The northwest region of China faces many practical challenges, and its digital economy lags behind other areas of China. Digital transformation is a new source of competitive advantage in the digital economy era, which can help northwest enterprises rebuild their competitive advantage in the digital age, accelerate the development of the digital economy in the northwest region, bridge the digital gap between the East and the West, and promote the high-quality development of the national digital economy. In this study, the PLS-SEM method is used to collect data from 172 enterprises across five provinces in northwest China, to deeply analyze the mechanism and path through which digital transformation reshapes enterprise competitive advantage, identify the key sticking point hindering digital transformation in northwest China, and then propose more targeted strategic suggestions. It is found that the resource base of enterprises in northwest China is generally weak, making it difficult to deliver direct competitive advantage; existing enterprise resources can provide basic conditions for digital transformation and resource-orchestration capability; although digital transformation cannot directly create competitive performance, it can indirectly deliver competitive advantage by positively affecting resource-orchestration capability; resource-orchestration capability directly and significantly affects enterprise competitive performance and is the core competency for enterprises to build digital resilience.

This paper investigates how the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI) affects long-term stock–bond correlations in China, employing mixed-frequency data from April 2005 to June 2025 in a DCC-MIDAS-X framework. Results show that higher GSCPI significantly reduces long-term stock–bond correlations, thereby enhancing the hedging property of bonds. This effect is both state-dependent and asymmetric, remaining significant in low-volatility regimes and following negative shocks, while becoming largely muted during high-volatility periods or after positive shocks. However, the impact of GSCPI weakens substantially after China’s 2014 financial liberalization, as global financial factors increasingly drive cross-asset dynamics. Moreover, GSCPI provides incremental information that enhances portfolio diversification and hedging performance.

Against the backdrop of recurrent global crises, economic uncertainty, and mounting environmental and social pressures, corporate resilience—defined as a firm’s capability to withstand external systemic shocks—has emerged as a critical determinant of long-term sustainability. This study empirically exames the effect of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance on corporate resilience in China’s A-share market, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to identify causal effects. The sample comprises 651 A-share listed firms, excluding financial institutions, real estate firms, and ST/*ST companies, over the period from January 20, 2020, when the pandemic was officially announced in China, to June 30, 2024. ESG performance is measured as the average of 2018–2019 ratings issued by three major domestic agencies, thereby capturing firms’ pre-shock conditions and mitigating concerns of reverse causality. Corporate resilience is evaluated along two dimensions: resistance, measured by the severity of losses in net income, revenue, and stock price, and recovery, measured by the time required for ROA, EBIT, stock price, and Tobin’s Q to return to pre-shock levels. To ensure the robustness of the findings, this study employs linear regression models with industry-clustered robust standard errors, an instrumental-variable approach using R&D intensity and analyst coverage as instruments, and a Cox accelerated failure time model to estimate recovery duration. The empirical results indicate that stronger pre-shock ESG performance significantly enhances corporate resistance and shortens recovery time. Mechanism analyses further reveal that ESG strengthens corporate resilience by improving total factor productivity, alleviating financing constraints, and enhancing corporate reputation. These findings remain robust to multicollinearity diagnostics and a range of additional robustness tests. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence of the value of ESG in strengthening corporate resilience and offers important implications for firms, policymakers, and investors.

We use nearly a decade’s worth of panel data from European Union Chamber of Commerce in China business confidence surveys to analyse the deteriorating outlooks of EU firms in China from 2017 to 2025. All firms in China currently face challenges including slow profit growth and deflation. These circumstances have contributed to a rare drop of foreign direct investment into China over the last two years. However, certain challenges are particularly acute for foreign firms, including those from the EU. According to survey results, business sentiment among EU firms operating in China has never been bleaker. Respondents view their profitability, growth opportunities and competitiveness negatively, while fewer respondents than ever plan to expand their Chinese operations. Moreover, significant shares of respondents report recent increases in political pressure from the Chinese state and media, while nearly a third of respondents say they are siloing their Chinese operations, meaning separating them from other global activities. Disaggregated by size, sector, and years of operation in China, insightful differences emerge between the business strategies of EU firms. We broadly classify these into four categories: doubling-down, hedging, hibernating and ready to exit. EU policymakers should consider how to address the challenges EU firms in China face, such as asset-heavy sectors being ‘stuck’ in China and smaller firms lacking the capacity to operate at a loss in China’s market. The EU might need to facilitate transitions for these companies, helping them to reduce exposure to China and diversify into other emerging markets.

We conduct a field experiment in China, o↵ering small business owners a conditional social media advertising subsidy. Beyond boosting business revenue and employment, the inter-vention significantly increases access to fintech credit: treated firms are more likely to open online stores and obtain online loans, while bank credit remains una↵ected. Our findings reveal a “fintech accelerator” mechanism—digital marketing drives sales growth that directly improves firms’ eligibility for fintech lending—demonstrating how targeted digital interven-tions can enhance financial inclusion and reshape credit allocation for small businesses.

