This paper examines the contrast between Hong Kong’s reputation for laisser faire and its record of extensive state intervention in financial markets. It traces the long process of abandoning the concepts of virtuous markets and moral hazard and the introduction of increasingly comprehensive...

In a target-zone exchange rate system, both fundamentals and exchange rate expectations, reflected in interest rate differentials between the domestic and anchor currency, determine the exchange rate. However, the scope to capture exchange rate expectations is limited when policy rates are close...

This paper identifies major determinants of mutual fund flows to Hong Kong equities, which is essential for financial regulators and investors to understand potential sources of instability in domestic financial markets. We find that fund flows to global equities outweigh other fund-specific...

This study shows that the statistical property of the commercial banks' rate of returns can be used to explain the resistance to using Value-at-risk (VaR) and stress tests to determine banks' capital adequacy. We showed that “fat-tail” risk requires more capital than the “normal tail”...

In this paper we develop a simple model with anchoring and loss aversion to explain house price dynamics. We have two testable implications: 1) when both cognitive biases are present, price dispersion and trade volume are pro-cyclical; 2) if anchoring decreases with time, then price dispersion...

This paper assesses whether long-term institutional investors help stabilise or destabilise Hong Kong and international stock markets. We use a novel dataset based on individual funds issued by insurance companies and pension funds worldwide. This allows us to examine each economic region in...

This study investigates the net effects of sectoral loan concentration on banks in Hong Kong. Research in this area remains inconclusive, due to the potential trade-off between concentration risks and specialisation gains. Our empirical results, based on a regulatory panel dataset of licensed...

Market sentiments influence the dynamics of Hong Kong’s macro-critical property market, but the unobservable nature of market sentiments makes it difficult to assess systemically this sentiment channel. Using text-mining techniques, this paper sets up a news-based property market sentiment...

This paper extends the single-asset target-zone model pioneered by Krugman (1991) to include both bonds and equities. The new model provides a convenient framework for investigating a ‘puzzle' recently noted in Hong Kong. While the economy has experienced persistently lower interest rates...

This paper investigates the determinants of firms' decision to issue public debt in emerging Asian economies, using a novel database covering the period 1995 to 2007. We use comparable micro level panel of eight countries - China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and...