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Purpose – We study the investment behavior of foreign institutional investors operating in China. A detailed analysis of foreign institutional investors is examined, along with a comparison of domestic Chinese investors.

Methodology/approach – We adopt annual Chinese stock market data for the period 2003–2009 for both foreign and domestic funds to analyze the industrial preference of foreign funds and compare the different preferences between foreign funds and domestic Chinese funds in relation to financial characteristic and corporate governance indicators.

Findings – The analysis reveals that foreign funds have a preference for a range of sectors such as transportation, metals and nonmetals, and machinery, as opposed to industries with a requirement for local knowledge. The portfolios of domestic Chinese funds are distributed more evenly across sectors, compared to foreign funds. The comparative analysis reveals that the companies foreign funds invest in are significantly different from those firms favored by domestic funds in terms of size, profit, and management compensation.

Social implications – These empirical findings highlight the differences between foreign and domestic funds investment preferences and has implications for policy makers aiming to attract foreign investors to emerging markets.

Originality/value of chapter – Our chapter not only provides an introduction on the QFII scheme in China, but also examines the impact of a comprehensive range of firm-level characteristics, financial and corporate governance indicators, on the investment decisions of foreign and domestic funds in emerging markets.

The paper aims to explain regulatory issues and considerations as to future regulatory changes that Chinese regulators may implement with regard to the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) regime.

The paper describes: the regulators responsible for QFII; the relevant regulations; the qualification process, including eligibility requirements and the regulators' preference for qualifying long‐term, buy‐side institutional investors (usually pension funds, insurance companies and mutual funds); the concept of the “open‐ended China fund”; rules governing the remittance and repatriation of capital and the lock‐up period; a provision that prohibits QFIIs from transferring or selling their quotas (for example, to create structured products offering their customers synthetic exposure to the Chinese securities market); available account structures; the investment process, including investment restrictions, required disclosure of interests, the short swing profit rule, over‐purchases and erroneous trades, stock index futures trading, and insider dealing and manipulation of the market; withholding taxes; and recent developments.

China's QFII regime has been a key component of China's staged opening up of its financial markets, in particular its public securities market, permitting foreign investors to gain access to the previously restricted RMB denominated A share market under relatively strict regulatory oversight.

Practical guidance from an experienced financial services lawyer is provided.

This paper addresses the topic “The interaction between financial institutions and firms in the nonfinancial sectors” in the special issue of “Banking and finance in China.” The purpose of this paper is to examine the trading behavior and price effects of foreign institutions under the celebrated Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) scheme on all non-financial firms in the Chinese A-share markets.

Using quarterly equity-level foreign institution transactions from 2005Q1 to 2011Q4 in the Chinese A-share market, the author finds a positive and significant contemporaneous relationship between foreign flows and equity returns. For each quarter, the author sorts the stocks into ten portfolios based on the percentage of foreign flows, and employs the bivariate vector autoregression (VAR) model to examine the contemporaneous association in detail.

Foreign institutions in the Chinese A-share markets do not show positive or negative feedback trading; however, their flows have a strong impact on future equity returns because of informational advantage. Additionally, different associations are found between foreign flows and equity returns.

Constraints on data availability exist, and a quarterly dimension is too coarse to provide a statistically precise result, although certain related papers use quarterly dimension data. Further research is required using higher frequency data.

This paper provides a first look at foreign institution trading patterns and price effects on local equity returns in the Chinese A-share markets. Additionally, the equity level data allow the author to exclude the stocks that were not bought by foreign institutions and to detect the “pure effect” of foreign flows on equity returns.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of board financial expertise on the shareholding of foreign institutional investors in an emerging equity market of China and to explore whether ownership concentration moderates the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional investment.

To test the hypothesized relationships, this study uses panel data regression models, i.e. static (fixed effect and random effect) and dynamic (two-step generalized methods of moments) models. Further, to control the possible endogeniety issue, this study uses two instrumental variables, namely, board size and industry average financial expertise of board to proxy board financial expertise. This study covers a period from 2006 to 2015 for 169 listed Chinese firms.

The results revealed that foreign institutional investors positively perceived board financial expertise and holds more shareholdings with the increasing level of financial experts at boards of directors. Moreover, ownership concentration positively moderated this relationship. It means that in highly concentrated firms, the board financial expertise conveys a stronger signal to foreign institutional investors that firms can manage financial resources rationally by controlling negative effects of ownership concentration. Further, the robustness model also confirmed the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional shareholdings.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate board-level financial expertise as a determinant of foreign institutional ownership. Further, no previous study has used ownership concentration as a contextual variable on the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional investment.

