Rules and Regulation: How Market Segmentation Interprets High-Frequency Institutional Signals

Speaker：Yang Ziyan, Associate Professor, Xiamen University

Host：Gao Ling, Associate Professor, Lingnan College

Time and Date：15:00, April 9, 2026 (Thursday)

Venue：W.T.Chan Auditorium, Lingnan Hall

Language：Chinese

Abstract：

This study examines how capital markets respond to the government's trade-off between rules and regulation. We utilize the unique institutional setting of China's refined oil price adjustments, which follow a rule-based pricing formula and are released at fixed intervals, and construct "regulatory surprises" based on deviations between actual price adjustments and rule-based expectations. The research identifies three types of heterogeneous reaction patterns. First, when price adjustments lean toward regulation, international capital flows out while domestic futures rise. Second, domestic and international markets extract fundamentally different information from the same signal. Third, the international market's reactions accumulate at the quarterly scale, while the domestic market's reactions dissipate immediately. Through analysis of A+H dual-listed companies, we find that implicit guarantees and market segmentation are key mechanisms driving this divergence. These patterns reveal that the oscillation between rules and regulation reflects the government's strategic balancing among different interest groups, with asymmetric costs faced by different groups across time dimensions.

Profile:

Dr. Yang Ziyan received her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland. She is currently an Associate Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at the School of Economics, Xiamen University. Her research focuses on institutional economics. Her research has been published in leading academic journals such as Management World and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. She has received multiple provincial-level Social Science Research Achievement Awards. She has led research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (General Program and Youth Program), the Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Program, and the Fujian Provincial Social Science Planning Key Project on Marxist Theory Research. Her policy recommendations have received affirmative instructions from provincial and ministerial-level leaders on multiple occasions. She leads a national first-class undergraduate course construction project and has received the National Teaching Achievement Award (First Prize), the Third Prize in the National University Teaching Innovation Competition, and the First Prize in the Fujian Provincial University Teaching Innovation Competition.