A Fortune from misfortune: Evidence from hog firms’ stock price responses to China’s African Swine Fever outbreaks
Tao Xiong,
Wendong Zhang () and
Chen-Ti Chen
Food Policy, 2021, vol. 105, issue C
Abstract:
China is the world’s largest hog producer and a leading pork importer. Since August 2018, ongoing outbreaks of African Swine Fever (ASF), a highly contagious and deadly disease affecting pigs, have hit China’s livestock industries and wiped out 40% of China’s pigs. We leverage data on daily stock returns from 25 major publicly listed firms from China and eight major pork-exporting countries to provide the first systematic analysis of the firm-level economic impacts of the outbreaks. We find that, on average, announcements of ASF outbreaks have led to positive and significant stock returns for both Chinese and international hog firms. China’s hog firms, on average, enjoyed 10%–40% cumulative abnormal returns during the 2019 Chinese Spring Festival, when investors saw signs of a near-20% inventory loss during a peak demand season for pork. We show that larger hog firms tend to capture greater positive stock returns. Our results suggest opportunities for consolidation, expansion, and upgrades of China’s meat industry that have long-run implications for its global competitiveness and efficiency.
Keywords: Stock prices; Abnormal returns; Agricultural policy; Event study; Food security; African Swine Fever (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G15 Q13 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919221001287
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: A Fortune from Misfortune: Evidence from Hog Firms' Stock Price Responses to China's African Swine Fever Outbreaks (2021) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:105:y:2021:i:c:s0306919221001287
DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2021.102150
Access Statistics for this article
Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd
More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().