团队

Using data on Internet news reading, we measure fund-level attention to both aggregate and firm-specific news and relate it to fund portfolio allocation decisions. In the time series, we find that funds shift attention toward macroeconomic news during periods of high aggregate volatility. Those funds that exhibit stronger attention-reallocation patterns earn higher future returns. In the cross-section of fund portfolios, fund attention is positively related to stock holdings. Furthermore, fund attention to a stock increases the value-add of that position to the fund's performance. This relationship is stronger using fund attention to more value-relevant news articles.

强积金是香港的强制性公积金计划，旨在为居民提供基本的退休保障。在过去25年里，强积金对香港普惠金融的发展起了重要的推动作用，成功鼓励了家庭参与证券市场。然而，其年化回报率偏低的问题一直备受批评。随着积金易平台即将推出，不同强积金计划将可以整合到统一数码制度中，这正好提供一个有利的契机，以对香港的主要退休储蓄制度作出重大改进。 关颖伦教授、Thomas Maurer教授及太明珠教授分析了导致强积金表现欠佳的三个主要原因：资产配置过于保守，限制了收益潜力；部分强积金产品质量不高，管理或投资策略存在缺陷；以及高昂的费用，直接侵蚀了投资者的回报。针对这些问题，他们向政府提出了以下建议：首先，政府可以修订预设投资策略以进一步降低费率，同时积金局亦可以邀请收费较低的新服务供应商进入市场。其次，政府应积极监察资产配置，透过采取规定性措施、推广理财教育及筛选强积金资讯，协助市场参与者了解强积金复杂的投资产品空间。第三，政府可以开拓强积金的产品空间，引入更多元化的投资选择。最后，积金局应提高数据透明度，并善用其数据资源进行分析。

Innovative firms must trade off disclosing to investors and maintaining secrecy from competitors. We study this trade-off in a sample of IP licenses mandatorily disclosed by US public firms, whose contents can be temporarily redacted. Hand classifying the redacted information, we find that firms with valuable IP in competitive markets redact IP information more often. Markets react positively to the redaction of IP information, consistent with theoretical predictions rationalizing a separating equilibrium in which nondisclosure signals more valuable IP. Our results suggest that credible nondisclosure partially resolves information frictions for innovative public firms when facilitated by sophisticated investors.

Banks’ information technology (IT) capabilities affect their ability to serve customers during the COVID-19 pandemic, which generates an unexpected and unprecedented shock that shifts banking services from in-person to digital. Amid mobility restrictions, banks with better IT experience larger reductions in physical branch visits and larger increases in website traffic, implying a larger shift to digital banking. Stronger IT banks are able to originate more Paycheck Protection Program loans to small business borrowers, especially in areas with more severe COVID-19 outbreaks, higher internet use, and higher bank competition. Those banks also attract more deposit flows and receive better mobile customer reviews during the pandemic.

Compliance-driven investments in technology—or “RegTech”—are growing rapidly. To understand the effects on the financial sector, we study firms’ responses to new internal control requirements. Affected firms make significant investments in ERP and hardware. These expenditures then enable complementary investments that are leveraged for noncompliance purposes, leading to modest savings from avoided customer complaints and misconduct. IT budgets rise and profits fall, especially at small firms, and acquisition activity and market concentration increase. Our results illustrate how regulation can directly and indirectly affect technology adoption, which in turn affects noncompliance functions and market structure.

Disputes over transactions on two-sided platforms are common and usually arbitrated through platforms’ customer service departments or third-party service providers. This paper studies crowd-judging, a novel crowdsourcing mechanism whereby users (buyers and sellers) volunteer as jurors to decide disputes arising from the platform. Using a rich data set from the dispute resolution center at Taobao, a leading Chinese e-commerce platform, we aim to understand this innovation and propose and analyze potential operational improvements with a focus on in-group bias (buyer jurors favor the buyer, likewise for sellers). Platform users, especially sellers, share the perception that in-group bias is prevalent and systematically sways case outcomes as the majority of users on such platforms are buyers, undermining the legitimacy of crowd-judging. Our empirical findings suggest that such concern is not completely unfounded: on average, a seller juror is approximately 10% likelier (than a buyer juror) to vote for a seller. Such bias is aggravated among cases that are decided by a thin margin and when jurors perceive that their in-group’s interests are threatened. However, the bias diminishes as jurors gain experience: a user’s bias reduces by nearly 95% as experience grows from zero to the sample median level. Incorporating these findings and juror participation dynamics in a simulation study, the paper delivers three managerial insights. First, under the existing voting policy, in-group bias influences the outcomes of no more than 2% of cases. Second, simply increasing crowd size through either a larger case panel or aggressively recruiting new jurors may not be efficient in reducing the adverse effect of in-group bias. Finally, policies that allocate cases dynamically could simultaneously mitigate the impact of in-group bias and nurture a more sustainable juror pool.

In canonical models of investment dynamics under uncertainty, “time-to-build” in investment decisions implies that uncertainty negatively impacts firm values and aggregate capital productivity. However, capital budgeting, which involves ex-ante information acquisition and state-contingent investment decisions, can potentially ameliorate time-to-build frictions. Reduced-form evidence using firm-level data on sales and investment expectations and errors supports both mechanisms. Incorporating capital budgeting into a standard investment model, our calibrated model reveals that state-contingent investment planning and information acquisition reduce aggregate productivity losses by 41% and 17%, respectively. Moreover, gains from planning accrue primarily to less productive firms, while information acquisition benefits higher productivity ones.

基于种种社会经济问题，香港有数十万劳动人口及其家庭已经移居海外。与此同时，受香港政府积极进取的人才计划所吸引，过去一年也有数十万人从外地来港。人口流动对香港的劳动力和人才库有何影响？关颖伦博士、邓希炜教授和王柏林博士通过分析领英（LinkedIn）社交数据和政府统计数据评估香港的劳动力市场和经济前景。