Why do firms appoint expired independent directors? How do expired independent directors affect corporate governance and thus impact investment decisions? By taking advantage of the sharp increase in expired independent directors’ re-employment in China caused by exogenous regulatory shocks, Rule No. 18 and Regulation 11, this paper adopts a PSM-DID design to test the impact of expired independent directors on CSR performance. We find that firms experience a significant decrease in CSR performance after re-hiring expired independent directors and the effect is stronger for CSR components mostly related to internal governance. The results of robustness tests show that the main results are robust to alternative measures of CSR performance, an extended sample period, alternative control groups, year-by-year PSM method, and a staggered DID model regarding Rule No. 18 as a staggered quasi-natural experiment. We address the endogeneity concern that chance drives our DID results by using exogenous regulatory shock, an instrumental variable (the index of regional guanxi culture), and placebo tests. We also find that the negative relation between the re-employment of expired independent directors and CSR performance is more significant for independent directors who have more relations with CEOs and raise less objection to managers’ decisions, and for firms that rely more on expired independent directors’ monitoring roles (e.g., a lower proportion of independent directors, CEO duality, high growth opportunities, and above-median FCF). The mediating-effect test shows that the re-employment of expired independent directors increases CEOs’ myopia and thus reduces CSR performance. In addition, we exclude the alternative explanation that the negative relation is caused by the protective effect brought by expired independent directors’ political backgrounds. Our study shows that managers may build reciprocal relationships with expired independent directors in the Chinese guanxi culture and gain personal interest.

为深化利率市场化改革， 提高利率传导效率， 推动降低实体经济融资成本， 2019 年 8 月中国人民银行开始推行贷款市场报价利率（ Loan Prime Rate， 简称 LPR） 改革。 本文基于 LPR 改革这一准自然实验， 采用连续 DID 等方法探究 LPR 改革对实体经济融资的影响及其机制。 结果表明：第一， LPR 改革显著降低企业的融资成本；第二， LPR 改革提升了信贷配置效率， 高成长性企业贷款可得性显著上升；第三， LPR 改革对不同类型企业的融资成本产生异质性影响， 低风险企业、战略新兴产业企业和非国有企业的融资成本下降相对显著；第四， 微观机制结果验证了， LPR 改革不仅通过传统的竞争性机制推动降低实体经济融资成本， 还会通过利率传导机制与贷款定价机制畅通利率传导过程， 提升中小银行贷款定价能力， 降低实体经济融资成本。

By establishing a labor-retirement model within China’s unique intergenerational support culture and one-child policy, this study provides evidence of the one-child policy’s early effect on individuals’ retirement decisions. This finding highlights a contradiction between the retirement intentions of the 1960s and 1970s generations, who are most affected by the one-child policy, and the delayed retirement policy of Chinese government. Utilizing data from the CHARLS 2011-2018 and employing OLS, IV, and fuzzy cohort DID estimation methods, we observe that only-child parents tend to retire at an earlier age compared to non-only-child parents. This early effect of the one-child policy on retirement decisions can be attributed to intergenerational support for children’s marriage and career, as well as the educational attainments of children, as confirmed by both theoretical and empirical analysis.

Taking the Stock Connect scheme as an exogenous shock based on data of China’s Ashare non-financial listed companies from 2009 to 2021, we identify the causal effect of stock market liberalization on green innovation. The baseline result based on a staggered difference-indifferences (DID) model suggests that stock market liberalization promotes corporate green innovation and this effect is similar to the green benefits of China’s mandatory environmental regulations. The results are robust to various checks, including the parallel trend tests, placebo tests, and the heterogenous time-varying treatment test based on Bacon decomposition and the DIDM approach. The enhanced continuity of corporate financing, improved corporate green governance and increased firm external technological collaboration are three plausible channels that allow stock market liberalization to promote corporate green innovation. Moreover, the effect is more significant for clean firms, non-SOEs, and firms in a good institutional environment. Further analysis suggests that the green innovation-enhancing effects of stock market liberalization are more likely to be high-quality innovation. Our paper provides new insights into understanding the green benefits of stock market liberalization and achieving sustainable economic development in developing countries.

