How does executive authority affect household behavior? I develop a model in which the executive branch of the government is partially constrained. These constraints credibly limit intervention under normal conditions but can be overridden when a sufficiently large fraction of the population is in distress. Households anticipate this and strategically coordinate their financial risks through public markets, creating collective distress that compels government bailouts. Weaker constraints lower the threshold for intervention, making implicit guarantees more likely. The model explains why implicit guarantees are prevalent in China and predicts that such guarantees may discontinuously emerge elsewhere as executive constraints gradually weaken.

This paper examines the consequences of Chinese regulators deviating from a long-standing full bailout policy in addressing the distress of a city-level commercial bank. This policy shift led to a persistent widening of credit spreads and a significant decline in funding ratios for negotiable certificates of deposit issued by small banks relative to large ones. Our empirical analysis reveals a novel contagion mechanism driven by reduced confidence in future bailouts (implicit non-guarantee), contributing to the subsequent collapse of other small banks. However, in the longer term, this policy shift improved price efficiency, credit allocation, and discouraged risk-taking among small banks.

This study explores the relationship between board chairs' early-life experience in the Great Chinese Famine and the debt maturity choices made by Chinese listed firms between 2000 and 2017. Our findings indicate that board chairs with famine experience exhibit a propensity towards long-term debt usage. We argue that this finding can be attributed to a risk-averse rather than altruistic orientation among board chairs who have experienced famine. Our results are particularly salient for firms with lower asset redeployability, higher distress risk, no political affiliations, and those that are not stateowned enterprises. Furthermore, this study provides three analyses to support the risk aversion traits: (1) board chairs with disaster experience underestimate their company's profit potential, (2) board chairs located in areas with higher mortality rates exhibit more obvious risk aversion behavior, and (3) extending the debt maturity date, board chairs can effectively increase company investment and mitigate the underinvestment problem.

This paper models the effect of corporate information preference on stock return volatility based on optimization problems of information decisions for firms and investors. Our model hypothesizes a positive correlation between corporate information preference and volatility. Utilizing the ideal institutional background of the Chinese stock market, we empirically confirm that corporate information preference has a positive impact on volatility, particularly for firms facing more severe financial distress, limited investor attention, and fewer analyst coverage. Our study provides a new perspective for analyzing the interaction between information supply and asset price dynamics.

How much value has been lost in the Chinese bankruptcy system due to excessive liquidation of companies whose going concern value is greater than the liquidation value? I compile new judiciary bankruptcy auction data covering all bankruptcy asset sales from 2017 to 2022 in China. I estimate the valuation of the asset for both the final buyer and creditor through the revealed preference method using an auction model. On average, excessive liquidation results in a 13.5% welfare loss. However, solely considering the liquidation process, an 8% welfare gain is derived from selling the asset without transferring it to the creditors. Firms that are (1) larger in total asset size, (2) have less information disclosure, (3) have less access to the financial market, and (4) possess a higher fraction of intangible assets are more vulnerable to such welfare loss. Overall, this paper suggests that policies promoting bankruptcy reorganization by introducing distressed investors who target larger bankruptcy firms suffering more from information asymmetry will significantly enhance welfare in the Chinese bankruptcy market.

Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2015 to 2022, a difference-in-differences model is employed to empirically examine the impact of bankruptcy regimes, marked by the establishment of the bankruptcy court, on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP). The results show a significant decline in TFP among firms in regions following the establishment of the bankruptcy court. This result remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism tests reveal that bankruptcy court heightens firms’ risk aversion by endowing excessive rights to creditors. Consequently, firms tend to downwardly adjust capital structure, curtail innovation investment, and accumulate liquid assets as coping measures, ultimately contributing to a decline in TFP. However, well-developed market mechanisms can alleviate the negative impact of bankruptcy court excessively protecting creditors. Specifically, when firms are located in regions with weak government intervention and strong financial development, as well as in market environments with low uncertainty and strong competition, this negative impact can be mitigated. Moreover, we find that under bankruptcy court operations, while a series of risk reduction measures taken by firms triggers a decline in TFP, it mitigates the risk of financial distress. These findings provide fresh insights into the dual nature of creditor protection and offer valuable references for governments to improve the bankruptcy legal system.

