In this paper, we construct a content analysis structure to explore whether corporate governance information in voluntary disclosures can predict management expenses in the next term. Employing the site visit information disclosure of firms listed on the Chinese A-share market from 2012 to 2021, we find that corporate governance information disclosure is motivated by ownership concentration,and that corporate governance information can predict management expenses and comprises incremental information, indicating that the content analysis we construct is valuable and the disclosure of corporate governance information can mitigate the agency problems.There is a difference between state-owned listed firms and nonstate-owned listed firms.

The foreign capital flight amid pandemic outbreaks can result in propagation effects in the equity market. With a daily shareholding dataset, this paper investigates the trading behavior of foreign mutual funds in China when it was the epicenter of COVID-19 outbreaks and the subsequent period with global spreads. Using fixed effects and panel structural VAR models, we confirm propagation effects caused by the capital flight of foreign mutual funds. Substantial heterogeneities across foreign funds affiliated and unaffiliated with commercial banks have been uncovered, though they are both found to withdraw from risky stocks as an indication of a "flight to quality." Without implicit guarantees, unaffiliated foreign mutual funds liquidated immediately and more when the pandemic hit China. The resulting price shocks led to further deleverage by bank-affiliated foreign funds on their pre-pandemic risk exposure stocks. Our results shed new light on the behavioral theory of stock market trading featuring fund and stock exposure channels.

With market-oriented reforms in the economy, the Chinese government has promoted the development of risky financial markets, but evidence on the influence of social trust on risky financial market participation is scarce. Using three-wave longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Survey; and lagged variable, instrument variable, and fixed-effects models to address the endogeneity issues; we investigated social trust’s influence on risky financial market participation. We also estimated the effects of social trust by age, education, sex, and urban/rural resident groups. We found that social trust positively affected the probability of holding risky financial assets and their shares, however its effects were insignificant when addressing unobservable individual heterogeneity. The positive effect of social trust was greater for the youth, the highly educated, women, rural residents and high-income groups than their counterparts.

How does labor risk affect corporate’s bond financing? Using the unique institutional feature of government regulations in China, we provide robust evidence that firms with a larger employment size have significantly better access to bond credit. This effect is more pronounced in times of local labor market deterioration or economic slowdown, for low-skill intensive industries, or in places with career-driven government officials. Our results are not driven by differential financial constraints or information frictions. We further show that the employment bias allocates bond credit towards under-performing large employers and the performance-enhancing benefits from bond issuance diminishes with employment size.

This article aims to provide an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of PRC Securities Law 2020 which overhauls China’s securities regulatory framework to construct more efficient and transparent capital markets with enhanced investor protection and market integrity. The law constrains regulators’ administrative powers in deciding the outcome of IPOs as well as streamline the securities offering procedure. This article pays attention to key reform initiatives proposed by PRC Securities Law 2020, such as the registration-based IPO system, the enhanced investor protection and compensation regime, the cross-border supervision, and the harsher punishments for securities frauds. It also discusses the latest enforcement cases relating to high-profile financial frauds like the Luckin Coffee scandal which resulted in Luckin Coffee being delisted from NASDAQ in 2020. The analysis in the article is accompanied by relevant US securities law in the same area to offer a comparative angle, which is of interest to practitioners, academics and policymakers in major financial centres.

Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local leadership could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to impressing/pleasing their evaluator, relative to working toward the goals of the organization itself. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese local civil servants to study the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that civil servants do engage in evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, partly in the form of reallocating work efforts toward job tasks that are more important and observable to the evaluator. Importantly, we show that introducing uncertainty about the evaluator’s identity discourages evaluator-specific influence activities and improves bureaucratic work performance.

We identify negative spillovers exerted by large, successful manufacturing plants on other local production facilities in China. A short-lived alliance between the U.S.S.R. and China led to the construction of 150 "Million-Rouble plants" in the 1950s. Our identification strategy exploits the ephemeral geopolitical context and the relative position of allied and enemy airbases to isolate exogenous variation in plant location decisions. We find a boom-and-bust pattern in hosting counties: treated counties are twice as productive as control counties in 1982, but 30% less productive in 2010. The average other establishment in treated counties is unproductive, does not innovate, and charges high markups. We find that (over)specialization limits technological spillovers. This prevents the emergence of new industrial clusters and leads to a flight of entrepreneurs.

We analyze the effects of exposure to industrial robots on labor markets and household behaviors,exploring longitudinal household data from China. We find that a one standard deviation increase in robot exposure led to a decline in labor force participation (-1%), employment (-7.5%), and hourly wages (-9%) of Chinese workers. At the same time, among those who kept working, robot exposure increased the number of hours worked by 14%. These effects were concentrated among the less educated and larger among men, prime-age, and older workers. We then explore how individuals and families responded to increased exposure to robots. We find that more exposed workers increased their participation in technical training and were significantly more likely to retire earlier. Despite the negative impact on wages and employment, we find no evidence of an effect on consumption or savings, which is explained by an increase in borrowing (+10%). While there is no evidence of an effect on marital behavior, we document that robot exposure led to a small decline in the number of children (-1%). Finally, we find that robot exposure increased family time investment in the education of children (+10%) as well as the investment in children’s after-school academic and extra-curricular activities (+24%).

Rising concern over the impact of Chinese industrial policy has led to severe trade tensions between China and some of its major trading partners. In recent years, foreign criticism has increasingly focused on the so-called "Made in China 2025" initiative. In this paper, we use information extracted from Chinese listed firms' financial reports and a difference-in-differences approach to examine how the "Made in China 2025" policy initiative has impacted firms' receipt of subsidies, R&D expenditure, patenting, productivity, and profitability. We find that while more innovation promotion subsidies seem to flow into the listed firms targeted by the policy, we see little statistical evidence of productivity improvement or increases in R&D expenditure, patenting and profitability. This paper suggests that the “Made in China 2025” initiative may have not yet achieved its target goals.

This paper examines the impact and mechanism of digital finance on financial fraud by constructing a theoretical framework of digital finance affecting corporate financial fraud. We use panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018. The results that digital finance can significantly inhibit corporate financial fraud and improve the ability of financial institutions to identify financial statements. Thus, the incentive and opportunity for corporations to engage in financial fraud is directly reduced. The internal mechanism shows that digital finance can restrain corporate financial fraud by alleviating the financing constraints faced by enterprises, as well as reducing corporate financial fraud by reducing corporate leverage. These effects will reduce debt pressure, thus easing the motivation of corporate financial fraud. The results of heterogeneity analysis that digital finance has a significant inhibitory effect on financial fraud of enterprises with different scales and different property rights.