This paper uses segmented dual-class shares of Chinese firms—A shares traded in mainland China by local investors and H shares traded in Hong Kong by foreign investors—to document a rich pattern in the differential reactions of local and foreign investors to analyst recommendations. This pattern reveals that social connections between analysts and investors affect investor reactions to analyst recommendations. Because of the investors' differential reactions, analyst recommendations may exacerbate, rather than attenuate, the market segmentation between the two share classes.

This paper uses segmented dual-class shares of Chinese firms—A shares traded in mainland China by local investors and H shares traded in Hong Kong by foreign investors—to document a rich pattern in the differential reactions of local and foreign investors to analyst recommendations. This pattern reveals that social connections between analysts and investors affect investor reactions to analyst recommendations. Because of the investors’ differential reactions, analyst recommendations may exacerbate, rather than attenuate, the market segmentation between the two share classes. Received January 28, 2016; editorial decision October 23, 2016 by Editor Robin Greenwood.

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between firm-level investment and the stock market in China from a price informativeness perspective. We find that firm investment does not significantly respond to the stock market valuation, because stock prices contain very little extra information about the future operating performance of firms. This finding is further supported by the relative investment response test and the relative price information content test based on the informativeness proxy of price non-synchronicity combined with firm information transparency.