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Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Vol. 61 No. 2 2026

Foreign Capital in the Chinese Stock Market: A Firm-Level Study

Christian Lundblad1; Donghui Shi2; Xiaoyan Zhang3; Zijian Zhang4

1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan–Flagler Business School · 2 Fudan University Fanhai International School of Finance · 3 Tsinghua University, PBC School of Finance · 4 China Asset Management Company

Abstract

Using a proprietary data set covering all foreign investors’ daily trades in the Chinese stock market from 2016 to 2019, we find that foreign order flows, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns, implying that these order flows are likely informed. We track the source of this informativeness and find that foreign order flows significantly predict firm-level news and news-day returns, suggesting that foreign investors can effectively process local firm information. Finally, we find that regulatory reforms that generally relax investment access requirements further improve foreign investors’ predictive power.

DOI
10.1017/s0022109025102081
Volume
61
Issue
2
Pages
799-840
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref

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