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With increasing ecommerce penetration, it is believed that consumers are spending more shopping time online and away from physical stores. This brings to question the role of physical stores in an increasingly digitized landscape and whether they remain relevant. The measurement of the impact of physical stores has been characterized by the difficulty of attributing the increase in online sales to customers seeing and experiencing products showcased in physical stores, as this information is not typically observed and captured. Should physical stores remain valuable in the digital age, which products should be showcased in stores? In this study, we attempt to shed light on these questions using a quasi-experiment, taking place through a nationwide retailer that expanded its physical presence during the study period. This work distinguishes from past studies in that it studies purchasing behavior in the underexplored Chinese market. Through a ``triple-differences'' framework, we provide a more direct evidence on the effect of the physical channel on online sales outcomes. We find that online sales for products showcased in physical stores increase for both high and low involvement products, suggesting that two possible mechanisms are at work in driving the online sales of showcased products.

We investigate the foreign and domestic credit ratings on Chinese seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Our results indicate a negative association between acquiring credit ratings and SEO underpricing. Ratings from the international agent Moody’s and multiple ratings contribute more to reducing market uncertainty and underpricing than local rating agencies. This finding is attributed to the intense competition in the Chinese market, which exacerbates the conflicts of interest between local rating agencies and rated firms. The negative association disappears in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), in firms with political connections, and for issuers located in the specific economic development areas.

Aim: With a view to finding a method for Spanish wine to open up a wider market in China, this paper analyses the opportunities and threats that Spanish wine faces in the Chinese market in order to understand the Chinese and Spanish wine market, and analyses how Spanish wine exporters export wine to China. Methodology: Data analysis, bibliographical search and case study. The main source of data on the wine market in China and Spain was the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV). For the information on the case, the company Torres, this was obtained mainly from the content published on their official website. Results: The study revealed that the main competitors of Spanish wine in the Chinese wine market are France, Chile and Australia. Economic relations and trade policies between countries have a major impact on the wine trade. In addition, Spanish wine exporters need to pay attention to consumer characteristics in the Chinese market, so that Spanish wine can create a clear image for Chinese consumers, combining multiple online and offline distribution channels to improve their performance in the Chinese market. Limitations: The study identifies different factors that influence the export of Spanish wine to the Chinese market, but lacks more specific figures, coupled with information to be able to analyse in depth the different degrees of importance of these factors.

Existing research attributes investor return heterogeneity to individual characteristics such as sophistication. We bring a new perspective from the supply side by showing that return heterogeneity can be magnified as assets offered by the market become more complex. Using detailed account-level data, we examine the trading of B funds—complex, structured products in the Chinese market. During a three-year market cycle, the return gap between the naive and sophisticated is an order-of-magnitude greater when trading B funds than when trading simple, non-structured funds. In an event study, we confirm that this disparity is driven by differences in investors’ understanding of product complexity.

Previous studies of the U.S. market regard short-term reversal as compensation for liquidity provision. However, we find that intraday reversal has no significant dependence on stock liquidity for the Chinese market. Hence, based on a stylized framework, we propose an alternative explanation: uninformed retail traders, who underestimate the information component in equilibrium price due to physiologi cal anchor, trade against previous price movement, generating an opposing price pressure. The empirical results confirm this liquidity oversupply explanation. The negative correlation between previous intraday returns and future returns in the Chinese market is reversed once we extend the holding period. This indicates that reversal is a pricing error due to excessive liquidity provision from uninformed retail traders instead of a price correction from a temporary price concession due to lack of liquidity.

Cost of capital is one of the most essential concerns in corporate finance. Anecdotal evidences and academic researches imply recent disclosure of key audit matter (KAM) required by the new audit standard may have unexpected implications on companies' cost of capital. I utilize the policy experimentation in implementing the new audit standard to establish a natural experiment, through which I find the introduction of KAMs increased companies' capital costs in general. Moreover, I find the introduction of KAMs affects companies in different information environment asymmetrically. The companies in better information environment are less affected by the disclosure of KAMs. Also, I find capital cost of companies with shorter KAM paragraphs increase less than those with long KAM paragraphs, which implies the detail level of KAM paragraphs can be a moderator on the incremental effect.

