This article examines the extent to which agency theory may explain chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in Chinese state‐owned enterprises during the 1980s. We find support for the agency theory: CEO pay sensitivity decreases with the variance of performance. Moreover, the performance sensitivity of CEO pay increases with the marginal return to executive action. While the elasticity of pay to sales is slightly smaller than that found for conventional firms in the West generally, our estimate of the semielasticity of pay with respect to profitability is comparable with estimates for regulated industries in the United States.

We examine how financial statement informativeness, analyst following, and news relate to the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. Corporations’ timely disclosures of value relevant information and information collection by outsiders reduce information asymmetry, limiting insiders’ ability to trade profitably on private information. We use the profitability and intensity of insider trades to proxy for information asymmetry. We find that increased analyst following is associated with reduced profitability of insider trades and reduced insider purchases. Financial statement informativeness is negatively associated with the frequency of insider purchases. However, company news, good or bad, is positively associated with insider purchase frequency.

We compare forecasts of the realized volatility of the pound, mark and yen exchange rates against the dollar, calculated from intraday rates, over horizons ranging from one day to three months. Our forecasts are obtained from a short memory ARMA model, a long memory ARFIMA model, a GARCH model and option implied volatilities. We find intraday rates provide the most accurate forecasts for the one-day and one-week forecast horizons while implied volatilities are at least as accurate as the historical forecasts for the one-month and three-month horizons. The superior accuracy of the historical forecasts, relative to implied volatilities, comes from the use of high frequency returns, and not from a long memory specification. We find significant incremental information in historical forecasts, beyond the implied volatility information, for forecast horizons up to one week.