Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not industry membership can explain the leverage of Shanghai listed firms prior to the 2007 financial crisis. In view of the central role that manufacturing industry played in China's rise as a global economic power, the authors are particularly interested in whether or not manufacturing is a special case. Design/methodology/approach – The paper undertakes a comparative study of leverage differences between manufacturing and non-manufacturing industry firms on both a cross-section and time-series basis. This is supplemented by a pooled regression analysis that models the factors determining leverage on an industry-by-industry basis. Findings – The authors find that leverage levels differ across industries because of industry-based differences in financial characteristics. It is also found that, despite playing a leading role in China's economic development, there is no evidence to suggest that manufacturing is a special case. Across all sectors borrowing-power-related variables were identified as being important determinants of leverage and, contrary to the expectations, factors relating to profitability were largely insignificant. Research limitations/implications – The trade off and pecking order capital structure theories found to be commonly applicable to firms in the western business environment do not appear to adequately explain capital structure in China. Originality/value – The paper identify evidence to suggest that China needs to be treated as a “special case” in the context of capital structure theory due to the unique cultural and business environment.

This paper investigates the impact of the 2007 financial crisis on the relationship between real mortgage interest rates and real house prices. It applies a dynamic conditional correlation based methodology that uses fractionally differenced data along with controls for structural breaks and non-interest-rate related factors that influence house prices. The key finding made is that the financial crisis had a long-term structural impact on the monetary transmission relationship. For example, we find that the mean conditional correlation between house prices in England and Wales and the three-year fixed mortgage rate rose by 6.6 percentage points. Similarly, the mean correlation between prices and the standard variable mortgage rate increased 6.4 percentage points to 54%. These findings suggest to us that interest-rate-based monetary policy still has an important role to play in the housing market.

We examine the dividend pay out patterns for all UK listed industrial companies featured in the FTSE All Share Index for the period 1992‐1998. Then we match the pay out patterns to different dividend policies. From our empirical observations, we argue that dividend signalling does not universally apply to all firms. We also report our evidence that there is no industry norm for dividend policy, particularly when firms have decided whether to use dividends to signal or not. In addition, we found that the percentage of insiders’ share holdings, market capitalisation and as set book values are statistically significant for determining whether firms use dividends to signal or not.

Combining the suggestion from Fan (2006) that a nation can have a brand image without deliberating efforts of nation branding and the work from Klerman et. al. (2011) on Colonial History and effects on legal systems, we view that legal-systems could be an unintended nation brand that could instrumentally affect Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) activitives. We classify 193 countries according to their Colonial History or no-Colonial History into 5 legal-families. Applying Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) on a set of panel data, our empirical evidence shows that legal-families play an instrumental role in explaining FDI activities. The paper opens up a new ground of research on 'unintended' nation brand of which the nation branding literature largely focus on designed-nation-brand, and on FDI area in which we introduce a new determinant in addition to the traditional determinants that have been reported in the FDI literature.

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