The variance risk premium (VRP) reflects the degree of risk aversion of investors and the overestimation of the probability of extreme losses. We examine a variety of variance risk premiums, including both the upside and downside variance risk premiums, in the Chinese stock market. We find that there is strong presence of variance risk premiums in the Chinese stock market. Evidence on the corresponding delta-hedging portfolios confirms that investors are willing to pay the premium to hedge against the variance risk. We further investigate the predictability of variance risk premiums on Chinese stock markets. Our results show that the predictability limit is up to six months. More surprisingly, the predictive power mainly comes from the upside variance risk premium rather than the downside variance risk premium. The realized variances also have predictive power in the Chinese market while the risk-neutral variances do not.

This paper analyses factors that account for credit risk in the Chinese market for bonds issued by non-financial enterprises. By exploring a data set of covering monthly observations of individual corporate and enterprise bonds a number of important structural features of the market are seen to account for cross sectional and time series variations of yield spreads. The analysis sheds light on the issue of implicit government guarantees. The results suggest that steps taken by Chinese authorities to restructure local public finance are concentrating such guarantees to a few segments and are bringing greater financial discipline to other segments of the market.

We study how short selling affects corporate tax avoidance. By exploiting staggered short-sale deregulation on the Chinese stock market as a source of variation in market pressure and monitoring, our difference-in-differences estimates show that the introduction of a short-selling scheme significantly discourages pilot firms from engaging in tax avoidance. We also find that the negative effect of short selling on tax avoidance is more pronounced for firms that have high advertising costs and high institutional holdings and are located in weak tax law-enforcement regions. We further reveal that short selling has an indirect effect on tax avoidance through the additional external pressure exerted by auditors, media, and financial analysts. Our evidence highlights the monitoring and discipline roles that short sellers play in determining the level of corporate tax avoidance.

This paper examines whether there is information sharing between mutual funds and their auditors about the auditors’ other listed firm clients. Using data from the Chinese market, we find that mutual funds earn higher profits from trading in firms that share the same auditors. The effects are more pronounced when firms have a more opaque information environment and when the audit partners for the fund and the partners for the listed firm share school ties. The evidence is consistent with information flowing from auditors to mutual funds, providing mutual funds with an information advantage in firms that share the same auditors. Our findings are robust to the use of audit-firm M&As as exogenous shocks and several other robustness checks. We further find that auditors benefit by charging higher audit fees for mutual fund clients and by improving their audit quality for listed firm clients.

Based on high-frequency firm-level data, this paper uncovers new empirical patterns on intraday momentum in China. First, there exists a strong intraday momentum effect at the firm level. Second, the intraday predictability stems mainly from the overnight component rather than the opening half-hour component, which is consistent with the microstructure features of the Chinese market. Third, the intraday predictability attenuates (strengthens) following large positive (negative) informational shocks, implying a striking asymmetric reaction by market participants. Finally, we document that late-informed traders are relatively less experienced or skillful. Overall, the empirical results lend support to the model of late-informed trading.

The Trump administration has argued that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has failed to address China's "unfair" trade practices. While it is true that China's economic rise poses a unique challenge to the world trading system, WTO dispute settlement has more potential to address China's practices than the administration believes. If the Trump administration really does want the Chinese economy to be more market-oriented, it should consider making better use of WTO rules by filing more complaints against China. While it is often accused of flouting the rules, China does a reasonably good job of complying with WTO complaints brought against it. There are a number of policy areas where additional complaints are possible. The U.S. Trade Representative's Office (USTR) has been gathering detailed information on China's practices for years, and should file complaints on this basis, coordinating these efforts with key allies. And for those areas that are not well covered by WTO rules, such as state-owned enterprises, the United States should work with these allies to develop new rules. So far, the Trump administration has mainly relied on unilateral tariffs to open the Chinese market, but these are likely to hurt Americans, while not having much effect on Chinese trade practices. The multilateral route is a better approach to disciplining these trade practices and making China more market-oriented.

