After the Chinese stock market dropped one-third in three weeks in June 2015, reportedly driven by lack of liquidity due to the fire sales by margin buyers, the government used hundreds of billions of dollars to purchase shares directly in the secondary market. We validate that margin trading is associated with the surge of stock market before the crisis. We find that firms in systemically important industries, firms with more political ties, and firms with high risk of falling into liquidity spiral are more likely to be rescued. More importantly, compared with matched un-rescued firms, rescued firms did not have higher stock return, but experienced higher volatility, lower liquidity, and lower price efficiency afterwards. Market quality even deteriorated further after the subsequent sale of the purchased shares. Last, rescued firms experience a modest decline in operational performance, while capital structure and investment remained the same. Our evidence suggest that a direct purchase rescue in the secondary stock market could generate serious unintended consequences.

Investors have limited attention, especially when getting busy. They also possess a capability of fast thinking that requires little, if any, attention, although fast thinking leads to biased judgement and inferior outcome. From a Chinese online peer-to-peer lending market, we document a substantial amount of instant loan bids (i.e., those confirmed within only a few seconds) which help identify fast thinking. We find that lending decisions made within busy working hours with more attention constraint have significantly higher likelihood of being instant and significantly lower investment performance, suggesting that investors are prone to fast thinking when their attention becomes limited.

现有文献主要聚焦于风投机构本身的静态同质化价值增值职能，围 绕风投机构的增值职能与风险投资退出表现展开了大量研究。本文提出风险投资 与创业企业之间的匹配结构对风险投资退出表现的影响机制问题。基于 Fu et al.(2018b)的研究模型，我们通过进一步的理论分析发现:创投双方匹配结构会 影响双方各自最优努力水平，造成风投机构价值增值职能的动态异质性，表现出 影响风投机构的退出表现;同时，采用实证模型研究发现:创投双方的匹配契合 度越高越有助于改善风投机构退出表现，创投双方的匹配差异度对风险投资提出 表现呈现倒 U 型关系特征，支撑了理论模型的研究结论。本文为探索风险投资 退出表现与创业企业发展成长的决定机制提供了一个崭新的研究视角，充实和扩 展风险投资对企业成长发挥增值职能的研究基础。

We examine how mutual funds’ trading and performance respond to corporate misconduct. We exploit a combined dataset of corporate misconduct and holding information of mutual funds and show that mutual funds tend to sell and buy more stocks of corporations with misconduct. Mutual funds with more misconduct exposure perform significantly worse than those with less misconduct exposure. Specifically, the top quintile portfolio of funds with the highest levels of misconduct exposure underperforms the bottom quintile by 1.57% to 1.97% on an annualized basis. Findings show that mutual funds undergo significant losses by investing in misconduct firms, which is more likely to be motivated by overconfidence than limited recognition.

We investigate a prevalent yet overlooked form of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, i.e., government-launched CSR. Contrary to the conventional view that mandatory CSR destroys firm value, we document a positive market reaction to governmentlaunched CSR activities that aim to alleviate poverty. Analyses of operating performance and firm value confirm the positive impact. Further analyses suggest that while governmentlaunched CSR intervenes the operation of the firm by reducing the operating efficiency, firms enjoy higher operating margin, take more market share and save selling expense and labor cost by engaging their operations with the poverty-stricken areas. Participating firms are also rewarded more government subsidy. We further find that government-launched CSR activities achieve the stated objective of poverty relief. However, it also crowds out the firms' investment in other CSR activities. Overall, the evidence indicates that government-launched CSR has economy-wide implications than the traditional CSR.

This paper uses ensemble learning to build a predictive model to analyze the short selling mechanism of short institutions. We demonstrate the value of combining domain knowledge and machine learning methods in financial market. On the basis of the benchmark model, we use three input data: stock price, financial data and textual data and we employ one of the most powerful machine learning methods, ensemble learning, rather than the commonly used method of logistic regression. In specific methods, we use LSTM-AdaBoost and CART-AdaBoost for model prediction. The results show that the model we train have strong prediction ability for short-selling and the company' s financial text data is more likely to have an impression of whether it would be shorted or not.

The existing literature mainly documents the relationship between international and domestic fossil energy markets; however, empirical evidence of the dynamic relationships between fossil energy market and new energy market is lacking. This paper combines TGARCH model and copula model to explore the dynamic linkages and spillover effects between international fossil energy (crude oil, coal and natural gas) markets and China's new energy market using daily data from 4 January 2012 to 3 September 2018. The empirical results indicate that fossil energy returns and new energy returns are positive related over time. And the crude oil returns and new energy returns, as well as the coal returns and new energy returns have lower tail dependence, while there is upper tail dependence structure between natural gas returns and new energy returns. Furthermore, the extreme upside and downside risk spillover from international fossil energy markets to China's new energy market is asymmetric. Among the spillover effects, the downward risk spillover of crude oil market exerts the most significant impact on China's new energy market.

We examine the effects of controlling shareholder stock pledge on corporate acquisition decisions and associated performance. Consistent with our aggravated expropriation hypothesis, we find that pledging firms in China initiate more takeovers, but these acquisitions conducted by pledging firms experience lower announcement returns. We adopt the difference in differences and the instrumental variable approaches to establish causality. Channel tests further reveal that pledging acquirers overpay for the deals and are more likely to be involved in related party transactions. Cross-sectionally, we find that the relations between the share pledge and corporate acquisitiveness and returns are more pronounced for non-SOEs and firms with high-level excess cash. Lastly, we document that pledging acquirers underperform in the long-run in terms of lower ROAs and a greater likelihood of goodwill impairment. Overall, our findings indicate that controlling shareholders increasingly expropriate minority shareholders through self-serving corporate takeovers after the stock pledge.

This paper examines the association between acquisition performance commitment and earnings management in an emerging market where investor protection mechanisms are not well established. Based on a sample of acquisition transactions by listed firms in China during 2008-2017, we find evidence that firms committed to certain performance targets in acquisition transactions tend to engage in earnings management to meet their commitments. This phenomenon is more pronounced at the later stage of the commitment period. Further, the positive relation between performance commitment and earnings management is attenuated by a stronger governance structure. Finally, we find firms that managed to just meet performance targets experience worsened accounting-based and market-based performances and higher probability of goodwill impairments immediately after the commitment period. This paper contributes to the acquisition literature by providing evidence from an emerging market of post-contractual opportunistic behavior.

Using Chinese data, we investigate the impact of the China Semi-Mandatory Payout Policy that sets an explicit requirement that firms need to distribute at least 20% of their average annual net profits as cash/stock dividends accumulatively in three consecutive years before refinancing via seasoned equity offerings. Firms with the payout level below (above) the cutoff imposed by the Semi-Mandatory Payout Policy are regarded as Treated (Control) group. We find that Treated firms are more likely to cut investment, especially long-term innovation investment, and perform poorly compared to Control group due to lack of money. Treated firms also tend to use earnings management assisting in financing through the debt market as an alternative way to raise money. The negative impact of cutting investment caused by the Semi-Mandatory Payout Policy is more pronounced for firms suffering from severe financial constraints, firms having good corporate governance, and firms located in less financial development areas. We attribute findings to the difficulty of accessing capital that is implicitly increased the China Semi-Mandatory Payout Policy, which alters firms’ behavior leading to insufficient investments and destroys firms’ value.