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.

The co-holding of mutually interdependent pairs of heterogeneous blocks can provide firms with stable financial support. The interdependence of heterogeneous blockholders’ investment decision has become an important frontier in the financial literature on large shareholders. In this paper, we study the interdependence of heterogeneous blocks in China. We find significant positive interdependence among blockholders of the same type. In heterogeneous block pairs, the financial–private pair shows positive interdependence. The findings are in contrast to those observed in the US. Under the mixed-ownership reform in China, our findings suggest the potential for cooperation among multiple blocks of the same type rather than between heterogeneous strategic partners.

We examine how organizational learning and organizational disruption jointly arise when Chinese audit firms have U.S. cross-listed clients and which effect dominates. Among public companies listed only in China, we define the treatment group as companies audited by Chinese audit firms serving at least one U.S. client, similar companies audited by firms without U.S. clients as the control group. Survey evidence indicates strong incentives and opportunities to learn from U.S. engagements and frequent learning activities in treatment audit firms. The archival evidence however shows that their domestic audit quality declines relative to the control group. The effect is more pronounced when U.S. clients demand more audit resources, when domestic clients are more sensitive to limited audit attention, and when U.S. and domestic clients are more similar. Overall, our findings indicate a negative externality of U.S. cross-listing audit when resource constraints hinder an effective firm-wide learning.

Background: How to cope with the rapid growth of LTC (long-term care) needs for the old people without activities of daily living (ADL), which is also a serious hazard caused by public health emergencies such as COVID-2019 and SARS (2003), has become an urgent task in China, Germany, Japan, and other aging countries. As a response, the LTCI (longterm care insurance) system has been executed among European countries and piloted in 15 cities of China in 2016. Subsequently, the influence and dilemma of LTCI system have become a hot academic topic in the past 20 years.Methods: The review was carried out to reveal the effects of the LTCI system on different economic entities by reviewing relevantliterature published from January 2008 to September 2019. The quality of 25 quantitative and 24 qualitative articles was evaluated using the JBI and CASP critical evaluation checklist, respectively. Results: The review systematically examines the effects of the LTCI system on different microeconomic entities such as caretakers or their families and macroeconomic entities such as government spending. The results show that the LTCI system has a great impact on social welfare. For example, LTCI has a positive effect on the health and life quality of the disabled elderly. However, the role of LTCI in alleviating the financial burden on families with the disabled elderly may be limited. Conclusion: Implementation of LTCI system not only in reducing the physical and mental health problems of health care recipients and providers, and the economic burden of their families, but also promote the development of health care service industry and further improvement of the health care system. However, the dilemma and sustainable development of the LTCI system is the government needs to focus on in the future due to the sustainability of its funding sources.

In this paper, we present a rational expectation equilibrium model in which fundamental and ESG traders hold heterogeneous valuations towards the risky asset. Trading occurs based on private information and price signal which is determined by a weighted combination of these diverse valuations. Our findings indicate that higher level of ESG rating disagreement increases ESG information uncertainty, thereby reducing trading intensity among ESG traders and attenuating the price informativeness about ESG. We further discover that allowing fundamental traders access to ESG information increases the coordination possibilities in the financial market, leading to multiple equilibria exhibiting characteristics of strategic substitutability and complementarity. Additionally, through measuring the ESG rating disparities among four prominent agencies in China, we deduce that ESG rating disagreement negatively impacts price informativeness by decreasing stock illiquidity.

Trade credit is a vital external source of financing, playing a crucial role in redistributing credit from financially stronger firms to weaker ones, especially during difficult times. However, it is puzzling that the redistribution perspective alone fails to explain the changes in trade credit when firms get involved in major litigation, which can be seen as an external shock for firms. Based on a firm-level dataset of litigations from China, we find that firms involved in major litigation not only exhibit an increased demand for trade credit but also extend more credit to their customers. Our further analysis reveals that whether as plaintiffs or defendants, litigation firms experience an increase in the demand and supply of trade credit. Moreover, compared to plaintiff firms, defendant firms experience a more pronounced increase in the demand for trade credit. Using firms’ market power and liquidity as moderators, we find that the increase in the demand for trade credit is more likely due to firms’ deferred payments rather than voluntary provision by suppliers, and the increase in the supply of trade credit appears to be an expedient measure to maintain market share. Generally, our results provide evidence of credit contagion effect within the supply chain, where the increased demand for trade credit is transferred from firms’ customers to themselves when they get involved in major litigations, while the default risk is simultaneously transferred from litigation firms to upstream firms.