Utilizing the special institutional setting in the Chinese securities market, we examine how suppressed short-sale demand influences stock valuations and price efficiency for stocks with no short-selling activities. Based on revealed short-sale volume of shortable stocks, we employ a characteristics model to estimate the suppressed short-sale demand for non-shortable stocks, with a higher short-sale demand being suppressed indicates a more binding short-sale constraint. We find that suppressed short-sale demand negatively predicts future returns, and such relation concentrates among firms with poor information environment. Consistent with Diamond and Verrecchia (1987)’s reduced-pricing-efficiency theory, we find that a higher suppressed short-sale demand is associated with a greater price delay and a stronger post-earnings-announcement-drift.

Our study is among the first to examine the net asset value (NAV) inflation practices of fund managers in China, finding that equity funds bolster their portfolios at quarter‐end and especially year‐end. In support of the NAV inflation hypothesis in China, we further document the following: (1) NAV inflation is more profound for the worst‐performing fund managers; and (2) the stocks in which fund managers hold larger stakes exhibit a more marked pattern of price inflation around quarter‐ and year‐ends than do other stocks. We also find that closed‐end funds in China engage in NAV inflation at quarter‐ and year‐ends.

In this paper, we find the stock returns of Chinese market exhibit reversal instead of momentum behavior from short to long horizons. While the traditional reversal strategies can generate economically large average returns in the Chinese market, they bear infrequently extreme downside risks. We hence propose enhanced reversal strategies by adding a stop-loss line to limit crash risk and constructing a composite reversal strategy to better select stocks. Our enhanced reversal strategy consistently provides stronger evidence of return reversal than does the traditional reversal strategy by doubling the Sharpe ratio, generating a vast monthly return of 1.75% and reducing the largest downside loss from -28.82% to -8.34%. The abnormal returns cannot be explained by the standard risk factor and are stronger among stocks with larger limits to arbitrage.

We study the high-speed rail (HSR) substitution for air travel through the demand shocks triggered by two HSR events: the launch of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rails (the “Jing-hu” HSRs) and the Wenzhou train accident. One novelty of our data is that the HSR events are exogenous to the airline industry, alleviating the common endogeneity concern. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find some evidence of substitution based on the pattern of airfare adjustments during the sample period. Specifically, compared to those in the control group, mean airfares for routes along the Jing-hu HSRs decline by 30.4 per cent upon the launch, but rebound by 27.4 per cent following the accident. Furthermore, the two events have a larger impact on low-cost carriers (LCCs) and regional airlines, on tourism routes, and on flights that depart during evening hours than their counterparts, respectively. Thus, we claim that the HSRs mainly serve as a low-end substitution for air travel in China.

This research explores the effects of adding bitcoin to an optimal portfolio (naive, long-only, unconstrained and semi-constrained) by relying on mean-CVaR in the Chinese market. Then backtesting to compare the performance of portfolios with and without bitcoin for each scenario is perfomed. Results show significant but weak correlations between various asset classes and bitcoin, implying a more mature financial profile of bitcoin in China compared to that in the west. Backtesting results show that the effect of adding bitcoin to optimal portfolios is not consistent over the entire out-of-sample period. The naive and the long-only strategy improved the risk-reward ratio up until the late 2013 price-crash with no significant advantages thereafter. Shorting strategies on the other hand, with or without leverage, fail to produce more efficient portfolios when bitcoin is added, and this is consistent over the entire out-of-sample period. The results also show that semi-annual rebalancing amplifies the advantages of adding bitcoin to most portfolios except for the semi-constrained portfolio, although the weights analysis show significant shifts in weights which might not represent a feasible strategy in realistic scenarios.

As a digit currency with wide popularity in the world, the market performance of Bitcoin in different countries is worthy of attention. This paper analyzes the price discovery and volatility transmission of BitCoin among Chinese market and U.S. market. We show that Bitcoin price in Chinese market has significant influence on U.S. market, while U.S. market has significant impact on Chinese market through volatility.

An examination of the issues faced by Hollywood studios in accessing the Chinese market, focusing on China's censorship regime and import quotas on cultural products.

We investigate the impact of short-sale and margin-purchase on stock price crash risk in the Chinese markets. China lifted bans on short-sale and margin-purchase for stocks on an expanding designated list since March 2010. Results of difference in different tests reveal that the removal of bans on short-sale and margin-purchase is followed by a reduction in stock price crash risk over the subsequent six months. Utilizing firm-level daily short-sale and margin-purchase turnover data, we find that short sales reduce future stock price crash risk whereas margin purchases add to the risk.

