The Geography of Equity Listing and Financial Centre Competition in Mainland China and Hong Kong

This study examines the changing competitiveness of financial centres in mainland China and Hong Kong based on the geography of equity listing of mainland Chinese firms. Pre-listing firm characteristics are used to explore firms’ motives for listing on a particular exchange and whether these motives have changed over time. The results show that Hong Kong’s prominence as an international financial centre is attracting the largest and, recently, also the best performing mainland Chinese state-owned enterprises to go public. Less differentiation exists between the competitiveness of Shanghai and Shenzhen, although the renewed strategy of the Shenzhen stock exchange to attract smaller firms appears to be successful

A Treatise on the Geographical Scale of Agglomeration Externalities and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem

The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) refers to the sensitivity of statistical research results to the initial spatial nomenclature used. Despite a substantial literature in the related field of geography on the potential influence of the MAUP, the urban economic modeling tradition has not paid much attention to this issue. In this article, we test to what extent the MAUP moderates the effect of agglomeration externalities on areal sectoral employment growth by varying the initial geographical scale of analysis. Using spatial cross-regressive modeling in which we account for spatial spillover effects of agglomeration externalities, we find different effects of agglomeration forces across geographical scales. As the MAUP is a theoretical as well as a methodological problem, research should not only work with proper statistical specifications of spatial agglomeration models incorporating different geographical scales, but also relate this more explicitly to hypotheses concerning the geographical scale at which agglomeration externalities operate

The financial centres of Shanghai and Hong Kong: Compentition or complementarity?

The contemporary rise of China in the new geo-economy is increasingly pressurising the spatial distribution of financial activity in mainland China and Hong Kong. With the reemergence of Shanghai, many people foresee the future demise of Hong Kong as the most important financial centre for the Chinese mainland. This paper shows that this conviction seems rather premature. From an examination of the regional distribution pattern of the mainland-China-based companies listed on the stock exchanges of Shanghai and Hong Kong it appears that both financial centres have relatively distinct hinterlands. Furthermore, it is shown that the exchanges of Shanghai and Hong Kong differ strongly in terms of sectoral specialisation. These results indicate that both centres reveal a considerable amount of complementarity