Utilizing microevaluation data on the extent to which firms advance the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provided by Robeco, this paper examines the influence of corporate sustainability on stock price performance and its underlying economic mechanisms. The empirical results suggest that firms’ sustainability has a significant negative effect on excess returns, particularly the contribution of firms to the social dimension of sustainability. Firms’ SDG performance can alleviate financing constraints and reduce financial risk, but it does not significantly enhance financial performance, leading to market capital outflows from high SDG-performing firms, especially from individual investors. Furthermore, our results suggest that high SDG-performing firms are undervalued and do not increase the information content in their stock prices, which may be the main reason for the negative effect of SDG performance. We also conduct a series of heterogeneity tests, which show that firms from regions with high environmental regulatory intensity and less economic development, as well as heavily polluting firms and firms with poorer information environments, experience greater negative effects. These findings have implications for investors to properly understand corporate sustainability and for regulators to promote the development of a low-carbon economy.

To address the challenges posed by renewable energy integration in power systems, China is advancing the development of Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS). However, the rapid growth of PHS installations, coupled with strict regulations and a high reliance on capacity compensation, has led to increasing financial burdens on other utilities. One solution is to reallocate the capacity compensation through market-based approaches to implement the “beneficiary-pays” principle. To achieve this goal, an operational policy named ’partial-regulated dispatch’ is proposed in this study. The analysis of this policy encompasses two crucial dimensions: the dispatch mechanism and business models. The dispatch mechanism evaluates PHS’s capacity contribution to grid stability, while the business models focus on enhancing PHS profitability to reduce dependency on capacity compensation while ensuring long-term economic sustainability. Furthermore, the flexibility of PHS is introduced as a criterion for assessing system security contributions, considering both individual unit vibration characteristics and multi-unit commitment strategies. The case study shows that through partial-regulated dispatch, PHS can reduce its reliance on capacity compensation by nearly 50% while ensuring its regulation service via flexibility compensation. This policy effectively balances economic viability with system support capabilities. Moreover, flexibility compensation provides PHS operators with a risk mitigation strategy in the complex power market environment. Under an appropriate operational strategy and policy incentives, the flexibility can be enhanced by nearly 30% in a fully marketized scenario, contributing to both system stability and operational efficiency.

The high-penetration integration of renewable energy requires huge demand for reliable capacity resources, and the coal-fired units are the main providers of the reliable capacity in China. This study proposes a future-oriented approach to facilitate coal-fired power’ transition through capacity market development. Focusing on China’s power market reform context, we propose a two-stage capacity market mechanism integrating annual capacity auctions and monthly capacity bidding, and design the procedural and transactional framework for coal-fired power participation. We further outline three market strategies including energy market trading, centralized capacity market trading, and renewable energy alliance leasing. Environmental costs are incorporated to construct revenue models and derive boundary conditions for coal-fired units’ decision-making. Research results reveal that current capacity prices fail to cover costs, requiring substantial market-driven price increases to achieve profitability. While stable capacity revenue can reduce medium-to-long-term and spot market prices, fostering competition between coal-fired power and renewable energy resources. However, coal-fired power remains highly sensitive to price volatility, demanding robust resilience to fluctuations. Carbon prices significantly influence capacity prices, yet excessive free carbon quota allocations weaken carbon price transmission effects, necessitating optimized quota ratios to enhance market responsiveness. Finally, policy implications are proposed according to the research results.

Climate change presents a global threat, prompting nations to adopt low-carbon development pathways to mitigate its potential impacts. However, current research lacks a comprehensive framework capable of integrating multiple variables and providing dynamic optimization capabilities. This article focuses on designing pathways for developing a low-carbon economy to tackle climate challenges. Specifically, we construct a low-carbon economy model that incorporates economic, environmental, social, energy, and policy factors to analyze the drivers of economic growth and carbon emissions. We utilize economic model predictive control and tracking model predictive control to optimize development pathways aligned with various low-carbon targets, creating and validating a comprehensive framework for low-carbon policy design using historical data from China. This study highlights significant advantages in analyzing low-carbon pathways through advanced techniques like hierarchical regression and model predictive control, providing a robust framework that enhances our understanding of causal relationships within the LCE system, captures system feedback, dynamically optimizes pathways, and accommodates diverse policies within a comprehensive low-carbon economy system.