This paper analyses empirically how increasingly close trade relations between China and Russia might affect the European Union (EU). We show that EU countries are complementary to Russia on the Chinese market. However, Chinese exports are increasingly relevant substitutes for EU exports on the Russian market. This means that an increase in China-Russia economic cooperation should have a negative impact on European exports. We simulate a scenario in which trade tariffs between Russia and China are eliminated, which is found to reduce EU exports to Russia. Finally, a more granular approach to the question analyses which sectors in Europe will be more affected by the increasing economic links between China and Russia, and finds that electronic machinery, equipment and machinery, and nuclear reactors will be particularly affected. Such findings obviously show quickly China is moving up the ladder in terms of export structure and how strategically important it is for Europe to continue upgrading its industry to compete at the highest level of that ladder.

Based on 4 years data of individual stocks in SZ300P index, the paper investigates the positive feedback trading behavior and its asymmetry. Regressions with heterogeneous belief terms show the presence of positive feedback trading in Chinese market. The traders who react to daily, weekly or monthly returns all exist in the market. The asymmetric pattern of positive feedback trading in individual stocks is quite different from that in developed markets and the findings in index data: The volume and order imbalance both rise more after price rises than those after price declines. An updated Sentana-Wadhwani model confirms the existence of this kind of asymmetric positive feedback trading. The asymmetric positive feedback trading tends to be more intensive in small-cap and high-liquid stocks, and this partially explains the contrast asymmetry between individual stocks and indexes.

This paper features an analysis of volatility spillover effects from Australia's major trading partners, namely, China, Japan, Korea and the United States, for a period running from 1st January 2004 to 30th June 2014. This captures the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). These markets are represented by the following major indices: The Shanghai composite and the Hangseng. (in the case of China, as both China and Hong Kong appear in Australian trade statistics), the S&P500 index, the Nikkei225 and the Kospi index. We apply the Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) Spillover Index, constructed in a VAR framework, to assess spillovers across these markets in returns and in volatilities. The analysis confirms that the US and Hong Kong markets have the greatest influence on the Australian one. We then move to a GARCH framework to apply further analysis and apply a tri-variate Cholesky-GARCH model to explore the effects from the US and Chinese market, as represented by the Hang Seng Index.

In manufacturing, developing economies have gained significant market share in both industrial countries and in each others' markets. This development have led many writers to argue that market share increases in industrial countries and expanding south-south trade could possibly drive future world trade. Analyzing the manufacturing import penetration in 5 industrial and 7 large developing countries, we show that during the 2000s, about three quarters of market share increases of all developing are due to China. The evidence also shows that market shares of all other developing countries in the Chinese market have decreased.

In 2005 China provided duty-free access to 190 items from 25 least developed sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Three years later duty-free access was extended to 454 items from 31 SSA LDCs. We find no evidence that China’s preferential market access program for the least developed sub-Saharan African countries has helped these countries gain competitive edge over other exporters into the Chinese market. While there is evidence of decreased export bundle concentration and movement up the value chain for SSA countries involved in the program, the effect differs significantly across countries.

This paper was written to explore the rationale behind English football clubs' entry to Chinese market. English football clubs were among the first to enter and have so far the best business practice in China. Italian football clubs enjoy the same popularity in China, however, they had rather few business activities there. This book created an interpretative framework to explain the entry of English clubs and also give hints to Italian ones based on the experience of the English football clubs.

This study examines the risk-return characteristics of the Chinese A and H B-shares from domestic and foreign investors’ perspective over the period January 1995 to June 2012. On average, H B-shares appear to offer a better risk-adjusted return irrespective of whether the returns are measured in the Chinese Yuan (domestic perspective) or in the US dollar (foreign perspective) terms. However, a ‘timeline’ analysis indicates that the relative advantage arising from investment in H B-shares may be nearing the end. This finding appears to be a consequence of investment schemes (such as opening of B shares to domestic investors, QFIIs and QDIIs) which allow domestic and foreign investors to cross each other’s territories specified at the begging of the opening up of the Chinese market to foreign investors. Second, there is some evidence of exchange rate advantage for foreign investors, but almost negligible. This finding may indicate that any extra benefit generated by slight (average annual) appreciation of Yuan against the dollar is offset by extra volatility of returns measured in the US dollar.

