More than one in five listed firms in China initiate dividend payments during the year right before their initial public offerings (IPOs). This tendency, which seems to contradict the purpose of raising capital, constitutes the pre-IPO dividend puzzle. This paper examines this puzzle using manually collected Chinese data from 2006 to 2019. We find that firms initiating pre-IPO dividends tend to have lower IPO underpricing than non-initiating firms. We also find that the effect of pre-IPO dividend initiation on IPO underpricing is more pronounced for firms with stronger pre-IPO growth and profitability. Additional analyses indicate that initiating firms have better pre- and post-IPO operating performance and post-IPO stock performance. Moreover, initiating firms pay more dividends and have significantly higher investor attention after the IPOs. Collectively, the pre-IPO dividend initiation is not a short-term strategic behavior of low-quality firms but is intended to send positive signals and improve investors’ stock valuation.

We examine the effects of the world’s first comply-or-explain dividend regulation in China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange, which requires firms to either pay at least 30% of profits as dividends or explain the use of funds. We find that many firms increased their payout ratio to comply, by increasing dividends or decreasing earnings. Firms with high profitability, state ownership, and fewer agency conflicts were more likely to comply. However, complying firms subsequently issued more debt and had a decline in accounting performance and firm valuation. The evidence suggests that the comply-or-explain regulation increased firms’ dividends at substantial costs.

By analyzing a hand-collected transaction-level dataset on the finance leases of China’s public firms for the period 2007-2019, this paper sheds light on China’s financial leasing industry. We find that banks use their affiliated leasing firms to provide credit to constrained clients in order to circumvent the government’s targeted monetary tightening policy. Finance Lease offsets the expected decline in traditional bank loans in affected industries, and therefore hampers the effectiveness of the monetary policy. Although this regulatory arbitrage may accumulate systemic risk at the macro level, bank-affiliated leasing firms charge lower leasing rate and exert tighter risk control than non-bank-affiliated leasing firms at the micro level. This finding indicates that banks use finance leases as a channel to keep low-risk clients rather than to make excessive profit.

我国信贷市场存在企业规模歧视，中小企业融资难、融资贵问题长期困扰着我国经济的健康发展。已有研究多是从信息不对称、经营风险、资产质量等方面对其进行阐释，尚未有研究基于财务风险信息扭曲视角对这一现象进行机理阐释。以2009—2018 年我国非金融A 股上市公司数据为样本研究发现：信贷市场的企业规模歧视在信贷规模和成本两方面同时存在；传统财务风险分析体系致使实体经济上市公司财务风险被高估约40%；中小企业面临着更为严重的风险高估问题，且财务风险信息扭曲在信贷市场的企业规模歧视中发挥了部分中介作用；上述机理在不同产权性质、不同市场化程度的分组样本中均得到验证。因此，正视传统财务风险分析体系缺陷，矫正财务风险信息扭曲导致的信贷错配，是缓解信贷市场规模歧视现象的市场化创新路径。

商业银行多元化经营是我国商业银行走向高质量发展的必经之路，而资产管理业务已成为我国商业银行多元化经营的重要试验田。虽然理财子公司是新兴事物，但与其股东结构相似，产品结构相似的商业银行系基金公司已随着我国“影子银行”发展壮大。本文将通过剖析我国商业银行作为最大股东的基金公司的产品特点与优势，发现商业银行控股的基金公司更偏好发行债券型基金产品，其表现不但显著优于非银行系基金，而且与商业银行的属性相关 。本文证明上述债券型产品的超额收益源自于商业银行股东的信息优势，即商业银行体系内存在信息传导机制，使旗下基金可以利用大股东在信贷业务中积累的信息优势从信用评级较低的债券中择出提供稳定收益的债券，既能获得低信用等级债券的高收益率，又规避违约风险，提高收益水平。

