China’s stock market has gone through major structural changes since its inception in the early 1990s. In this survey article, we review the empirical literature published in 15 leading accounting and finance journals from 1998 to 2013 that documents these important structural changes. In analysing this literature, we focus on the ‘distinctiveness’ of the Chinese stock market compared with developed stock markets (e.g. US) and the research opportunities generated by the China setting. Key themes include China’s share issue privatisation (SIP) reforms, the political connections in privately owned companies, the characteristics of Chinese listed companies and their governance, the regulatory environment reforms in China, and the evolving role played by auditors and other information intermediaries.

This study investigates the role of free cash flows and (cross-sectional and time-series) price momentum in predicting future stock returns. Past returns and free cash flows each positively predict future stock returns after controlling for the other, suggesting that cash flows and momentum both contain valuable and distinctive information about future stock returns. A strategy of buying past winners with high free cash flows and shorting past losers with low free cash flows significantly outperforms the traditional momentum trading strategy. The enhanced performance is not sensitive to investor sentiment, time variations, or transaction costs. Further analysis shows that the incremental cash flow effects are largely attributable to net distributions to equity/debt holders. Overall, our findings shed light on the role of corporate fundamentals in technical trading strategies.

Rank and file employees execute firms’ daily operating activities, but prior research rarely examines their importance due to a lack of employee information. In this article, we use a novel data set—company reviews by rank and file employees—to provide evidence on the impact of employee satisfaction on a firm’s cost of equity capital. We find that firms with higher employee satisfaction have a lower cost of equity. Our results are robust to a variety of endogeneity tests and model specifications. We also find that the effect of employee satisfaction is more pronounced for firms with higher risk, greater financial constraints, and higher labor intensity or product market competition where labor is more critical to firm success. Further analysis shows that the negative association between employee satisfaction and the cost of equity is primarily grounded in reviews from current rather than former employees. Finally, we document that firms with high employee satisfaction experience lower systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Overall, our article presents novel evidence on the capital market benefits of higher employee satisfaction, particularly with regard to financing cost reduction.

We investigate whether firms limit the volume of financial items in annual reports (including the financial statements and footnotes) to obfuscate poor future firm performance, and how investors react to this reduced volume. We estimate abnormal volume to capture managers’ discretion over reporting in the 10-K and find that abnormally low volume predicts poor future earnings. This relation is more pronounced in firms where the market has difficulty in detecting managerial intervention in the disclosure process. We also find that abnormally low volume predicts negative future returns, suggesting that managers benefit from disclosing fewer financial items by delaying the incorporation of bad news into stock prices. Further corroborating our results, we find that the volume is abnormally low when there exist strong managerial incentives to withhold bad news and manipulate investor perceptions upward. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the notion that managers attempt to obfuscate poor future performance and inflate current stock prices by disclosing fewer financial items in the 10-K.

This study examines the role of mutual funds in the pricing of accruals in China's stock market to evaluate the sophistication of Chinese mutual funds. Using a sample of A-share stocks in China from 2003 to 2011, I find that the mispricing of accruals is concentrated in firms with large mutual fund holdings. This result differs from a number of U.S. studies documenting a positive relation between institutional holdings and stock price efficiency. In an effort to explain this result, I provide evidence that mutual funds in China fixate on earnings and fail to understand the one-year-ahead earnings implication of accruals. Specifically, I find that the persistence of accruals is overpriced in stocks with a high level of mutual fund ownership. The mispricing of accruals in these stocks is largely driven by discretionary accruals and is related to their high stock price responsiveness to earnings. JEL Classifications: M41; G12.