Since the early days of Dow Jones Averages indexing has raised complexity. The lack of standard theoretical framework for index building, and the heterogeneity of empirical studies regarding their statistical properties, make comparisons an issue. The scenario remains the same in Asian-Pacific-Chinese (APC) markets, and literature regarding their statistical properties is scarce. This article aims to contribute that literature in two ways: first, analyzing the complete historical evolution of 20 APC stock markets, shedding light on their statistical properties in three periods; second, it compares these results and risk adjusted return performance within APC market indices and with the most important developed markets. According to our findings, generally higher risk is rewarded with higher returns, three groups of risk can be established, and Chinese markets are found to be exceptional, with very high kurtosis and positive skewness.

This paper investigates the efficiency consequences of firm disclosure. Using accounting and financial data in the Chinese market, the largest emerging market dominated by noise traders, we find that disclosure attracts noise trading and reduces the amount of information learned by firms from market prices, which in turn harms investment efficiency. Our results indicate that disclosure can negatively affect market efficiency and real investment performance in markets where noise trading increases with disclosure. Our results shed new lights on the dark side of disclosure for both informational and allocative efficiency.

The underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the Chinese market is higher than in other markets. This paper analyses both initial underpricing and long-run performance for Chinese IPOs in order to resolve arguments in previous Chinese IPOs literature studies. Using a sample of 275 Chinese IPOs from 2005 to 2008, the results support Rock’s (1986) winners’ curse and Welch’s (1992) cascades theory. The results of long-run performance report that Chinese IPOs underperform the market in two years time. More importantly, this paper finds that the underpricing of Chinese IPOs is mainly caused by the activities of investors in the secondary market.

The paper examines the competitiveness of Indian exports in the Chinese market as a key factor in explaining the imbalance in Indo-China bilateral trade. Examination of such competitiveness vis-a-vis similar exports from the ASEAN countries show Indian products to be competitive in only select segments, while ASEAN exports are competitive in most. The lack of market access for Indian exports due to low competitiveness is further accentuated by the more exhaustive FTA between China and ASEAN.

China launched a pilot scheme in March 2010 to lift the ban on short-selling and margin-trading for stocks on a designated list. We find that stocks experience negative returns when added to the list. After the ban is lifted, price efficiency increases while stock return volatility decreases. Panel data regressions reveal that intensified short-selling activities are associated with improved price efficiency. Short-sellers trade to eliminate overpricing by selling stocks with higher contemporaneous returns following a downward trend, and their trades predict future returns. In contrast, we find intensified margin-trading activities for stocks with lower contemporaneous returns, and these trades have no return predictive power.

After China was accepted as a formal member to the WTO and issued its new Anti-Monopoly Law after some thirteen years drafts, there is a tendency which is becoming more and more significant during the past several years. Foreign investors in China have given up a way to simply set up their own factories within the territory as they did in the past thirty years since China reformed and opened its market, instead, nowadays through the cross-border mergers and acquisitions to acquire Chinese enterprises to enter the Chinese market as the main way becomes preferred by most of them. This new tendency cause foreign mergers and acquisitions to take more subtle and diverse ways such as joint ownership as well as seizing indirect ownership of domestic enterprises by financial tools, which is becoming an uprising new issue and task of Anti Monopoly regulation in China. On the other hand, after the MOFCOM issued its new guideline against stealth acquisition, it becomes a common concern for foreign investor and their lawyers as well. This article tend to address the reasons and under what circumstances that Chinese policy maker take into their considerations in regard of this issue.

The existence of herding behaviour challenges the validity of an Efficient Market Hypothesis. This study examines herding behaviour in the Chinese and Indian stock markets; our findings suggest that herding behaviour exists in both stock markets. The level of herding depends on the market conditions. In the Chinese market, herding behaviour is greater when the market is falling and the trading volume is high. On the other hand, in India the study finds herding behaviour occurs during the up market conditions. Herding behaviour is more prevalent during large market movements in both the markets. Relatively, a lower prevalence of herding behaviour was detected in the Indian stock market.