International debt financing is important for the development of emerging economies, as it allows firms from emerging markets (EMs) to have access to greater liquidity, a wider investor base, and more effective laws and regulations. However, the financial crisis in the late 1990s, coupled with recent rapid growth in corporate leverage in emerging markets, have forced policy makers to re-evaluate the risk of offshore financing and its role in EMs’ development. In this paper, we investigate the bonding/signaling effect of offshore financing to those firms in subsequent domestic market financing through the improvement of information disclosure and creditability. With a comprehensive database covering bond issuances by Chinese firms both in domestic and offshore markets over the period of 2010 to 2015, we find that: 1) The offshore bond issuance has a positive bonding/signaling effect on firm’s subsequent debt-raising in the domestic market in terms of longer maturity of corporate issuance and lower funding cost. 2) If the offshore issuance occurs in a stricter jurisdiction providing more effective investor protection and stringent disclosure, or with an international investment-grade rating, it will have a positive influence on firm’s subsequent debt-raising domestically. 3) Offshore debt financing improves the long-term firm performance, especially for financially-constrained companies. Our study presents new evidence for the role of the offshore market in promoting both the domestic institutional environment as well as firm growth, and provides policy implications for developing a broad offshore corporate bond market in emerging economies.

We compare the differences between the Chinese and U.S. bond risk premia. We find that the expectations hypothesis fails in the two bond markets: We identify the Chinese and U.S. bond time-varying risk premia by forecasting the corresponding excess return of n-year bond using the n-year forward rate and n-year forward spread, respectively. To focus on the systematical forecasts, we then combine the forward rates at different maturities as the return-forecast factors. Unlike the one-factor model introduced by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005), a two-factor model including level- and slope-based factors explains significantly Chinese bond premia with R2 up to 68%. More importantly, the slope-based factor sharply improves the performance of test. The results are robust with respect to measurement errors, multicollinearity and small-sample biases. Out-of-sample tests show that, in recent years, the U.S. bond market changes drastically, and tends to be like the Chinese market. We use the empirical results to calibrate the parameters of affine model, and find that the differences of bond premia between the two markets are caused by the differences of dynamics of state variables and risk attitude of investor.

仅依赖法律等正式制度无法确保金融或经济的长期发展，信任等非正式制度在其中的作用不可或缺。鉴于此，本文研究信任这一非正式制度在债券市场中的价值。研究发现，信任不仅有助于提高债券信用评级，还有助于降低债券信用利差，该结论在考虑了内生性问题后依然成立。同时，利用最高法“失信被执行人”数据还发现，失信及失信程度的增加会降低债券信用评级，提高债券信用利差。进一步地，路径分析法的结果还发现，信任不仅会直接影响债券评级和定价，还会通过提升公司财务报告质量间接地发挥作用，即不仅投资者主观上更愿相信高信任度地区的企业，客观上这些企业也的确更为可信。本文还发现，信任对债券评级和定价的积极作用在国有企业、金融业更发达地区的企业以及发债次数更多的企业中更为显著，即投资者与发行人之间的重复博弈机会越多，信任的价值也越大。研究表明，通过缓解债券发行人与债券投资者之间的信息不对称问题，信任可以被资本化为财富。本文研究结论提醒政府在推动企业融资成本下降时，应着重加强对信任这种地区乃至国家公共品的培育和建设。

This paper studies the information interpretation of return synchronicity in the context of corporate bond market and examines the specific event intensity rationale that underlie the relationship between bond synchronicity and bond level information environment. We find that investment-grade bonds, bonds without rating splits, and bonds issued by public firms present higher levels of bond return synchronicity. These results hold after we control for bond level characteristics, industry and year fixed effects. By using credit rating change announcements as a unique measure of bond specific event intensity, we corroborate that security under better information environment has lower likelihood of specific event surprise occurrence, and thus is more synchronous with the market. We also verify that once rating change announcements did take place, the corresponding return synchronicity would be lower. Such impact would be more pronounced when the rating is downgraded compared with upgrade rating changes.

Using a proprietary dataset from 2016 to 2019, we find that order flows from foreign investors, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns in the Chinese market. Most surprisingly, foreign investors possess the ability to process local firm-level public news, whereas their informational advantages regarding global market-level information are relatively muted. Further, the predictive power of foreign investors is particularly strong on large price movement days when the implications of firm-level information is likely most pronounced. Finally, regulatory reforms that generally relax investment access requirements further improve foreign investors’ predictive power