effect of margin trading on future stock price crash risk, though margin trading is often blamed for destabilizing stock market. We propose three possible mechanisms through which margin trading may affect crash risk. Our empirical results show that neither...

We collect compensation policy data from 60 Chinese mutual fund companies, which covers 88% of assets under management by all active stock and stock-oriented hybrid mutual funds in China. Using the collected data, we investigate the portfolio pumping from a performance-based perspective. We find...

We investigate two under-explored factors in mitigating the risk of corporate fraud and regulatory enforcement against fraud, namely institutional investors and political connections. The role of institutional investors in the effective monitoring of a firm's management is well established in...