This study constructs a new mispricing factor for the Chinese equity market. We propose two-, three-, and four-factor models that incorporate this factor alongside the market, size, and value factors. Our models, especially the two-factor version, consistently outperform the Fama and French models and perform as well as other leading models in explaining Chinese anomalies. This study advances asset pricing literature specific to China and offers a promising new framework for analyzing mispricing in emerging markets.

The global financial system is currently navigating a profound transformation driven by digitalization and the rise of decentralized financial innovations. In response, central banks are increasingly exploring or implementing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a sovereign digital evolution of fiat money. This study investigates the dual nature of CBDCs, evaluating whether they represent a strategic opportunity to modernize the economy or a systemic threat to existing financial stability. Employing a qualitative methodology, the research analyzes official policy frameworks from the IMF and BIS alongside diverse real-world case studies, including China’s e-CNY, the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, Nigeria’s eNaira, and the European Central Bank’s Digital Euro. The findings suggest that while CBDCs offer significant benefits—such as enhanced payment efficiency, reduced transaction costs, and improved financial inclusion—they also introduce critical risks. These include the potential disintermediation of commercial banks, heightened cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and concerns regarding individual data privacy and government surveillance. The study concludes that the successful integration of CBDCs is not merely a technical challenge but a social and strategic one. Adoption is heavily dependent on infrastructure, digital literacy, and public trust. Ultimately, the research highlights that there is no "one-size-fits-all" model; the future of money will be shaped by how effectively individual nations balance technological innovation with the preservation of financial architecture.

Firms frequently overstate digital transformation in public disclosures while committing less in observable investment, a phenomenon known as digital catering. We examine whether digital public financial infrastructure can discipline such symbolic behavior. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design on Chinese A-share listed firms over 2014--2024, we find that exposure to China's e-CNY pilot reduces digital catering by roughly 14% relative to the sample mean. The decline is driven almost entirely by reduced rhetorical digital transformation, while balance-sheet-based digital commitment rises only marginally: the e-CNY pilot is associated with substantially less digital talk, but not with a commensurate increase in digital walk in the short run. The effect operates through lower agency costs and reduced information asymmetry, and follows an amplification--substitution pattern---stronger among digital-sector and accounting-opaque firms, weaker where internal controls and institutional ownership are already strong. The evidence identifies financial-transaction verifiability as a novel source of discipline over corporate cheap talk: CBDC-related infrastructure constrains unsupported symbolic claims without immediately accelerating substantive digital investment.

Against the backdrop of systemic financial risk prevention and the pursuit of a virtuous cycle in the real economy, whether Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs) shareholding alleviates maturity mismatch of corporate investment and financing activities is a question of critical importance, not only for the development of individual firms but also for high-quality macroeconomic growth. Using a sample of A-share listed firms in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2009 to 2021, this paper theoretically analyzes and empirically tests the impact of LGFVs shareholding on corporate maturity mismatch. The empirical results indicate that LGFVs shareholding can significantly alleviate corporate maturity mismatch and the finding is still robust across a series of empirical checks. Mechanism analyses show that LGFVs shareholding improves firms’ long-term financing capacity through a resource provision channel and restrains overinvestment through a governance optimization channel, thereby collectively mitigating corporate maturity mismatch. Further analysis indicates that the mitigating effect of LGFVs shareholding is more pronounced in firms with concentrated LGFVs shareholding, firms controlled by non-state-owned capital and firms under higher economic policy uncertainty. Our findings provide valuable theoretical insights for policy design aimed at optimizing corporate financial behavior and curbing corporate financial risks.

The robustness of the securities market is a necessary condition for ensuring the stable operation of the financial market, and stock price fluctuations have always been a major concern for academia and investors. One of the main influencing factors of stock price fluctuations is macroeconomic monetary policy. As one of the important control tools of macroeconomic monetary policy, the impact of benchmark interest rates on stock price fluctuations cannot be ignored. This paper takes Chinese A-shares as the research object, analyzes the impact of benchmark interest rate changes on stock price fluctuations, and further introduces investor sentiment as a mediating variable to analyze its role in the transmission process of monetary policy. This paper selects monthly data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2018 to 2024 and conducts empirical tests by constructing direct effect models and mediating effect models. The research results show that: First, benchmark interest rates have a significant negative impact on stock price fluctuations; second, benchmark interest rates can indirectly affect stock price fluctuations by influencing investor sentiment, with investor sentiment playing a partial mediating role. The research conclusions of this paper help to deepen the understanding of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy's impact on securities prices, and provide micro-evidence for monetary policymakers to assess the impact of policy adjustments on capital market stability, while also providing a reference for investors to understand the risk characteristics of the securities market under changes in the interest rate environment.

