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.

This study examines the impact of trust on initial public offering (IPO) underpricing using a large sample of IPO firms in China. We find that firms in regions of high social trust have lower underpricing, consistent with the notion that IPO firms in low-trust regions have to offer greater underpricing to secure participation. This result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests and after controlling for endogeneity using instrumental variables. We also find that the negative relation between social trust and underpricing is more prominent for small and growth firms, and firms in high-tech industries, consistent with trust playing a more important role in asymmetric information environments. This relation is less pronounced for firms with high insider ownership and political connections, suggesting that investors rely less on trust in these cases; it is less salient when firms are in regions with high quality legal institutions and high average education levels, consistent with trust being a substitute for formal institutions.

This paper examines the impact of social trust on stock price crash risk. Social trust measures the level of mutual trust among the members of a society. Using a large sample of Chinese listed firms for the 2001–2015 period, we find that firms headquartered in regions of high social trust tend to have smaller crash risks. This result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests and is more prominent for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), for firms with weak monitoring, and for firms with higher risk-taking. Moreover, we observe that firms in regions of high social trust are associated with higher accounting conservatism and fewer financial restatements. Our study suggests that social trust is an important variable that is omitted in the literature investigating the predictors of stock price crashes.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the NASDAQ's success helped to prompt Singapore (SESDAQ), Japan (JASDAQ), Taiwan (TAISDAQ), and South Korea (KOSDAQ) to set up or formalize their own second board markets. In 1999, Malaysia (MESDAQ) and Hong Kong (GEM) followed suit. Given the growing importance of these second board markets, we examine whether there is any evidence of spillovers from NASDAQ returns and volatilities to Asian second board market returns and volatilities after controlling for spillovers from the NYSE, and whether these cross-country spillovers are strong relative to domestic spillovers from the corresponding main board markets. We employ EGARCH models, dynamic causality tests, and VAR-based forecast error decompositions using daily data of a recent sample period that includes the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and continues until April 20, 2001. There is strong evidence of lagged returns and volatility spillovers from the NASDAQ market to the Asian second board markets when we exclude contemporaneous main board market returns. There is also strong evidence of contemporaneous and lagged returns and volatility spillovers from the local main board markets to the corresponding second board markets. However, even in the presence of contemporaneous main board market returns, there are substantial spillovers from the lagged NASDAQ returns and volatilities to Asian second board market returns and volatilities. These findings are not sensitive to whether we use US dollar-based data or local currency-based data. Given the difference in the trading hours between the NASDAQ and Asian stock markets, we use available intra-day return data and Canadian return data. The findings seem quite robust: there is substantial information spillover from the NASDAQ to the Asian and Canadian second board markets. These findings indicate the existence of a substantial cross-country industry effect (or meteor shower effect), as well as a domestic market effect (or heat wave effect), and imply that both country diversification and industry diversification are important.

We examine two inconclusive issues in the IPO (initial public offering) underpricing literature. It is unclear whether private firms or state-owned enterprises (SOEs) underprice their IPOs more and how the institutional environment affects IPO underpricing. Using a much larger China IPO sample of SOEs, we conclude that SOEs underprice their IPOs more than private firms. Specifically, SOEs controlled by the central government (CSOEs) underprice their IPOs 27 percentage points more than private firms, whereas SOEs controlled by local governments (LSOEs) underprice theirs 7 percentage points more than those of private firms. Using the National Economic Research Institute Index of Marketization (NERIIM) to measure the institutional environment, we find that one index score improvement in institutional environment is associated with a two percentage-point reduction in IPO underpricing. Importantly, a better institutional environment reduces IPO underpricing most effectively for private firms, followed by LSOEs, and the least for CSOEs.