Since their inception in late 2007, the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor (QDII) funds, which help Chinese investors to invest in foreign capital markets, have experienced significant portfolio losses and persistent fund outflows. While these losses are large in absolute terms, QDII funds, on average, performed better than Chinese A-share funds, but slightly worse than a group of foreign mutual funds. Our study focuses on the QDII industry, and asks three interrelated questions: (1) why have there been large fund outflows from the industry? (2) what explains QDII funds’ poor performance? and (3) why have QDII funds been so heavily exposed to the Hong Kong market? Our empirical analysis shows that the persistent capital outflows were primarily a result of disappointing fund performance. This poor performance can, in turn, be explained by the deficiency of knowledge required of QDII fund managers to successfully invest in foreign capital markets and manage global portfolios. Finally, our study goes some way to explain the phenomenon of QDII funds’ large asset allocation in the Hong Kong market. This ‘Hong Kong bias’ is shown to be consistent with the well-documented ‘home bias’ behaviour in cross-border portfolio investment, but is greatly exacerbated by the lack of global investing experience of QDII managers.

This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.

This paper aims to use artificial neural network (ANN) methods to predict stock price crashes in the Chinese equity market.

Three ANN models are developed and compared with the logistic regression model.

Results from this study conclude that the ANN approaches outperform the traditional logistic regression model, with fewer hidden layers in the ANN model having superior performance compared to the ANNs with multiple hidden layers. Results from the ANN approach also reveal that foreign institutional ownership, financial leverage, weekly average return and market-to-book ratio are the important variables when predicting stock price crashes, consistent with results from the traditional logistic model.

First, the ANN framework has been used in this study to forecast the stock price crashes and compared to the traditional logistic model in the world’s largest emerging market China. Second, the receiver operating characteristics curves and the area under the ROC curve have been used to evaluate the forecasting performance between the ANNs and the traditional approaches, in addition to some traditional performance evaluation methods.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the momentum phenomenon in two market segments of the Chinese stock market – the Class A share market and Class B share market over time period spanning from January 1996 to December 2010.

The authors largely follow Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) paper; the authors decompose the momentum returns following the procedure first proposed by Jegadeesh and Titman (1995). In addition, a liquidity factor (Pastor and Stambaugh, 2003) and a share ownership factor (Wang and Xu, 2004) are incorporated in the procedure to gauge the contribution of liquidity and the dynamics of share ownership towards the momentum returns, respectively in the two segments of the Chinese stock market.

The authors find compelling evidence showing distinctively different momentum phenomena exist in the two market segments of the Chinese stock market. Specifically, the momentum phenomenon is more pronounced in the Chinese Class A share market compared to those found in the Chinese Class B share market. Through decomposing the momentum returns, the authors find evidence showing the dismal momentum returns observed in the Class B share market can be attributed to markedly weakened contributions of the liquidity factor and the share ownership factor.

Relatively short sample time horizon compared to the most of major financial markets such as USA and UK. The number of B shares has been rather limited.

Subsequent to the opening of the Chinese Class B share market to domestic investors in 2001 and the opening of the Chinese Class A share market to qualified foreign institutional investors (QFII) in 2003, the empirical evidence found in this study provides a crucial reference point for domestic and foreign portfolio strategists in guiding them to form suitable portfolio strategies concerning investments in a nascent financial market such as the Chinese stock market, fraught with volatility and speculative trading behaviour.

It offers a comprehensive view of the momentum phenomenon in the Chinese Class A and B share markets over the sample period from January 1996 to December 2010. Second, the reasons behind the dichotomy of the momentum returns found in the two market segments were investigated through decomposing the momentum returns based on Jegdeesh and Titman’s (1995) method while incorporating three new explanatory factors – the liquidity factor, share ownership factor and the under reaction towards firm-specific news factor.

A couple of extant papers have visited the topic before. yet this paper offers more comprehensive view on the existence of momentum premium in both Chinese Class A and B share markets and investigates the driving forces behind the subdued momentum returns observed in the B share market.

This study seeks to explore the presence and the relative strength of market efficiency in the onshore and offshore Renminbi (RMB) forward markets.

In the onshore and offshore foreign exchange markets, the RMB forward contracts are designed in similar ways. However, the underlying economic forces and regulatory frameworks are very different in these two markets. We first analyze the functioning of each market, by examining the covered interest rate parity (CIRP) conditions. Second, we explore the CIRP deviations in the two markets and quantify the role of market frictions and government interventions.

We find that the CIRP condition does not hold in either the onshore or the offshore RMB forward markets. We also find that the offshore market is more efficient than the onshore market in conveying private information about investors’ expectation.

Our results reveal that the onshore RMB forward market provides an imperfect platform for investors to manage their currency exposures. We suggest that by opening the offshore market to domestic participants and the onshore market to more foreigners, the forward rates may become more informative with a greater investor mix. These liberalization efforts are important steps in the right directions to improve market efficiency in the Chinese FOREX market.