With the digital transformation of the capitalist economy, some contemporary scholars have put forward the Techno-Feudalism narrative of the digital economy. This narrative emphasizes that digital platform enterprises, as emerging market entities in the digital economy, have many practices that are highly similar to those of feudal lords. For example, digital platform enterprises plundering user data is similar to feudal lords plundering land; digital platform enterprises collecting digital rent is similar to feudal lords collecting land rent; digital platform enterprises controlling users and workers is similar to feudal lords controlling slaves. However, this narrative has many theoretical fallacies. Marx's theory of surplus value shows that the above phenomena are essentially still the contemporary form of capital seizing surplus value through technological innovation. The techno-feudalism narrative ignores the internal logic of capital using technological iteration to reconstruct the exploitation mechanism and falls into a superficial misjudgment. In contrast, the Chinese governance practice of digital economy breaks the monopoly of platforms on data elements through the innovation of the separation of three rights of data property rights; promotes fair competition and optimal allocation of resources in the digital economy by strengthening anti-monopoly supervision and promoting the construction of digital infrastructure; proves that the socialist system can break the capital proliferation cycle and achieve "people-centered" development by building a labor rights protection system to promote the creation and sharing of value and transcending the techno-feudalism phenomenon of the digital economy.

This paper examines the impact of Chinese local government hidden debt on corporate ESG greenwashing. Extending fraud theory, we reveal that hidden debt shifts the boundary between government and market that drives the factors behind ESG greenwashing. Using the ESG greenwashing indicator of listed firms in the A-share market and the hidden debt-to-GDP ratio of 31 provinces from 2012 to 2023, we find that local government hidden debt is positively correlated with corporate ESG greenwashing. The impact is more significant for firms that are state-owned, without active primary-level Party organizations, or not on China’s key pollution supervisory list. Mechanism analysis indicates that expansion of local government hidden debt brings firms with higher LGFVs’ share-holding for the SOEs, heavier environmental tax burden, and less social responsibility preference, all of which are related with ESG greenwashing. Reducing local government special debt and improving tax compliance can help alleviate this impact. These findings highlight the necessity of fiscal risk management in achieving genuinely sustainable corporate development.

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.

Exploring the relationship between government subsidies, market competition, and the digital transformation of cultural and tourism enterprises (CTEs) will provide inspiration for upgrading and promoting the digitization development of China’s cultural and tourism industry. This paper theoretically and empirically evaluates the effect of government subsidies on digital transformation of CTEs by developing an evolutionary game combined with Hotelling model, and meanwhile using the econometric model. The theoretical model demonstrates that different subsidy scale will affect the evolutionary efficiency of the system under different market competition intensities. And the empirical model shows that the relationship between government subsidies and the digital transformation of CTEs is a U-shaped curve and the market competition exerts the flattening moderation on the U-shaped relationship. The findings provide guidance to both policymakers and managers.

Adverse selection remains a significant challenge in the insurance industry, often resulting in substantial financial losses for insurers. The primary hurdle in addressing the issue lies in accurately identifying and quantifying adverse selection. Traditional methods often fail to adequately account for the heterogeneity of insurance purchasers and the endogenous nature of their insurance decisions. This study introduces an innovative approach that integrates the Gaussian Mixture Model and the regression-based model from Dionne et al. (2001) to assess adverse selection, addressing the limitations of previous methods. Through comprehensive simulations, we demonstrate that our method yields unbiased estimates, outperforming existing approaches. Applied to China’s automobile insurance market, leveraging IoT devices to track telematics data, this method captures risk heterogeneity among the insured. The results offer robust evidence of adverse selection, in contrast to conventional methods that fail to detect this phenomenon due to their inability to capture the underlying relationship between customer risk and claim behavior. Our approach offers insurers a robust framework for identifying information asymmetries in the market, thereby enabling the development of more targeted policy interventions and risk management strategies.

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.