مکانیسم های روانی از سرمایه گذاران در بازار سهام چینی

The study investigated the psychological mechanisms of risky investment behaviors in Chinese Stock Markets. A 42-item questionnaire was developed and distributed to 1547 individual investors recruited by stratified random sampling from Nan Fang Bond Company. A speculative orientation and a low level of risk perception among Chinese investors were revealed. The results also showed that investors were deficient in investment knowledge and skills. Structural equation modeling was used to generate a risk perception-mediated model for investment behaviors. We found that information from organizational/institutional level can precipitate low risk perception and policy-oriented speculation of investors, which could be accounted for by the collectivistic culture in China and may not be beneficial to risk management in Chinese Stock Markets. Suggestions were made regarding the further development of stock markets in China.

Since the reform and opening up in 1978, China has gone through a rapid transformation from planned to market economy at the national level, and has been confronted with increasing challenges under the current trend of globalization. Its financial system has been undergoing a radical reform after China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The transformation process however is associated with higher risk and uncertainty in the rapidly changing economic environment. According to the guidelines for future work regarding the Chinese financial sector (Chen, 2002), the Chinese government will put more emphasis on precautions against and reduction of financial risks. Stock markets in China (e.g., Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, etc.) have been burgeoning remarkably since their establishment at the end of 1990 in response to the efforts of the Chinese government to develop a market-oriented economy. Having developed for ten years, the proportion of the total value of Chinese Stock Markets to GDP of China was up to 45% in 2001 (Huang, Lin, & Liang, 2002). However, compared with the more developed markets such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), Chinese Stock Markets are still in the elementary stage of development with an array of problems. Firstly, Policies from China’s Securities Regulatory Commission lack continuity and stability which precipitated severe “policy-oriented” speculation (Cheng, 2003). It is evident from the 26 highest rates of daily return ranging from 8.08% to 28.86% and 25 lowest rates of daily return ranging from −17.91% to −7.41% of the Shanghai Stock Exchange index from 1991 to 2002. These were all caused by policies or information relevant to stock market issued by the government. For instance, the State Council and the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission decided to implement the “three market-saving policies”. This piece of policy-oriented information accounted for 28.86% of return of the Shanghai Stock Exchange index the day after (Wang, 2003). Secondly, most listed companies have evolved from formerly state-owned enterprises. To ensure the state holding dominant shares, the percentage of liquid shares of list companies is commonly constrained to less than 50% so that the function of stock market becomes mainly on raising money from investors for state-owned companies rather than estimating the value of listed companies and improving the efficiency of capital use and allocation, causing a functional bias of stock markets. Thirdly, the benefits of investors have always been ignored and impaired. On the one hand, with respect to the dividend policies, listed companies in Chinese Stock Markets are generally implementing a non-distributive dividend policy (Song, 2003). The proportion of listed companies following non-distributive dividend policy was 59.8% in 1999. Only 7.44% of listed companies had distributed dividend continuously from 1997 to 2000. On the other hand, the performance of listed companies lacks continuously developing potential. For example, the average return on net asset of all listed companies had decreased from 15% in 1993 to 7.61% in 2000. In addition, there were only two listed companies suffering financial loss in 1994 which accounted for 0.68% of listed companies, but when it came to 2000, the amount of listed companies at a loss had increased to 96, accounting for 8.5% of listed companies. Therefore, in this sense, the non-distributive dividend policy might not be a good sign here showing the firm’s capacity to generate new business but a sign revealing harm to investors’ benefits. Last but not least, the annual turnover rates of Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange ranged from 341% to 760% and 265% to 950% respectively from 1992 to 1998. The average P/E ratios in Shanghai Stock Market and Shenzhen Stock Market were 58.22 and 56.03 respectively in 2000, which were significantly higher when compared with the average of 15 in developed markets (Song, 2003). The above evidence consistently indicated a short-term speculative orientation which currently prevails among investors in Chinese Stock Markets when compared with developed markets such as those in the US and Japan. Given the above speculative investment environment, risk