We examine Chinese companies that issue both A-shares in mainland China and H-shares in Hong Kong. A-shares are restricted to mainland Chinese investors, while H-shares are available to Hong Kong and international investors. We find that H-shares exhibit significant exposure to Hong Kong market factors and behave more like Hong Kong stocks than mainland Chinese stocks. However, H-shares retain significant exposure to their domestic market and therefore provide foreign investors with diversification opportunities. We find a large time-varying H-share price discount relative to A-shares, and this discount is highly correlated with domestic and foreign market factors and relative market illiquidity.

Digitalization is a crucial strategy for firms to gain a competitive advantage. This study utilizes data from Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2020 to examine how digitalization affects firms' stock price informativeness. Empirical results demonstrate that digitalization reduces stock price synchronicity and promotes firms' stock price informativeness. Moreover, digitalization improves stock price informativeness by enhancing investment efficiency and firm value, reducing information asymmetry, and alleviating agency costs. These findings suggest that effective digital strategies and capabilities constitute an important yet underappreciated resource that enables firms to generate value-relevant information and improve the information environment in emerging capital markets. Our study contributes new evidence on the financial market implications of digital transformation from a resource-based view perspective.

Recent research suggests that insiders’ incentives for capturing cash flows affect price formation process in which insiders are inclined to withhold good news and to accelerate the release of bad news (Jin and Myers, 2006). We investigate whether insiders’ incentives for private control benefit, proxied by control-ownership wedge, affect firm-specific return characteristics. We find that control-ownership wedge is negatively related to the likelihood of positive return jumps and positively related to the extent of asymmetric market reaction to good news rather than to bad news. Overall, our results support the notion that corporate insiders increase opaqueness and withhold good news in order to capture unexpected cash flow.

This study examines whether insiders’ incentives for private control benefits affect investment sensitivity to stock price. While Chen et al. (2007) link stock price informativeness to firms’ learning from the stock market, we offer an alternative agency-cost based explanation. Using a total of 2822 firms from 22 countries in East Asia and Western Europe, we document a strong negative association between control-ownership wedge and investment-q sensitivity, suggesting that insiders’ incentives for private control benefit reduce their propensity to listen to the market. Furthermore, the negative impact of wedge on investment-q sensitivity is primarily driven by sub-optimal investments. Overall, we provide evidence that agency problem is an important factor that determines the learning from the stock market in capital allocation.