This study examines the impact of climate-transition risks on trade credits for Chinese listed companies from 2007-2017. We develop an index of county-level climate-transition risks faced by Chinese-listed companies using data on local carbon emissions and carbon sequestration when moving towards net zero carbon emissions. Our two-way fixed effects OLS regression results find that local firms facing greater climate-transition risks significantly reduce their trade credit financing. Specifically, a one standard deviation of increase in Risk leads to a 0.73% decrease in trade credit. This reduction is more pronounced for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), firms operating in less competitive industries, and those headquartered in regions without carbon trading markets. Our main finding is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests including the use of alternative measures and lagged independent variables. Results on an Instrumental Variable (IV) method and a differences-in-difference (DiD) analysis suggest a causal relationship between climate-transition risks on trade credit. Further analyses reveal two plausible channels for the effect: increased financial distress risk and enhanced access to bank credit.

Whilst there is increasing research attention on predicting financial distress, the existing literature is subject to two specific limitations. The first is that a firm can experience a financial distress event (e.g., loan default, bankruptcy) more than once, yet most studies that model corporate financial distress prediction treat financial distress as occurring only once. This approach leads to an inefficient use of data with all subsequent events being ignored and subsequently a decrease in statistical power. Second, to account for the lack of independence between observations of repeated event data, the extant research utilising hazard analysis either has a separate analysis for successive distressed events or relies upon robust standard errors. In addition to a much smaller sample, a separate analysis yields the models that can be used to predict the survival of a distressed firm rather than the survival of a firm generally. The method of robust standard errors, while innocuous to one-time event data, ignores the possible downward bias in coefficient estimates for repeated event data. To address these two limitations, we treat financial distress as repeated events and apply more advanced methods (generalised estimating equations, random effects, fixed effects, and a hybrid approach) to account for the lack of independence between observations in discrete time hazard analysis. These different approaches are applied to a sample of listed companies in China over the 2007‒2021 period. We find that variables that are not statistically significant in models based on one-time events data become statistically significant in the models based on repeated events data, and that coefficient estimates are larger in their magnitude with more advanced methods than with the method of robust standard errors. We also find that among the advanced methods, a hybrid approach achieves substantially better out-of-sample prediction, particularly over a long-term horizon than other approaches. Our results remain robust in tests of robustness.

This paper investigates the consequences of Chinese regulators deviating from a long-standing full bailout policy in addressing a city-level commercial bank’s distress. This event led to a persistent widening of credit spreads and a significant decline in funding ratios for negotiable certificates of deposit issued by small banks relative to large ones. Our empirical analysis pinpoints a novel contagion mechanism marked by diminished confidence in bank bailouts, which accounts for the subsequent collapse of several other small banks. However, the erosion of confidence in government guarantees enhances price efficiency and credit allocation while discouraging risk taking among small banks.

Bank stress tests can be an effective information disclosure policy in persuading stakeholders to avoid “attacking” a bank, thereby decreasing the probability of bank failure during distress. This paper studies stress test design along two dimensions: strength and frequency, assuming stakeholders are privately informed and move sequentially. We characterize all robustly persuasive stress tests that ensure all bank stakeholders disregard private information and coordinate actions perfectly based on test results (“pass” or “fail”). Our ffndings indicate that more frequent stress tests can substitute for increased test strength in making the stress test result robustly persuasive. We then identify the optimal stress test policy and investigate how the optimal frequency and strength depend on macroeconomic conditions, bank idiosyncratic characteristics, and endogenous maturity choices of banks. Finally, we discuss how other regulatory measures may complement the stress test policy.