The progression of the social credit system is crucial for fostering enterprise innovation and elevating the quality of economic development. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of establishing demonstration cities for the social credit system, this study delves into whether the construction of a social credit system can indeed foster enterprise innovation. Our findings indicate that the establishment of demonstration cities for social credit system promotes enterprise innovation and improves the quality of innovation. Furthermore, mechanism test shows that it alleviates financing constraints faced by enterprises, leading to an increase in the scale and maturity of corporate loans, ultimately fostering corporate innovation. Further analysis of heterogeneity highlights that this positive impact is particularly evident in non-state-owned enterprises and those facing severe financing constraints. These findings present insights that the pivotal role of informal institutions, such as the social credit system, in facilitating the upgrading of industrial structures and augmenting the quality of economic development.

The effects of skyscraper development on surrounding firms’ innovation in China is assessed in this paper, and empirical results show that skyscraper development significantly promotes the innovation of firms within 1 km of skyscrapers. However, such effect only exists around very tall skyscrapers in large cities. This means that skyscraper development in small cities often is unfit for the economic fundamentals of these cities, which may weaken the positive externalities generated by skyscrapers. The mechanism analysis in this paper shows that increased surrounding population density brought by skyscraper development and knowledge sharing between firms surrounding the skyscrapers and other firms in the same city are the main paths through which skyscrapers affect innovation.

The study reveals that the COVID-19 crisis has had a strong but one-off negative impact on the hedge fund industry. It also shows that during the new coronavirus pandemic, the main components of the hedge fund industry achieved only partially their main investment goal, i.e. they as a whole provided a hedge of the investment risk but did not produce higher than the market return in the conditions of a growing capital market. In this situation, due to the relatively stable М&A market, the Event-Driven Risk Arbitrage strategy was undoubtedly most successful, followed by the Emerging Markets, the Global Macro and the Long/Short Equity strategies. The worst performance was reported for the Fixed Income Arbitrage strategy due to the currently overvalued bond markets and to the expectations for higher inflation rates in the countries with developed capital markets.

We study the role of Chinese government guidance funds (GGFs) in value creation for investee firms. Using a sample of 2,855 firms that went public during the period of 2010-2021, we show that GGF-backed IPO firms had higher initial returns than non-VC-backed IPO firms and nonGGF VC-backed IPO firms. After decomposing the initial return into IPO underpricing and market overvaluation, we find that GGF-backed firms enjoyed higher overvaluation and lower underpricing than other firms. Consistent with investor sentiment and information asymmetry hypothesis, our results indicate that public investors value the benefits of political resources more than the costs of government interference associated with GGF sponsoring. However, GGF-backed firms did not outperform other-VC-backed firms when post-IPO long-term stock, operating and innovation performance is assessed. The divergence in the effects of GGFs observed in the financial and product markets reveals the complexity in evaluating the role of GGFs in value creation.

China’s housing purchase restriction (HPR) policy imposes administrative restrictions on households’ home purchase eligibility to curb speculative demand. We quantify households’ willingness to pay (WTP) to re-acquire such eligibility. The empirical results based on the staggered DID specification suggest that when local governments implement the HPR policy, the transaction prices of judicial housing auctions legally exempted from HPR increase by 18.91%. This HPR-exempted qualification premium can be converted to an estimate of 22.48% of the transaction price as buyers’ WTP for home purchase eligibility. The heterogeneity analysis also suggests that the WTP significantly increases when speculative incentives are stronger in the housing market. If policymakers in mainland China consider replacing the HPR policy with an additional buyer transaction tax like that in Singapore and Hong Kong, China, the WTP estimates can serve as the benchmark in setting the tax rate.

《巴黎气候协定》以及碳达峰、碳中和目标要求中国向低碳经济发展模式转型。本文以《巴黎气候协定》签署为事件冲击，采用连续型 DID 模型探究了区域低碳转型风险对银团贷款定价的影响。研究发现，自协定签署后，中国高碳排放地区的银团贷款存在显著为正的碳风险溢价；由于地区碳风险导致贷款违约风险上升，从而提高了企业贷款成本。此外，研究还发现：碳风险溢价的高低受地区自然环境和制度环境特征的影响；在法制化程度高的地区，银行因承担污染连带责任而提高对碳风险的重视程度，相应地提高了碳风险溢价；在产品市场发育程度高的地区，价格机制和竞争机制能够激励低碳产品生产和低碳技术研发，从而降低碳风险溢价；在发生气候灾害的地区，银行执行国家救济职能，会降低碳风险溢价；在森林覆盖率高的地区，碳中和更易实现，林业碳汇收益和碳汇抵押资产能够增加现金流并降低信用风险，从而降低碳风险溢价。本文研究对于推动中国区域低碳转型和降低企业融资成本具有重要的政策启示意义。