Using the establishment of the Chinese Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund in 2014 as a quasi-natural experiment, we investigate whether and how the national industrial investment fund affects corporate R&D investment. We find that the policy has a significant and positive effect on corporate R&D investment, and this effect is more pronounced in firms with more severe financial constraints, poorer internal governance, and laxer external supervision. Furthermore, the mechanism tests show that this policy helps alleviate firms’ financial constraints and agency conflict, thereby increasing corporate R&D investment.

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.

In this paper, we use a distinct quasi-natural experiments to examine the effect of liberalization of the stock market on corporate environmental, social, and governance(ESG) disclosure quality. We find that the liberation of the opening of Shanghai(Shenzhen)-Hong Kong Stock Connect (SHSC) significantly and consistently improves ESG disclosure quality of listed companies, and this effect is most evident in environmental information disclosure. We then find that the SHSC can improve the quality of ESG disclosure of listed companies through “voting with feet” and “external supervision” effect. Furthermore, the effect is stronger in firms that are Non-SOEs and with low equity concentrations. Overall, our results suggest that the liberalization of stock market can improve the quality of companies’ ESG disclosure quality.

发展供应链金融对于深化金融供给侧结构性改革，增强金融服务实体经济具有不容忽视的重要战略意义。本文通过对 2007 年-2019 年中国 A 股上市公司全 部公告和全部网络财经新闻报道大数据信息的进行收集整理，实证检验了上市公司发展供应链金融业务以及参与金融科技的意愿对企业价值的影响。研究结果表明：上市公司发展供应链金融在短期可以促进企业股价的上涨，在长期可以促进企业价值的提升，并且上市公司采用的供应链金融业务越多，公告中提到供应链金融业务越频繁，这种提升效果越显著。已采用供应链金融业务的上市公司在新闻报道中提到大数据、区块链、人工智能等金融科技相关词汇越多，对上市公司企业价值提升的效果越强。上市公司在发展了供应链金融业务之后会通过提高风险承担水平，提高投资支出与投资收益，提高资金效率和全要素生产率的方式促进企业价值的提高。在进行一系列稳健性检验之后，上述结论依然成立。本文不仅为发展供应链金融提高企业价值提供了基于公开市场数据大样本的实证证据，也对于国家和地方政府支持供应链金融的发展具有现实启示。

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.

We provide firm-level evidence on the real effects of shadow banking in terms of technological innovation. Firm-to-firm entrusted loans, the largest part of the shadow banking sector in China, enhance the borrowers’ innovation output. The effects are more prominent when the borrowers are subject to severer financial constraints, information asymmetry, and takeover exposures. A plausible underlying channel is capital reallocations from less productive but easy-financed lender firms to more innovative but financially less-privileged borrower firms. Our paper suggests shadow banking helps correct bank credit misallocations and thus serves as a second-best market design in financing the real economy

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.

We study the demand for government participation in China’s venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and the private firms managing the invested capital by deploying it to high-growth entrepreneurs. Our respondents together account for nearly $1 trillion in assets under management. Each respondent evaluates synthetic profiles of potential investment partners, whose characteristics we randomize, under the real-stakes incentive that they will be introduced to real partners matching their preferences. Our main result is that the average firm dislikes investors with government ties, indicating that the benefits of political connections are small compared to the cons of having the government as an investor. We show that such dislike is not present with government-owned firms, and this dislike is highest with best-performing firms. Additional results and follow-up surveys suggest political interference in decision-making is the leading mechanism why government capital is unattractive to private firms. We feed our experimental estimates and administrative data into a simple model of two-sided search to discuss the distributional effects of government participation. Overall, our findings point to a “grabbing hand” interpretation of state-firm relationships reflecting a desire by the government to keep control over the private sector.

There is little empirical work examining contractual innovation in the context of China, which is the second largest venture capital market in the world, after the United States. Drawing upon extensive interviews, a hand-collected dataset of investment agreements and judgements made by Chinese courts on venture capital disputes, this article examines a unique contractual design that is common in the Chinese venture capital sector—the valuation adjustment mechanism (“VAM”). A VAM provides investors with a right to adjust a portfolio company’s original valuation and to get compensation by cash or equity upon the occurrence of certain future events (such as failing to meet financial or non-financial performance indicators). The prevalence of VAMs in China is potentially attributable to: (1) severe information asymmetry in the less informed market, (2) the lack of convertible preferred stock under Chinese law and excessive legal restrictions over investment tools and contractual mechanisms in venture capital financing, and (3) insufficient legal protection for investors under Chinese law. This article argues that, unlike American venture capital contracts, which are designed to encourage long-term, sustainable investor-entrepreneur relationships, VAMs are predominantly investors’ self-help mechanisms to address specific and serious investor protection issues in the transitional and less informed Chinese market. Thus, it suggests that the problems regarding investor protection motivating the use of VAMs can be better solved by law reforms such as allowing limited liability companies to issue convertible preferred stock, introducing more legal remedies for minority investors, as well as an improved regulatory environment governing venture financing.

随着企业创新越来越受到社会以及学术领域的关注，如何缓解中小企业创新信贷融资约束成为我国金融业的重点探讨方向之一。为此，本文通过剖析企业创新能力的微观影响因素以及融资特征，分析在信息不对称情况下中小企业在面临融资约束时，关系融资成为一种重要的解决途径，然而关系融资会催生信贷寻租，降低社会资源的配置效率，为此文章提出缓解中小企业创新融资的潜在路径，包括宏观层面上的强化放贷人权利保障，中观层面上健全信息环境，尤其是第三方资源，微观层面上银行从信贷技术综合运用上突破。针对中微观层面上，探讨银行信贷与风险投资在中小企业创新融资上是否有合作的空间，文章分析了风险投资对中小企业创新的作用效果以及风险投资对促进银企关系，促进信息对称方面的研究成果。最后，提出结论以及下一步的研究方向。