The Efficiency of the Chinese Stock Markets: Some Unfinished Business on the Road to Economic Transformation

In his William S. Vickrey address to the International Atlantic Economic association in 2005, Franklin Allen examined the question of how China has managed to grow rapidly in the absence of many of the factors usually considered essential to economic expansion in Western economies. China had no tradition of the rule of law, corruption was rampant, and the financial institutions that could facilitate growth were inadequate and/or dysfunctional. In particular, the stock and bond markets in China were undeveloped and the banking system did not serve as an institution that could effectively channel individual savings into those companies with the highest potential investment opportunities.

Hedge Funds: Risk and Return

Constructing a data base that is relatively free of bias, this paper provides measures of the returns of hedge fund s as well as the distinctly non-normal characteristics of the data. We provide risk-adjusted measures of performance as well as tests of the degree to which hedge funds live up to their claim of market neutrality. We also examine the substantial attrition of hedge funds and analyze the determinants of hedge fund survival as well as perform tests of return persistence. Finally, we examine the claims of the managers of “funds of funds” that they can form portfolios of “the best” hedge funds and that such funds provide useful instruments for individual investors. We conclude that hedge funds are far riskier and provide much lower returns than is commonly supposed.

The Value Effect and the Market For Chinese Stocks

A long literature in empirical finance has isolated both a value and a small-capitalization effect in asset pricing. This study confirms the existence of these style effects both in new types of equity indexes and in the stocks of Chinese companies traded in international markets. We then present a new nonparametric method of portfolio construction that enables investors to extract the predictive power of these style effects, without diluting their efficacy through an unintended weighting distribution that closely resembles capitalization weighting. We then develop a simple method to isolate periods where style tilts are likely to be particularly effective.China, stock market, capitalization, stock portolios, equity index

The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics

Revolutions often spawn counterrevolutions and the efficient market hypothesis in finance is no exception. The intellectual dominance of the efficient-market revolution has more been challenged by economists who stress psychological and behavioral elements of stock-price determination and by econometricians who argue that stock returns are, to a considerable extent, predictable. This survey examines the attacks on the efficient-market hypothesis and the relationship between predictability and efficiency. I conclude that our stock markets are more efficient and less predictable than many recent academic papers would have us believe.

Taxation and Corporation Finance

This paper analyzes the effects of the federal tax structure on corporate financial and investment behavior. We first develop a model of corporate behavior given taxes, taking into account both uncertainty and costs of bankruptcy. Simpler models abstracting from bankruptcy costs had clear counterfactual implications. The forecasts from our model proved to be consistent with both the observed cross-sectional variation in debt-equity ratios and the time series pattern of debt-equity ratios (data that were constructed in the paper). We then attempted to measure the efficiency costs created by corporate tax distortions as implied by the model. The forecasted efficiency cost of the distortion favoring debt finance seemed to be quite large, while the tax distortion affecting investment seemed to be less important than others have claimed. The paper concludes with a study of the efficiency implications of various proposed corporate tax changes.