代表性偏差由著名心理学家Kahneman和Tversky提出，指人们于根据观察到的某种事物的模式与其经验中该事物所形成典型模式的相似程度而进行判断。某一事物与其类别高度相似，则其代表性越高。这种情况在人们的金融投资活动中往往扮演着重要角色和作用。因此研究这种偏差对投资心理活动对信息处理加工输出的不同阶段的影响，对投资者对金融市场的投资决策往往会起到一定的重要辅助作用。

基于2003-2015年沪深A股非金融行业上市公司的数据，本文考察了地区腐败与该地企业慈善捐赠的关系，以及融资约束对上述关系的影响。研究发现，地区腐败越严重，该地企业的慈善捐赠会越少，呈现地区腐败的慈善抑制效应。公司的融资约束会加剧地区腐败的慈善抑制效应。即，在腐败严重地区，融资约束越严重的公司慈善捐赠会越少。数学模型的推导结果表明，地区腐败与慈善捐赠之间的负向关系源于行贿对慈善捐赠的挤出效应。即，在腐败严重地区，与慈善捐赠相比，直接行贿更有利于公司实现利润最大化的目标。从而，理性的公司会选择行贿，而非慈善捐赠。强力反腐会削弱地区腐败的慈善抑制效应。这与强力反腐提高了公司行贿的成本密切相关。该研究不仅从理论上揭示了地区腐败、融资约束与慈善捐赠之间的内在逻辑关系，还为我国优化商业道德，推进反腐进程，维护市场秩序提供了理论依据。

近年来，一方面，我国消费不足的问题长期存在，另一方面，房地产价格整体上升。那么，房价将如何影响了居民消费？利用蚂蚁金服2017年1月到2019年4月100万抽样用户的淘宝消费与“中国百城房价”数据，本文考察了房价对居民消费的作用。研究发现，第一，房价的上升对消费有抑制作用，且导致了消费降级；第二，流动性约束较高的用户，房价对消费的负向影响更高；第三，上述效应具有异质性，房价对消费的抑制作用主要作用于享受型消费、对收入较低的群体更加显著、且主要体现在三线及以下城市。以上结论在多种检验下保持稳健。本文提示了房地产价格过快上涨的风险，以及缓解居民流动性约束的重要意义。

Using the staggered opening of governmental public data platforms in China, we employ the difference-in-difference approach to investigate how public data access affects stock price synchronicity. We find that stock price synchronicity significantly drops after the public data platform is established in a firm’s headquarters city. The underlying mechanism is reducing information acquisition costs rather than increasing market attention or corporate information disclosure quality. Furthermore, the informational role of public data platforms magnifies under higher informed trade risk, poorer corporate governance, or better regional economic and innovation capacity. We highlight the role of public data in facilitating financial market efficiency.

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.

Serfling (2016) examines how the increase in firing costs impacts the capital structure decisions of firms and hypothesizes that higher firing costs of labor lead to a decline in a firm’s financial leverage use by directly increasing its distress costs and indirectly lifting its operating leverage. Stricter labor protection laws passed in China in 2007 provide an opportunity to revisit the issue within a controlled environment. Employees of SOEs already enjoy the benefits that the new labor law imparts. So, SOEs are exposed to lower firing costs than their non-SOE counterparts. Additionally, the exposure to bankruptcy is more limited for SOEs than non-SOEs. We hypothesize and show that non-SOE firms’ financial leverage decreases more than SOEs, confirming the leverage-lowering effect of labor protection laws. Further, the decline in financial leverage is more pronounced for a labor-intensive firm or one that encounters steep competition.

We study how government intervention in the bank loan granting process affects firms’ leverage dynamics. We exploit the setup of administrative approval centers (AACs) in China, a program aiming to reduce bureaucracy in business activities, as a quasi-natural experiment. On average, AACs help to shorten the leverage rebalancing period by as much as a quarter. This acceleration pattern persists in under-leveraged firms, which issue more debt to rebalance accordingly. Cross-sectional analyses show that the positive effect of AACs on leverage adjustment is more pronounced for firms that are in poorer legal environment, with more financial constraints, or less politically connected. ics.

As “sin” stocks and “brown” stocks generally earn higher returns than “green” stocks, fund managers face a trade-off between profitability and sustainability preferences when investing in environmental, social and governance (ESG). We explore the investment styles of ESG funds in the Chinese A-share market and analyze the behavior of ESG funds in terms of asset allocation and portfolio adjustment. We find that ESG funds prefer stocks with high return performance over stocks with high ESG performance. Textual analyses of prospectuses reveal a degree of “greenwashing” behavior by ESG funds. Overall, we show that ESG funds not purely ESG-driven.

This study investigates venture capital (VC) reputation impact on the pre-IPO performance of the entrepreneurial firms backed by three kinds of VCs. This study employs backward stepwise regression models following prior theoretical frameworks to examine the research question. Based on a database of the top 50 VC firms ranked during 2016 to 2020 and their portfolio firms. This study shows some contingent contribution to pre-IPO firm performance. Firstly, the reputation of the Chinese government-owned VCs is negatively associated with their portfolio firm performance. Still, there is a positive relationship between foreign and local private VCs. Secondly, entrepreneurial firm performance is significantly associated with industry policy and entrepreneur’s performance than VC reputation. This study has practical implications for entrepreneurs and limited partners regarding their corporation relationships with the Chinese VCs.

Recent financial frauds in China such as Kangmei Pharmaceuticals’ case have raised suspicion in the capital market and among academics about the reliability of accounting information of listed companies, and as a result, various non-financial information that is compulsory or encouraged to be disclosed by regulators and voluntarily disclosed by listed companies is gradually gaining attention from various stakeholders and academics. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) information is one of the most widely disclosed non-financial information by listed firms, but its reliability and motivation are also questionable, for example, is CSR commitment affected by firms’ financial information quality? Using China a-share listed companies that disclosed their corporate social responsibility reports from 2009-2019 as a sample, we investigate whether earnings management can influence corporate social responsibility by analysing the management’s motives embedded in earnings management, in order to further examine whether Chinese listed companies are morally motivated to undertake social responsibility or use social responsibility as a strategic tool to maintain the reputation of the firm and the management. The results of the study show that earnings management and CSR are positively correlated, and the finds continue to be robust when using 2SLS, Heckman two-step regression and propensity score matching to control for reverse causality and self-selection bias, proving that China's listed companies are ethically motivated to fulfil their social responsibility. Therefore, it is important to focus on the quality of earnings information in order to perceive the motivation of CSR when evaluating a company’s CSR commitment.