We introduce a real-time dispersion measure based on cross-sectional stock returns explicitly designed to capture retail-driven speculative episodes. Elevated return dispersion effectively identifies periods characterized by intensified retail investor trading behaviors, driven by salience, diagnostic expectations, and extrapolative beliefs. During these high-dispersion states, momentum strategies collapse, and short-term reversals become dominant. Conditioning momentum strategies on our dispersion measure resolves the longstanding puzzle of missing momentum in retail-intensive markets such as China, substantially enhancing profitability. A dynamic rotation strategy between momentum and short-term reversal portfolios guided by dispersion states achieves annualized Sharpe ratios nearly double those of static approaches. Extending our analysis internationally, we employ Google search trends as proxies for retail investor attention, confirming that dispersion robustly predicts momentum and reversal returns globally. Our findings underscore the behavioral channel through which retail-driven speculation conditions momentum dynamics, providing clear implications for dynamic portfolio management strategies.

Periods of market crisis are often accompanied by heightened fear and information overload, which can induce information avoidance behaviors such as the ostrich effect. While prior research has documented investors’ tendency to avoid unfavorable information, little is known about how different information sources—and trust in those sources—jointly shape such behavior under extreme uncertainty. Drawing on Granular Interaction Thinking Theory (GITT) and employing Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics, this study examines how investors’ regular securities-related information sources is associated with the ostrich effect during the 2022 market downturn in China, and how these associations are conditioned by trust. Using survey data from 1,451 Chinese individual stock investors, we model investors’ recalled frequency of temporarily disengaging from stock investing as an indicator of information avoidance. The results show that regularly consulting professional sources, financial newspapers, and online forums is associated with information avoidance, whereas reliance on personal relationships and company disclosures is not. Importantly, trust moderates these relationships in distinct ways. Higher trust in professional sources is associated with reduced information avoidance, while higher trust in financial newspapers and online forums amplifies avoidance behavior. Among all sources, the interaction between trust and information referral is strongest for financial newspapers. These findings suggest that trust does not uniformly mitigate fear-driven avoidance. Instead, when combined with high-entropy information sources, trust can exacerbate cognitive and emotional strain, increasing investors’ propensity to disengage. By highlighting the joint roles of informational entropy and trust, this study advances behavioral finance research and offers practical insights for investors, policymakers, and regulators seeking to improve decision-making resilience during periods of market crisis.

Mutual funds create liquidity for investors by issuing demandable equity shares while holding illiquid securities. We study the implications of this liquidity creation by examining frequent trading suspensions in China, which temporarily eliminate market liquidity in affected stocks. These suspensions cause significant mispricing of mutual funds due to inaccurate valuations of their illiquid holdings. We find that investors actively acquire information about suspended stocks held by mutual funds, driving flows into underpriced funds. This information is subsequently incorporated into stock prices when trading resumes. Our findings suggest that mutual fund liquidity creation stimulates information acquisition about illiquid, information-sensitive assets.

Purpose The study investigates the impact of government intervention policy of capital markets (“National Team”) on firms’ sustainable management, i.e., green mergers and acquisitions (GMAs) in China, aiming to understand how such interventions influence corporate investment activities amidst a growing focus on green transition. Design/methodology/approach The research employs a dynamic analysis of quarterly data from Chinese companies (2014 Q1 to 2022 Q4), utilizing identified strategies, such as double machine learning-DID and multiple panel data regressions to assess the effects of government intervention on GMAs, and examines potential economic channels like liquidity, market stabilization, and informativeness. Findings The study finds that increased government intervention via direct stock purchases significantly boosts both the number and amount of GMAs, with economic significance of 23% and 45%, respectively. It identifies liquidity, market stability, and informativeness efficiency as underlying economic channels for this effect. Practical implications The findings suggest that government interventions can enhance corporate investment in green sectors, guiding firms to align strategies with sustainability goals. This can inform policymakers regarding the effectiveness of direct stock purchases in fostering a green economy, especially for large emerging countries. Social implications By promoting GMAs, government interventions contribute to green innovation and energy transition, ultimately benefiting society through enhanced environmental sustainability and compliance with eco-friendly regulations. Originality/value This research uniquely documents the direct effects of government stock purchases on corporate green financial activities, particularly GMAs, in a Chinese context characterized by tight credit, thereby expanding the understanding of government intervention in emerging markets.

Following the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the central government elevated the construction of ecological civilization to a central position within national strategy and introduced environmental governance indicators as mandatory criteria for evaluating officials, alongside GDP. These indicators served as an additional "threshold" for performance assessments. In the context of changes in the central government's development ideology and policies, this study utilizes matched data on the turnover of municipal party secretaries and local enterprise carbon emissions from 293 prefecture-level cities in China between 1990 and 2021. The research finds that turnovers of municipal party secretaries after the 18th National Congress have led to a significant reduction in carbon emissions from local enterprises, a trend that was not evident prior to the congress. This effect is more pronounced in situations where official turnover is primarily driven by promotion incentives, and less influenced by collusive behavior between the government and enterprises. Further analysis reveals that the decline in carbon emissions is more significant for private enterprises, non-heavy polluting enterprises, those located in the eastern region, and those in general prefecture-level cities, before and after municipal party secretary turnovers. This study enhances understanding of the relationship between the promotion incentives of Chinese officials and the carbon emissions of local enterprises, offering valuable insights for improving the official promotion assessment system and advancing local carbon reduction efforts.