management plays an essential contributory role in the stability and further development of the emerging Chinese Stock Markets. Even though the developed markets such as NYSE have established an advanced credit and market regulation system to manage risk, they are still fragile to the risk of stock crisis, which is evident by the stock market crashes taking place in 1929, 1987 and 2000 in the US. Risk management has therefore emerged as an intensive research area in finance. Unfortunately, theories of neoclassical Finance derived from developed markets have become gradually insufficient to guide investors in coping with related risks. Finance researchers in western countries have observed more and more market anomalies since the end of the 1970s (De Bondt and Thaler, 1985, Friedman, 1953, LeRoy and Porter, 1981, Mehra and Prescott, 1985 and Shiller, 1981) which violated basic principles of neoclassical Finance such as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH). Accordingly, strategies and tactics such as diversification and indexing, contrarian and momentum, stop-loss tactics and portfolio insurance were developed to manage and reduce market risk (Wärneryd, 2001). The use of these strategies and techniques per se implies a violation of the efficient-market theory. The decisions of investors were not found to be as unboundedly rational as the theories of neoclassical Finance hypothesized. Simon (1986) proposed that humans have fundamental limitations on their information processing capacities, which explains why investors sometimes behave irrationally. Kahneman and Tverksy, 1979 and Kahneman and Tversky, 1982 suggested that cognitive limitations compelled people to employ various heuristics (e.g., availability, representativeness and anchoring, etc.) so as to ease the burdens of processing complex and ambiguous information when making judgments and decisions in an uncertain environment. However, these heuristics may meanwhile lead to faulty judgments which are known as cognitive biases. They also posited prospect theory which rendered them Nobel Prize Laureates in Economics in 2002. It suggested that risk attitudes under profit and loss situations are somewhat opposite, thus violating the consistent risk attitude hypothesis in neoclassical Finance. In response to the difficulties faced by the traditional paradigm of neoclassical Finance, researchers have developed a new “behavioral” approach to investigate financial markets. Behavioral Finance aims at analyzing the aggregate market phenomena on the basis of the psychological mechanisms of investment behaviors (Barberis & Thaler, 2002). Behavioral Finance has provided a better understanding of some financial phenomena by using models of not fully rational agents (Barberis & Thaler, 2002). Because of the imperfect market regulations and policies in Chinese Stock Markets, the prevailing speculative and irrational investment behaviors may have a relatively larger impact on the market. Given this, the Behavioral Finance approach seems to be particularly applicable to the emerging Chinese Stock Markets. The present study purports to construct a psychosocial model which may be used as the theoretical foundation for investigating the psychological mechanisms of investment behaviors in Chinese Stock Markets. This study also aims to provide psychological and managerial suggestions in risk management of stock markets and contribute to the establishment of a national psychological precautionary system during stock crises (Shi, 2003).

This study confirmed a risk perception-centered psychological mechanism to understand the irrational investment behaviors such as short-term speculation and frequent stock trading prevailing in Chinese Stock Markets. It also revealed an underestimation of risk in stock markets by Chinese individual investors. They had lower risk perception on subjective risks such as pursuing up-going stock and excessive speculation than objective risks such as variation in policies related to stock market and improper management of listed companies. This contributed to the speculative atmosphere in the Chinese Stock Markets. In addition, we found that institutional factors such as market policy had a great impact on investment decisions of investors because of the collectivistic culture in China. Based on our findings, we have made a few recommendations for the healthier development of the Chinese Stock Markets in the future. First, education and training on investment knowledge and skills should be given to the Chinese individual investors. Second, China’s Securities Regulatory Commission should strengthen the regulation of listed companies on information disclosure and investment yield reallocation so as to increase the investment confidence of investors. Third, in order to rectify the functional bias of stock markets in China, it is necessary to reduce the state’s stake in listed companies and accordingly to increase the liquidity of stocks and the competitive mechanism in the markets. Fourth, more emphasis should be given to the risk management of stock markets and meanwhile to keep the continuity and stability of market regulation policies, which in turn contributes to the establishment of a national psychological precautionary system in stock crisis.