In the mid-1990s, the concept of smart growth emerged in the United States as a critical response to the phenomenon of suburban sprawl. To promote sustainable urban development, it is necessary to further investigate the principles and applications of smart growth. In this paper, we proposed a Smart Growth Index (SGI) as a standard for measuring the degree of responsible urban development. Based on this index, we constructed a comprehensive 3E evaluation model—covering economic prosperity, social equity, and environmental sustainability—to systematically assess the level of smart growth. For empirical analysis, we selected two medium-sized cities from different continents: Wuhu County, China, and Colima, Mexico. Using an improved entropy method, we evaluated the degree of smart growth in recent years and analyzed the contributions of various policies to sustainable urban development. Then, guided by the ten principles of smart growth, we linked theoretical insights to practical challenges and formulated a development plan for both cities. To forecast long-term trends, we employed trend extrapolation based on historical data, enabling the prediction of SGI values for 2020, 2030, and 2050. The results indicate that Wuhu demonstrates a greater potential for smart growth compared with Colima. We also simulated a scenario in which the population of both cities increased by 50 percent and then re-evaluated the SGI. The analysis suggests that while rapid population growth tends to slow the pace of smart growth, it does not necessarily exert a negative impact on the overall trajectory of sustainable development. Finally, a study on the application of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) theory in Wuhu County was conducted. Based on this analysis, we proposed several policy recommendations aimed at enhancing the city’s sustainable urban development.

Suzhou and Shenzhen are among the top cities in China by GDP, and both have performed exceedingly well in terms of cultivating technological industries and attracting foreign investment. This is in spite of the fact that neither city is a provincial capital nor a centrally administered city like Shanghai and Beijing. Yet, the two cities embody very different administrative models with respect to their relationship with the provincial and central governments. Shenzhen, in particular, has a closer relationship with the central government than almost any non-centrally administered city in China, whereas Suzhou is a city that remains closely in coordination with the provincial government even as its economy has grown by leaps and bounds. This begs the question of which city's model will prevail moving forward: the Shenzhen model, typified by "re-centralization" of power, or the Suzhou model, which represents more of the conventional regional decentralization model that has been prevalent in China since the 1980s. The article attempts to argue that even though Shenzhen is of pivotal importance to the central government's policies, it will remain an outlier for the time being so as to avoid disturbing the delicate balance between the central and provincial governments, barring an unforeseen economic or political crisis.

The influence of informal institutions such as history and culture on corporate behavior has been widely recognized, but few studies have been analyzed from the perspective of the ruling party culture. Based on the data of the old revolutionary base areas (ORBA) in China, this paper makes an empirical test on the role of Red Culture in promoting enterprises green innovation. First, this paper finds that the stronger the Red Culture in the region where the enterprise is located, the higher the level of green innovation.Secondly, in the samples with high political sensitivity and less cultural conflict, the promoting effect of Red Culture is more obvious. This paper not only expands the relevant literature on the influence of informal system on enterprise green innovation, but also enriches the research on the influence of Chinese unique culture on enterprise management decision-making.

This paper examines whether employees avoid firms that commit environmental, social and governance (ESG) misconduct in China where ESG norms are weak. We find that the number of employees grows slower when firms have more ESG incidents after accounting for performance, risk, corporate governance, and time-invariant firm characteristics. The result is mostly attributable to social incidents and incidents that affect China, better educated knowledge workers, and high tech and non-labor-intensive industries, and is unlikely to be caused by layoffs. Overall, workers with better job fluidity respond to incidents that affect them personally.