The Chinese government is selling off state-owned assets and domestic Chinese companies are actively seeking partners from abroad. Coupled with the recent economic slowdown in Western countries and the subsequent bumpy recovery, this new era adds great importance to the M&A or takeover for foreign businesses seeking opportunities in China for growth. China has made considerable advances in the last several years in developing a reasonable and predicable legal regime for M&A transactions, more in line with international standards. On the other hand, the current regulatory framework and requirements are still often criticized for being complex, fragmented or sometimes disjointed. Proved as quick learners and patient game players, the regulators, businessmen, intermediaries, and all other parties involved should keep adapting themselves constantly towards such an evolving environment.

We examine stock return predictability in China. We take 18 firm-specific variables that have been documented to predict cross-sectional stock returns in the U.S. and examine their relation with stock returns in China for the sample period from 1995 to 2007. We find relatively weak predictability for Chinese stocks. Only five firm-specific variables predict returns in the Chinese market. Tests on U.S. stock returns find more predictors can explain cross-sectional stock return variation. We test two explanations for the cause of weak returns predictability in China. First, perhaps return predictors in China are less heterogeneously distributed than they are in the U.S. Second, stock prices are less informative in China than they are in the U.S. We find support for both explanations.

This study investigates the comovement across China, Hong Kong, and U.S. stock markets with the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model proposed in Engle (2002). This study answers three questions. First, will the policies of the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors system (QFII) and the Split Share Structure Reform in China impact the correlations across China, Hong Kong, and U.S. stock markets? I find evidence that both reform policies have significant positive impacts on the corresponding correlations, except the correlation between Shenzhen and the U.S. stock markets. In addition, the Split Share Structure Reform has greater impact than the QFII regime does. Second, how do the exogenous variables, the excessive trading volume, and the daily high-low price differential of each stock market drive the correlations between the Chinese and two developed markets? Only these exogenous variables from Hong Kong and U.S. stock markets have significant effects on corresponding correlations. In addition, the daily high-low price differential has greater explanatory power than the excessive trading volume does. Third, do the developed markets lead the Chinese market? There is no evidence on this hypothesis.

In this paper, we examine the effect of political connections versus founding family ownership on the relationship between disproportional ownership structure and leverage decisions of privately owned firms listed in Chinese market. We find that disproportional ownership has positive effect on leverage, indicating that controlling shareholder tends to use both disproportional ownership structure and debt to expropriate. We also find that the interacted term between disproportional ownership and political connections has a positive impact on leverage ratio, and disproportional ownership structure is negatively related with leverage ratio of founding-family controlled firms, which indicate a substitute effect between political connections and founding-family ownership for the impact of disproportional ownership on leverage ratio. Finally, we provide evidence that controlling shareholder of firms with disproportional ownership structure tends to use more related party loans for tunnelling. We argue that under China’s weak creditor protection institutions, political connections of chairman or CEO provide better access to financing for private-owned firms, but also provide excess external resources for controlling shareholder to expropriate. However, founding-family ownership can largely mitigate the tunnelling effect of controlling shareholder while privately controlled firms through taking-over from former State owned firms tends to facilitate the tunnelling effect of controlling shareholder through its political connections.

This article presents, through gravity models and a correct definition of what is understood by lost opportunities, an analysis of aggregate trade flows aimed at identifying China’s effects on Latin America’s trade. The results obtained indicate that it is not possible to talk about lost opportunities for Latin America in the Chinese market, since all the groups included in the region present demand elasticities from China that are not lower versus the rest of the regions or country groups.

In this article, we propose to study the case of the management of reputation when a sports company aims to penetrate the Chinese market. The sporting sector is an environment that suffers from strong instability as it is reliant upon sporting results. We intend to understand how sports organizations can exploit resources linked to reputation in order to develop a sustainable strategy in the Chinese market. On the basis of the case study of the Olympique Lyonnais Football Club, the leading football club in France, we propose a matrix that we use to analyze the mobilization of resources for the development of reputation in China.

