Research Insights

Jian Zhang from the HKU Business School along with authors from the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, INSEAD in Singapore and the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University, helped to advance understanding of this phenomenon in their recent paper, called Air Pollution, Behavioral Bias, and the Disposition Effect in China. The team studied how air pollution can affect mental health by intensifying a certain type of cognitive bias observed in financial markets.

Take the recent study by Chen Lin and Mingzhu Tai from the HKU Business School, conducted with collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their paper addressed a fundamental worry for almost everyone during the pandemic: Money. Specifically, they examined how people in the U.S. saved money in response to COVID-19.

In their study “Do multinationals transfer culture? Evidence on female employment in China”, published in the Journal of International Economics in July 2021, authors Heiwai TANG and Yifan ZHANG show that MNC practices do impact the behaviour of local companies, and the outcome is a positive impact on the productivity of local companies.

虎年春節前後，新冠疫情在内地多個城市再度爆發，「就地過年」也再次成為人們春節的選項。香港大學副教授賈軾、香港中文大學（深圳）教授賈建民、清華大學教授薛瀾和博士生袁韻等組成的研究團隊再次開展《春節幸福感與疫情應對行為》的全國性問卷調查。研究團隊於春節前、後通過內地的調研平臺Credamo對同一群體開展兩次調查，分別收集問卷3500份和3016份，樣本來自全國256個城市，年齡段以20-50歲有春節探親需要的群體為主，覆蓋各類社會群體與收入階層。

Professor Heiwai Tang, also Associate Director of HIEBS, together with his team, jointly published this report with Hong Kong Productivity Council. The report aims to analyse the current performance and the future potential of three advanced manufacturing industries, in which Hong Kong is often perceived to have comparative advantages – FoodTech, GreenTech and HealthTech.

Since Max Weber, Confucianism has been widely viewed as being in opposition to capitalist or modern growth in historical China, especially in comparison with the rise of Western Europe after the Protestant Reformation. In pre-19th century China, the absence of industrialization or capitalism is partially attributed to the conservative nature of Confucian culture, particularly the emphasis on the ‘adjustment’ to the world and the depreciation of pursuing wealth, among others. And perhaps more importantly, the clan as a tangible organization of Confucianism restricted interpersonal cooperation to the family or lineage scope. Such ‘kinship-based morality’, in contrast to the ‘generalised morality’ enforced by market institutions in the West, paved the way for China’s divergent developmental path from the West. In a recent study, Zhiwu Chen, Andrew Sinclair and Chicheng Ma find another channel through which Confucianism inhibits capitalism: competition in financial markets.

Dr Hongsong Zhang of HKU Business School and Dr Shengyu Li of University of New South Wales discussed in this VoxChina piece their investigation of the impact of external monitoring from the government on state-owned enterprise performance, using the variation in monitoring strength arising from a nationwide policy change and firms’ geographic location in China. We utilize a structural approach to estimate input prices and productivity separately at the firm level using commonly available production data. We show that enhanced external monitoring, as a key component of corporate governance, can substantially reduce managerial expropriation in procurement and shirking in production management. The results suggest that government monitoring can be an effective policy instrument to improve state-owned enterprise performance.