We examine how the sudden drop in public information search capability caused by Google’s withdrawal from China affects Chinese analysts’ earnings forecasts. We observe, after Google’s withdrawal, a decline in analysts’ forecast accuracy for firms with foreign trade relative to those without it. This decline suggests that the withdrawal hinders analysts’ acquisition of foreign information about firms, which decreases the quality of their earnings forecasts. We also find that the effect of the withdrawal on forecast accuracy is stronger for firms with higher business complexity and more opaque financial reporting and for analysts with weaker information processing capacity and more attention constraints. Additionally, we find that corporate site visits serve as an alternative information source that can compensate for the information loss caused by the Google withdrawal. Last, we document that the withdrawal reduces analysts’ forecast timeliness and increases their forecast dispersion.

The process of internationalization of China’s banking industry began in 1917. After a hundred years of development, China’s banking internationalization has made great achievements. However, there is still a big gap between China’s banking industry and the financial institutions in some developed countries in the field of internationalization. In the process of internationalization, China's banking industry are now still facing the dilemma of backward development concept, lack of effective risk control system and international talents. This thesis mainly introduces the history, present situation and difficulties of the internationalization of China’s banking industry. The first part gives a description to the history of the internationalization of China’s banking industry, which starts in the year of 1917. An analysis of the current situation of China’s banking industry’ internationalization is given in the second part of this article. And the third part summarizes the difficulties that are faced by China’s banking industry.

This paper investigates whether regional negative public sentiment associated with extreme non-financial social shocks (e.g., violence or crime) will affect the resident firms’ M&A announcement return. Using a sample of 3,200 M&A deals in China, our empirical results consistently show that M&A announcement return is significantly lower after the firm’s headquarter city has experienced negative social shocks. We further find that better CSR performance helps to mitigate the impact of these negative shocks. Overall, we show that firm operations will be largely affected by the resident environment and location, and better CSR performance acts as an effective risk management strategy.

We construct a daily Chinese Housing Market Sentiment Index by applying GPT-4o to Chinese news articles. Our method outperforms traditional models in several validation tests, including a test based on a suite of machine learning models. Applying this index to household-level data, we find that after monetary easing, an important group of homebuyers (who have a college degree and are aged between 30 and 50) in cities with more optimistic housing sentiment have lower responses in non-housing consumption, whereas for homebuyers in other age-education groups, such a pattern does not exist. This suggests that current monetary easing might be more effective in boosting non-housing consumption than in the past for China due to weaker crowding-out effects from pessimistic housing sentiment. The paper also highlights the need for complementary structural reforms to enhance monetary policy transmission in China, a lesson relevant for other similar countries. Methodologically, it offers a tool for monitoring housing sentiment and lays out some principles for applying generative AI models, adaptable to other studies globally.

This paper investigates how transparency in lawsuit information affects capital allocation and aggregate industrial production. Greater transparency enhances the availability of information about firms' fundamentals, which can influence resource distribution. We exploit regional variations in courts' compliance with mandated judicial document disclosures in China, implemented since 2014, as a natural experiment. For firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), a 10-percentage-point increase in legal transparency results in a 4.4% increase in physical capital and a 7.9% reduction in MRPK, relative to firms with lower MRPK. Additionally, regions with higher transparency experience a rise in aggregate output. Further analysis differentiating firms by ownership type, public listing status, and industry-level contract intensity enhances the robustness of our findings.

This paper investigates the effect of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the ESG performance of their underlying firms. Using data from China, we find that ETFs enhance the ESG performance of their underlying firms. This finding remains consistent after several robustness and endogeneity tests. Further, we show that the effect is more pronounced for non-SOEs, firms in low-polluting industries, and firms at growth and maturity stages. Studying the mechanisms behind these results, we find that ETFs mitigate the corporate agency problems, enhance the willingness of managers to invest in ESG, and improve the ESG performance.

Site visits allow visitors to physically inspect productive resources and interact with onsite employees and executives face-to-face. We posit that, by allowing visitors to acquire investmentrelated information and monitor the management team, site visits offer disciplinary benefits for corporate investments. Using mandatory disclosures of site visits in China, we find that corporate investments become more responsive to growth opportunities as the intensity of site visits increases, consistent with the notion that site visits yield disciplinary benefits. We also find that the positive association between site visits and investment efficiency is more pronounced when visitors can glean more investment-related information and when they have stronger incentives and greater power to monitor managers. This positive association is also stronger among firms with more severe agency problems and higher asset tangibility. The overall evidence supports the notion that site visits serve as a unique venue for institutional investors and financial analysts to acquire valuable information and serve a monitoring function, which generates disciplinary benefits for corporate investments.

Financial technology, also known as Fintech, is transforming our daily life and revolutionizing the financial industry. Yet at present, consensus regarding the effect of Fintech on green bonds market is lacking. With novel data from China, this study documents robust evidence showing that Fintech development can significantly boost green bonds issuance. Further analysis suggests that this promotion effect occurs by empowering intermediary institutions and increasing social environmental awareness. Additionally, we investigate the heterogeneous effect and find that the positive relation is more pronounced for bonds without high ratings and in cities connected with High-Speed Railways network. The results call for the attention from policymakers and security managers to take further notice of Fintech utilization in green finance products.

This study investigates how economic policy uncertainty (EPU) affects venture capital (VC) contract terms. Using a unique database of contracts between VCs and entrepreneurial firms in China, we provide evidence that VCs include more investor-friendly covenants in contracts when EPU increases. Our findings hold across a battery of robustness checks, including addressing endogeneity concerns and using alternative EPU measures. Our mechanism analysis shows that higher investment risk and increased VCs’ bargaining power might be plausible reasons why EPU positively affects the presence of investor-friendly covenants in VC contracts.

This research employs the Alkire-Foster approach to measure multidimensional poverty between 2012 and 2020 in China, followed by examining the role of the three-pillar pension system in mitigating household multidimensional poverty. With the China Family Panel Studies data, our measurement uncovers the sustainable effects and mechanisms of household participation in the multi-pillar pension system on poverty mitigation. The results indicate that more participation in the pension system mitigates the probability of being trapped in multidimensional poverty. The findings reveal the significance of state social insurance, enterprise annuity, and individual commercial insurance. The mitigation effect of market-oriented pillars is achieved through more investment in and consumption for livelihood assets. Based upon the sustainable livelihoods framework, livelihood assets ameliorate household capabilities in human, natural, financial, and psychological capital against risks, shocks, and uncertainties. Our research contributes to the knowledge of how household participation in pension pillars sustainably mitigates multidimensional poverty through micro-level mechanisms and to the policy praxis of why a facilitating state is called for poverty mitigation from the perspective of new structural economics.