China will likely become the largest market in the world for new large civil aircraft (LCA), with global LCA manufacturers expecting to sell 100 LCA per year in the Chinese market for the next twenty years, or one every three to four days, at a total value ranging up to $350 billion. The challenge for western LCA producers in meeting this demand comes less from each other than from the regulation of China's market by its government, the lack of adequate air transport infrastructure to serve its population, and China's nascent attempt at building its own LCA. Should China continue to aggressively address governmental and infrastructure restraints, it will benefit through increased trade and tourism, both of which will spur LCA sales to satisfy air transport demand. This paper describes China's growing market for LCA and the challenges for LCA producers in realizing China's potential market. It further discusses China's trade in LCA and parts, U.S. exports and imports with China, key infrastructure and regulatory challenges in China, and China's ambitions of building a domestic LCA by 2020.

This report interrogates and compares the censorship practices of the search engines provided by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for the Chinese market along with the domestic Chinese search engine Baidu. This report finds that although Internet users in China are able to access more information due to the presence of foreign search engines the web sites that are censored are often the only sources of alternative information available for politically sensitive topics. In addition to censoring the web sites of Chinese dissidents and the Falun Gong movement, the web sites of major news organizations, such as the BBC, as well as international advocacy organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, are also censored. The data presented in this report indicates that there is not a comprehensive system - such as a list issued by the Chinese government - in place for determining censored content. In fact, the evidence suggests that search engine companies themselves are selecting the specific web sites to be censored raising the possibility of over blocking as well as indicating that there is significant flexibility in choosing how to implement China's censorship requirements. Finally, this report finds that search engine companies maintain an overall low level of transparency regarding their censorship practices and concludes that independent monitoring is required to evaluate their compliance with public pledges regarding commitments to transparency and human rights.

Stock returns in China exhibit significant co-movement with provincial return indices after controlling for the industry effect, consistent with local co-movement findings in the United States. The magnitude of such co-movement increases with participation in trading by local investors. Trading activities of individual stocks also co-vary with provincial volume. The last two findings support the roles of investor behaviour in explaining the local return co-movement phenomenon.

The share of Spanish exports in the Chinese market is much lower than their share in the global market. This document examines whether we are exporting to China below our potential. To that end, we compare the actual level of exports to China with the level predicted by the model of bilateral trade predominant in the literature. We find that between 1990 and 1999 Spanish exports to China were above the prediction of the model, while Chinese exports to Spain were fairly close to the prediction of the model. From 1999 onwards, actual bilateral trade flows between Spain and China, in both directions, are below the prediction of the model. Our results also suggest that, given the fundamentals explaining trade volumes, Spanish exports to other markets and not only to China are below their potential.

In the 1930s, two men in different parts of the United States began businesses that would eventually come to dominate the global snack food market. The combined companies became Frito-Lay and were acquired by PepsiCo in 1965. This case explores the recent entry of Frito-Lay into the Chinese market, showing tactics which were successful, along with mistakes made by the company.

Italian Abstract: Per operare in Cina o con la Cina e necessaria una approfondita conoscenza delle condizioni culturali-politiche che la caratterizzano e che possono tradursi in barriere e ostacoli commerciali con l’Occidente. L’elemento basilare che caratterizza i rapporti sociali ed economici in Cina e racchiuso in un'unica espressione: “coltivare le relazioni”. Con essa si intende fare riferimento a un complesso sistema di relazioni personali che in Cina viene chiamato guanxi, senza il quale non e possibile operare nel mercato.English Abstract: To operate in China or with China a thorough knowledge of the cultural and political conditions is required. Cultural and political conditions may result in barriers and obstacles for business relationships. The basic element that characterizes the social and economic relations in China is wrapped up in one phrase: "cultivate relationships". With it you intend to refer to a complex system of personal relationships, which in China is called guanxi, without which you can not operate in the market.

This paper examines the recent slew of mergers and acquisitions legislation passed by the Chinese authorities to govern domestic as well as international mergers and acquisitions affecting Chinese enterprises. In addition, it identifies the issues and challenges facing foreign investors acquiring Chinese enterprises; and ends with a comparison of the legal regime between the traditional greenfield route of entering the Chinese market and the more recent and popular M&A path.