As China’s shadow banking sector expands, the impact of listed companies’ involvement in financial stability and the real economy accumulates increasing attention. Despite being a crucial channel for non-financial firms to participate in shadow banking, the literature has given limited consideration to the acquisition of wealth management products (WMPs). Using data from Chinese listed firms between 2007 and 2020, we analyze how excessive equity financing affects companies’ WMP acquisitions. Our findings indicate that over-financing significantly boosts WMP purchases among these firms, particularly in cases of private ownership, raised environmental uncertainty, and strict financing constraints.

The development of the wealth management market is based on the needs of investors. The logic of market regulation should also be based on the interests of investors. On the basis of summarizing the regulatory experience of the global wealth management market, suggestions are put forward to improve the system of China's wealth management market . The fundamental driving force for the establishment of a regulatory legal system for the wealth management market comes from the needs of the development of the wealth management market. Moreover, the structure and process of this institutional construction are also closely related to the structure and development of market demand. China's current wealth management market has become a huge financial sector, and the deepening of the market and the diversification of participants all put forward requirements for the construction of a fair and scientific regulatory system. Wealth management business is different from traditional financial business in many aspects such as function, business standard and business model, and its basic legal relationship is also far from traditional business. The commonality of business in China's current wealth management market is in line with the basic elements of the legal relationship of trust. From the perspective of the realistic basis and the nature of the industry, it is appropriate to define the basic legal nature of wealth management business as a trust relationship. Due to factors such as information asymmetry and economic scale, financial investors are in a serious imbalance and imbalance when they trade with financial institutions. Therefore, the financial supervision system should grasp this core contradiction, give investors the status of consumer protection, and establish the concept of protecting wealth consumers. The regulation of wealth management operators should grasp the requirements of the basic trust relationship, take the basic principle of supervising the performance of trustee duties by financial management institutions, and implement a series of rules for trustees to be loyal and prudent in financial management. These rules should focus on risk prevention, and include establishment of access standards for wealth management business, supervision of independent development of wealth management business, supervision of full performance of prudent management duties by wealth management institutions, and guidance for healthy development of wealth management institutions. The experience in the supervision of developed wealth management markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Singapore shows that the establishment of a legal system for the protection of wealth management consumers is an inevitable result of the development of the financial market, and it is necessary to set up special institutions and mechanisms to implement the concept of wealth management investor protection, and emphasize wealth management products. Providers' fiduciary obligations to investors, and functional supervision based on a unified system in the regulatory system can be used as a reference for China . China's wealth management market regulatory system include inconsistent rules, weak protection, biased guidance, and lack of independence. Due to the separate regulatory system, different game rules apply to homogeneous wealth management business operated by different types of financial institutions, resulting in rule conflicts and market injustice. However, the substantive rights of wealth management investors still exist in a vacuum that cannot be confirmed. At the same time, the status of consumers is far from being officially confirmed, and the consumer protection mechanism cannot truly achieve justice. As regulatory guidance still favors the concept and tools of supervising traditional businesses, wealth management institutions mainly expand extensively by selling products, and wealth management products also present serious "bond-like" characteristics. The "non-neutral " positioning of financial regulatory agencies has externalized into phenomena such as rule conflicts, "policy following suit" and "excessive maintenance of stability". Constructing and continuously improving China's wealth management market supervision system is: the purpose of supervision is to restore the effective operation of the market mechanism. The basic legal relationship in China's wealth management market should be recognized as a trust relationship. This is not only an essential requirement of the wealth management market, but also a practical need to integrate regulatory chaos. It is the trend of financial and economic development that the regulatory system positions the position of wealth management consumers. It should start with legislative policies, make key breakthroughs around consumers' substantive rights and protection mechanisms, and gradually improve investor protection mechanisms. The regulatory system should focus on supervising financial institutions to fulfill their fiduciary obligations, and establish sound access rules, business independence rules, prudent management rules, and strict market exit mechanisms. China's wealth management market supervision system should be based on unified legislation and gradually implement functional supervision in order to achieve effective management and harmonious development of the wealth management market.

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 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.

Although implicit guarantees are widely used in the shadow banking system, we know very little about its qualitative and quantitative properties. In this paper, we use a micro-level data set on China's shadow bank products to quantify the risk of implicit guarantees. We find a robust empirical fact that banks extend more implicit guarantees to their shadow bank debt (i.e., wealth management products) when their own default risks increase. Our result shows that this effect is particularly stronger when riskier banks plan to issue certificates of deposits in the interbank market. A simple model that is based on a signaling game is proposed to rationalize this fact. The key mechanism of the model is that as a bank's reputation becomes worse, it has stronger incentives to send positive signals to the market, i.e., to boost the realized returns of its shadow bank obligations, although it has no obligation to do so. Our findings show that implicit guarantees have nonlinear negative effects on bank fundamentals and the risk-weight of off-balance-sheet exposure should be increasing in banks' default risks.

We investigate banks' issuance choices of wealth management products (WMPs), which are both interest rate deregulation vehicles and shadow deposits without explicit government insurance. Support for an inverted-U shape between market share and WMP issuance is found in national market. State-owned banks are reluctant to issue WMPs due to their monopoly power, very small banks do not have the capacity to issue while small and medium banks issue WMPs intensively as a regulatory arbitrage. Moreover, the geographic deregulation in 2009 stimulates the bank competition in the local market, incumbent banks take advantage of WMPs to fight off the new entering banks.

Shadow financing through off-balance sheet wealth management products (WMPs) has become increasingly important besides deposits in China. We quantify the economic magnitude of the effect of WMPs on banking stability in an equilibrium model calibrated to Chinese banking sector data. Alternative equilibria emerge, which deviate substantially from the observed banking system and lead to severe financial distress and large welfare losses. Rollover costs from the WMP market and negative shocks to the asset market underlying WMPs can exacerbate banking instability. Moreover, we show that smaller and medium sized banks are comparably relevant for financial stability as the systemically important big 4 banks in China.

We study the causes and consequences of growth in shadow banking by examining the Chinese banks’ issuance of Wealth Management Products (WMPs), which are short-maturity off-balance-sheet substitutes for deposits. Using branching overlap data, we instrument deposit availability with banks’ exposure to competition from a large state-owned bank, which substantially increased loan supply to support the fiscal stimulus during the Global Financial Crisis and competed more aggressively for deposits thereafter. We show that deposit market competition has a causal effect on smaller banks’ reliance on shadow banking: exposed banks increased the issuance of WMPs sharply, creating rollover risk for these banks.