Investor Activity in Chinese Financial Institutions: A Precursor to Economic Sustainability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is interesting,but can in some respect be improved. I see two major weak points:

1) The literature review is rather scratching at the surface. I do, however, agree that it is hardly possible to deal with the extensive literature on two pages. I think that particularly section 2.3 (could be renamed as "Motivations for Trading"?) deserves a deeper discussion.

I would not agree to the first sentence on page 4: Investment theory suggests that investors choose their risk-return combination based on the personal (risk) preferences, not on the methd of market acquisition. If that should hold, it requires additional explanation.

2) Section 3: "H3: Chinese investors who have larger assets for value investment will increase the amount of market spent on information acquisition." Why value investment? Shouldn't it be "Investment" in general?  And why "amount of market"? Shouldn't it be "amount of ressources (time, money)"? Otherwise it seems to make no sense to me.

3) Section 4 is very hard to follow. I think it needs to be better structured. Tables with descriptive statistics for the data sources could help the reader as well.

Minor points:

line 40: "news traveled primarily by word of mouth..." add: in China

line 55: "common in the 1900s": Not in the 1990s?

line 61: "with some notable restrictions": Which restrictions?

Author Response

Dear editor and referees

I appreciate your effort in reviewing our manuscript and your comment to improve this study. As you requested, we revised the following. All changes are marked up with ‘track change .’ This cover letter includes how we revise our manuscript to correspond to the reviewer’s comments.

Sincerely

Chungil Chae

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is interesting, it deals with an important subject regarding the impact of market information on asset allocation and investment in China and it is my pleasure to review it. 

The paper has merits, is well organized, and uses a solid scientific and logical tool. The literature is also well chosen, up-to date and evocative.  

However, I would have some considerations and suggestions for improving the quality of the article.

Description of generations X; Y, millennials, below 18 etc. (Subchapter 2.5) - it is interesting, suggestive, but somewhat approximate and stereotypical. Moreover, figures and elements in order to confirm the gathering of these age groups in the announced categories and behaviors are missing.

As a general remark - The connection with sustainability is not clear, especially in this exceptional case of the economy and investment behaviors in Chinese society, where the impact on sustainability is (could be) huge.

It is not clear the transition from the pilot study to the research itself, more explanatory information in this regard would facilitate the fluidity of reading.

It would be fitting for the authors to refer to the hypotheses in the Discussion (and perhaps in Conclusions) section in a more systematic and detailed manner, clearly stating their validation/invalidation/partial validation, as well as how they relate to the international flow of research on this topic, highlighting the actual contribution of this article in this context.  

Formal:

The citation style is not the recommended one, normally the first occurrence is denoted by [1], the second by [2] and so on… , here the references are alphabetically arranged.

It is not clear why Figure 2 shows repeated percentages for each option.

Page 6 row 239 18-25 millenniums or 18-25 millennials?              

Thank you for the opportunity to review this article and good luck!

Author Response

Dear editor and referees

I appreciate your effort in reviewing our manuscript and your comment to improve this study. As you requested, we revised the following. All changes are marked up with ‘track change .’ This cover letter includes how we revise our manuscript to correspond to the reviewer’s comments.

Sincerely

Chungil Chae

Author Response File: Author Response.docx