Dr. Qing Ba from Hong Kong Exchanges and Professor Frank M. Song from the University of Hong Kong discuss the role of offshore debt issuance in the improvement of Chinese issuers’ creditability and transparency. China has the third largest bond market in the world. However, the absence of an accurate local rating and pricing system deepen the risks in domestic debt sectors. Our recent research finds that after Chinese corporates issue bonds in the offshore market, thus binding themselves to stricter market discipline and information disclosure requirements, the rating and disclosed information from offshore issuance may be of a greater reference value in the assessment of Chinese corporates’ credibility. This in turn leads to a signaling effect on their subsequent domestic debt financing. In addition to providing cheap funding, offshore debt issuance could bring about improvements in the creditability and transparency of Chinese issuers. This is of critical importance in pricing China’s credit risk and enhancing the soundness of China’s bond market.
As a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of the collateral-based unconventional monetary policy, we exploit the expansion of the collateral for the Medium-Term Lending Facility (MLF) in the interbank bond market on June 1, 2018 by the People’s Bank of China. We also consider that many bonds are dual-listed in a largely segmented exchange market. We find that the policy reduced the spreads of the newly collateralizable, dual-listed bonds in the treatment...
In China, the college entrance exam score is predictive for both firm success and wage-job success in the future, yet higher-score individuals are less likely to create firms.
We conduct a textual analysis and exploit an exogenous event — Google’s 2010 surprising withdrawal from the Chinese mainland — which significantly hampered domestic investors’ ability to access foreign information. Following Google’s exit, Chinese firms’ announcements concerning their foreign transactions become more bullish in comparison to similar announcements prior to the exit and to those that involve only domestic transactions. This finding suggests that firms strategically alter their disclosure behaviors when the channel to transmit information is severed.
Reverse mortgages are financial products that allow older homeowners to live in their property and receive income for as long as they live; repayment is made from the proceeds of the property sales upon the homeowners’ death. A recent pilot program in China by Happy Life Insurance found almost no takeup of such products. We investigate whether, if reverse...