Hukou, China’s household registration system, affects access to public services and signals the strength of a person’s local social network, guanxi. We use a collective model and data on household consumption and spouses’ hukou status to show that hukou plays a crucial role in determining within-family bargaining power. Wives who bring the family more lucrative hukou enjoy significantly higher bargaining power than other wives. Still, these wives have less bargaining power than their husbands. Large differences in preferences between husbands and wives, especially regarding alcohol, tobacco, and clothing, allow us to identify these disparities.

In this chapter, we review the development of the insurance industry in China. We provide a comprehensive discussion of its regulatory framework, major insurance segments, market structure, InsurTech, social insurance and the prospects for the future development.

本文构建理论模型分析金融不确定性与经济下行风险之间的关系，并结合实证研究进行检验。理论模型基于风险积累渠道描述了金融不确定性通过干扰银行部门正确预期的形成，影响其主动风险承担水平，并最终影响经济下行风险的传导机制。实证部分基于 Jurado et al（2015）的大数据方法构建金融不确定性指数，并使用分位数回归从宏观层面进行研究，结果表明扩张波动期的金融不确定性对中长期经济增长左尾分布有显著的负面影响，这是由于扩张波动期的金融不确定性会使银行部门预期向好偏差，银行部门将提高其主动风险承担水平，从而增加中长期经济下行风险；紧缩波动期的金融不确定性将使银行部门预期向坏偏差，进而导致其主动风险承担水平下降，但该风险积累渠道发挥的作用较弱，此机制下金融不确定性对中长期经济下行风险的抑制作用不明显。

We examine the economics of independent directors’ resignation decisions by taking advantage of a natural setting: The revised Securities Law of the People’s Republic of China, which took effect on March 1, 2020 (hereafter New Securities Law or NSL), and the first successful class-action securities lawsuit on November 12, 2021. We argue that by increasing 18-fold the penalties to directors of firmsthat misreport, NSL reduces by the same factor the maximum probability of getting caught at which director positions remain economically viable. We predict and find that in the short run when director compensation is fixed, NSL leads to more frequent voluntary resignations, particularly in firms that have a higher ex-ante likelihood of financial misreporting, and in firms where director compensation is lower. We also find that independent director dissent that arises primarily as a result of directors’ inability to establish whether their firms’ financial reports are reliable is a significant antecedent to voluntary resignations post NSL. Finally, analyzing the fraction of Chinese publicly traded firms that purchase director and officer liability (D&O) insurance, we find that independent directors are less likely to resign pre NSL but more likely to resign post NSL. Thisfinding suggeststhat firms with higher misreporting risk self-select pre NSL into such contracts. Given directors’ valuable monitoring role, we expect to observe in the long run both increased independent director compensation and increased D&O insurance coverage.

Direct experience of a peer’s punishment might have a sobering effect above and beyond deterrence (information about punishments). We test this mechanism in China studying the reactions to listed state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) punishments for fraudulent loan guarantees by firms in the same location or industry (peers) and non-peer firms, across SOEs and non-SOEs. After experiencing SOEs’ punishments, peer SOEs cut their loan guarantees by more than non-peer SOEs and peer non-SOEs, even if information is common to all firms. The reaction is stronger for peer SOEs whose CEOs have higher career concerns or face lower costs of cutting guarantees.

This paper dissects the lottery-like anomaly in Chinese A-share stocks by decomposing total stock returns into overnight and intraday returns. Our findings indicate that the negative overnight returns are concentrated among lottery-like stocks, and the lottery-like anomaly is mainly driven by the overnight returns component. Considering the unique Chinese institutional features, our mechanism analysis reveals that the overnight returns induced lottery-like anomaly is more pronounced in stocks with high retail investors' gambling preference and high limits of arbitrage. Overall, our results suggest that investors optimism and trading constraints have a substantial impact on market efficiency in China.

This paper examines how globalization process shapes the corporate ESG efforts in emerging markets. Using a staggered difference-in-difference model based on the gradual inclusion of China's A-shares in the MSCI index, we find that public companies improved their ESG performance and disclosure quality after being included. The results are robust to propensity score matched sample. Notably, the impact on ESG disclosure was significantly greater than on ESG performance, and the effect is more pronounced for non-SOEs and firms with weak governance. The inclusion also leads to significant increasesin foreign holdings, the proportion of women directors, and analyst attention, which have promoting effects on corporate ESG performance and disclosure ratings. This study sheds light on the macro-level determinants of corporate ESG engagement.

Firms in China increase green innovation following a mandate that requires them to regularly disclose their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Further analyses show that the CSR disclosure mandate leads to higher media coverage of disclosing firms' environmental issues, and the increase mainly comes from negative environmental news. By contrast, voluntary CSR disclosure does not affect corporate green innovation, and it increases positive but not negative environmental media coverage. These findings suggest that (1) it is the mandatory feature of the mandate, not the act of disclosure, that matters most for the positive effect on corporate green innovation; and (2) the negative media coverage induced by mandatory CSR disclosure plays a disciplinary role and promotes green innovation, while the positive media coverage induced by voluntary CSR disclosure does not.

In this paper, we identify cross-sectional anomalies in excess returns of industrial bonds at the issuer and secondary market levels, and find that liquidity, risk, and historical return variables can generate cross-sectional excess returns that cannot be explained by traditional bond factors. We also introduce a risk premium factor that is economically and statistically significant in industrial bonds based on the risk characteristics prevalent in credit bonds and that cannot be explained by long-standing bond market factors. We show that the newly identified risk factor outperforms the other anomalies considered in this paper in explaining the cross-sectional returns of industrial bonds.

The China-U.S. trade frictions and COVID-19 pandemic have caused unprecedentedly high economic policy uncertainty since 2017. To resist this high uncertainty, investors may prefer large stocks over small stocks, thereby damaging the size effect. To test this inference, we apply data from China to show that the size effect becomes insignificant after 2017. However, a significant size effect re-emerges among stocks with low valuations or low volatility, and this is positively associated with the increment of the economic policy uncertainty index. We also find that when uncertainty increases, institutional investors increase their holdings in small stocks before 2017, but hold more large stocks after 2017. Our findings consistently suggest that high policy uncertainty may change investors' preferences for firm size and cause the disappearance of the size effect, and only among stocks with low risk, size effects may show up due to low-risk small firms' similar function in resisting market uncertainty as large firms. Other mechanisms, such as the quality premium, unexpected profitability shock, shell value, or M&A option value, are not applicable in explaining the findings in China. Our study contributes to proposing a new mechanism for the time-variability of the size effect.