How does labor risk affect corporate’s bond financing? Using the unique institutional feature of government regulations in China, we provide robust evidence that firms with a larger employment size have significantly better access to bond credit. This effect is more pronounced in times of local labor market deterioration or economic slowdown, for low-skill intensive industries, or in places with career-driven government officials. Our results are not driven by differential financial constraints or information frictions. We further show that the employment bias allocates bond credit towards under-performing large employers and the performance-enhancing benefits from bond issuance diminishes with employment size.

This article aims to provide an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of PRC Securities Law 2020 which overhauls China’s securities regulatory framework to construct more efficient and transparent capital markets with enhanced investor protection and market integrity. The law constrains regulators’ administrative powers in deciding the outcome of IPOs as well as streamline the securities offering procedure. This article pays attention to key reform initiatives proposed by PRC Securities Law 2020, such as the registration-based IPO system, the enhanced investor protection and compensation regime, the cross-border supervision, and the harsher punishments for securities frauds. It also discusses the latest enforcement cases relating to high-profile financial frauds like the Luckin Coffee scandal which resulted in Luckin Coffee being delisted from NASDAQ in 2020. The analysis in the article is accompanied by relevant US securities law in the same area to offer a comparative angle, which is of interest to practitioners, academics and policymakers in major financial centres.

Referring to the newspaper textual analysis method by Baker et al. (2016), this study constructs a monthly Chinese Real Estate Policy Uncertainty (REPU) index from 2001 to 2018. The index increases significantly near the promulgation of major policies. We also conduct evaluation of the index with the vector autoregression (VAR) model, which reveals that the rise of REPU indicates the decline in the growth rate of commodity housing development investment, sales area, and real estate industry added value. The REPU index is helpful to expand the understanding of policy uncertainty, and the accurate measurement of REPU is the basis for further research of its impact on China's real estate market.

This paper uses a loan transactions dataset from China to identify whether shadow loans cost more than formal bank loans even with collateral. This motivates us to explore the reasons as to why a listed firm would opt for such loans. Using propensity-score matched data, we find that privately-owned firms with shadow loans are forced to obtain these loans since they are politically discriminated following a regulation change in 2009 that favoured state-owned firms. However, state-owned firms obtain shadow loans due to their inferior firm characteristics. Further, we employ a Difference-in-Differences methodology to uncover that privately-owned firms experience a decline in their performance, investment growth and an increase in default probability following their high dependence on shadow loans when they are excluded from the formal loan market. The above results survive various robustness checks, including doubly-robust inverse-probability weighted Difference-in-Differences regressions.

The crypto and noncrypto markets used to be separated from each other. We argue that with the rapid development of stablecoins since 2018, risks are now transmitted between the crypto and noncrypto markets through stablecoins, which are both pegged to noncrypto assets and play a central role in crypto trading. Applying copula-based CoVaR approaches, we find significant risk spillovers between stablecoins and cryptocurrencies as well as between stablecoins and noncrypto markets, which could help explain the tail dependency between the crypto and noncrypto markets from 2019 to 2021. We also document that the risk spillovers through stablecoins are asymmetric—stronger in the direction from the US dollar to the crypto market than vice versa—which suggests the crypto market is re-dollarizing. Further analyses consider alternative explanations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional crypto holdings, and determine that the primary channels of risk transmission are stablecoins’ US dollar peg to the noncrypto market and their transaction-medium function in the crypto ecosystem. Our results have important implications for financial stability and shed light on the future of stablecoin regulation.

In recent years, numerous Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms have collapsed, prompting us to investigate the regulation and monitoring of the fintech industry. Using a unique dataset of P2P lending platforms in China, we investigate the effect of the information environment on regulatory monitoring and platform collapse. Using the platforms’ proximity to regulatory offices as a proxy for information asymmetry, we show that an increase in distance reduces regulatory monitoring and increases the likelihood of platform collapse. Specifically, for every 1% increase in the driving distance between the local regulatory office and a P2P lending platform’s office, the platform’s likelihood of collapse increases by 1.011%. To establish causality, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis that exploits two exogenous shocks: government office relocation and subway station openings. We provide evidence that proximity enhances monitoring quality by facilitating soft information collection, reducing platform failures. We further find two channels of this effect: (1) the information channel through which greater regulatory distance reduces the likelihood and frequency of regulators’ on-site visits and (2) the resource-constraint channel, through which greater regulatory distance significantly increases the local regulatory office’s monitoring costs. Overall, this study highlights the importance of the acquisition of soft information for regulatory monitoring to ensure the viability of fintech firms.

Deregulation may increase bank stability. Employing China’s loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) reform in 2015, we show that the deregulation of the LDR increases the stability of banks. Specifically, the deregulation of the LDR alleviates banks’ deposit competition, and decreases reliance on customer deposit funding. By doing so, it improves the loan structure among banks with a high LDR, which, in turn, increases the on-balance-sheet stability of these banks. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the LDR curbs high-LDR banks’ impulse to issue principal-floating wealth management products, a form of shadow banking, which thus increases their off-balance-sheet stability.

We examine an important yet understudied form of reputational sanction in China, namely public criticisms imposed on culpable firms by the Chinese stock exchanges from 2013 to 2018. We find significantly negative cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement date, and they were affected by several factors, including financing propensity, governance mechanism, and equity nature. However, the market reaction is significantly negative only for firms relying on external financing and non-state enterprises, and importantly, becomes insignificant in cases where the firm had self-exposed misconduct before the official announcement of public criticism. Further, we examine other effects of public criticism, finding that public criticism does not improve firms’ long-term values, nor produce strong deterrence to change their behaviour. Overall, the evidence of the effects of public criticism on culpable firms is mixed, suggesting that reputational sanction is a weak, if not ineffective, instrument of market regulation in China.

We study how shadow banking affects the effectiveness of monetary policy in China.Using novel data on bank-issued off-balance sheet wealth management products (WMPs), we show that banks improve their on-balance sheet risk profile by issuing WMPs. This in turn lowers the sensitivity of banks' wholesale funding cost to monetary policy and reduces the effectiveness of the bank lending channel. The effect of our mechanism on total credit is quantitatively similar to the effect arising from the substitution between traditional loans and shadow banking loans previously analyzed in the literature. The channel documented in this paper has novel implications for the regulation of banks' off-balance sheet activities and market-based funding.

China’s shadow banking system has experienced surprisingly high growth since the global financial crisis. We develop a model to understand this puzzling phenomenon. With local government interventions in bank loans for low-quality projects and information asymmetry between banks and regulators, a policy combination of tightening formal banking and loosening shadow banking can reduce inefficiency, because the higher funding liquidity risk of shadow banking incentivizes banks to be more disciplined about the quality of projects. We find consistent empirical evidence that when on-balance-sheet financing was constrained by regulators, banks primarily shifted high-quality projects into their controlled shadow banking system.