This paper develops a delegation-based framework to explain how institutional design shapes pricing incentives under risk. Using China’s 2016 IPO reform—which abolished prefunding requirements and transferred payment obligations from investors to underwriters—as a natural experiment, we show that introducing subscription-payment risk (SPR) renders underwriter’s partial residual claimants with respect to unpaid allocations. Building on Baron’s (1982) delegation model, we argue that the reform amplifies information asymmetry and induces underwriters to adopt more conservative pricing strategies to manage perceived payment risk. Empirically, IPOs exposed to SPR exhibit greater underpricing and lower offer prices, particularly when investor bids reflect stronger valuation pessimism. The effect tends to be less pronounced for reputable underwriters and when foreign institutional investors participate. Overall, the evidence demonstrates how risk redistribution and institutional frictions jointly shape underwriter behavior and pricing efficiency in primary equity markets.

A central premise of mandatory disclosure regulation is that greater transparency reduces information asymmetry and lowers borrowing costs. We challenge this premise by examining industry-level operational disclosure - a regulatory form that reveals horizontally comparable information across peer firms rather than refining individual firm fundamentals. Exploiting the staggered introduction of mandatory industry-specific disclosure guidelines by Chinese stock exchanges between 2013 and 2019, we find that enhanced industry disclosure significantly widens bond credit spreads by approximately 54 basis points - the opposite of what standard disclosure theory predicts. This counterintuitive effect is more pronounced in non-homogeneous industries, among smaller firms, and for bonds restricted to institutional investors. Mechanism tests confirm two opposing channels: disclosure reduces information asymmetry while simultaneously intensifying product market competition by exposing strategically sensitive operational metrics. Our evidence challenges the one-size-fits-all approach to disclosure regulation and highlights that the competitive implications of disclosed information - not merely its quantity - shape credit risk pricing.

Hyman Minsky (1919–1996), a prominent post-Keynesian economist, argued that capitalist financial systems are inherently unstable. During prolonged prosperity, firms and financial institutions increase leverage and adopt more fragile forms of financing, shifting from hedge to speculative and Ponzi finance. This gradual buildup of financial fragility can eventually trigger a sudden collapse of asset values—later termed a “Minsky moment.” After the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, Minsky’s ideas gained renewed attention, and current financial developments once again bring his insights to the forefront.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission is allowing firms to use externally financed funds for share repurchases, a recent measure to enable listed companies address valuation pressures and protect investors; however, its implications for corporate marketing decisions remain unclear. Using an event sample of Chinese listed firms that conducted open-market repurchases between 2009 and 2024, this study empirically examines how this market activity financed by different sources influence marketing decisions and explores the underlying mechanisms. The findings show that compared with firms using internal cash for repurchases, those relying on debt financing are inclined to resist myopic marketing decisions, and this negative relationship is pronounced under high analyst coverage and when privately owned listed firms are controlled by family entrepreneurs. These results remain robust after replacing the dependent variables and applying propensity score matching. Overall, this study shows that debt financing to support share repurchases has a long-term beneficial governance impact as it improves earnings quality and protects investor interests, and offers a new perspective on the relationship between financing-based repurchases and marketing myopia, and provides useful policy insights for evaluating the effectiveness of China’s refinancing regulations related to share repurchases, while guiding further refinement.

This paper constructs a call pressure index (CP) from China's SSE 50 ETF option market and finds a robust U-shaped nonlinear predictability for directional option returns as measured by log returns. The effect reflects that extreme call pressures—whether unusually low (reversal) or high (momentum)—contain information, while moderate levels are dominated by noise trading. Robustness checks using delta-hedged returns confirm that predictability stems primarily from directional exposure rather than volatility dynamics. The predictability is stronger in high-volatility and down-market states and survives controlling for implied skewness, variance risk premium, and other common predictors. A simple timing strategy based on rolling-window forecasts achieves a Sharpe ratio of 0.97, which further increases to 2.43 after applying a prediction threshold. A parsimonious volume-based indicator captures unique predictive information beyond complex proxies, offering a feasible path for emerging markets lacking proprietary order flow data.