Using data from Chinese A-share listed companies for the period 2007–2022,we investigates the impact of financialization on the long-term use of short-term debt (LUSD). Our findings reveal that increased financialization leads to a stronger issue of LUSD. Financialization squeezes long-term investments and equity financing levels of firms, thereby leading to LUSD. Moreover, the rise in financing costs and the degree of financing constraints intensify the effects of financialization on LUSD. The smaller the scale of the enterprise, the shorter its operating period, the higher its operational risk, the greater the promoting effect of financialization on LUSD.

As China’s shadow banking sector expands, the impact of listed companies’ involvement in financial stability and the real economy accumulates increasing attention. Despite being a crucial channel for non-financial firms to participate in shadow banking, the literature has given limited consideration to the acquisition of wealth management products (WMPs). Using data from Chinese listed firms between 2007 and 2020, we analyze how excessive equity financing affects companies’ WMP acquisitions. Our findings indicate that over-financing significantly boosts WMP purchases among these firms, particularly in cases of private ownership, raised environmental uncertainty, and strict financing constraints.

This study investigates the effect of a large-scale Internet upgrade program in China on the consumption of rural households. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, we find that the Internet upgrade at the village level significantly increases rural households’ expenditures on total, online, and ofline consumption. Moreover, high-educated and young households, as well as those living in difficult-to-access villages exhibit a larger boost in total consumption. The mechanism analysis rules out income as the possible channel but highlights the role of online information exchange. ln particular, the variations in the increase in online time among households align with the heterogeneous responses in total consumption.

This study examines how short-sale constraints affect investors’ information acquisition and thereby shape stock price efficiency. By exploiting two settings that relax short-sale constraints in the US and China, respectively, we find that the removal of short-sale constraints increases investors’ information acquisition in both markets, but the effect is more prompt in China. Investors acquire value-relevant information, especially bad news, and improve their short-selling decisions in both markets. Lastly, information acquisition induced by the removal of short-sale constraints improves price efficiency. Our evidence shows that a reduction in trading frictions promotes information acquisition and improves price efficiency.

This study examines how foreign equity participation affect risk-taking of commercial banks using Chinese bank-level data from 2012-2020. Our analysis is based on strategic alliance theory and principal-agent theory, and we find that banks with foreign equity participation exhibit a significantly lower risk-taking compared to those without foreign equity participation, and this finding is shown to be consistent in a series of robustness tests. Additional analysis shows that equity checks and balances reinforce this negative relationship. Furthermore, we document that the incidence of such effects is more pronounced for Chinese banks which are smaller and less based on income diversification. Our results suggest that the proportion of foreign equity participation should be moderately increased to form equity checks and balances.

This article applies natural language processing (NLP) to extract and quan- tify textual information to predict stock performance. Leveraging an exten- sive dataset of Chinese analyst reports and employing a customized BERT deep learning model for Chinese text, this study categorizes the sentiment of the reports as positive, neutral, or negative. The findings underscore the predictive capacity of this sentiment indicator for stock volatility, excess re- turns, and trading volume. Specifically, analyst reports with strong positive sentiment will increase excess return and intraday volatility, and vice versa, reports with strong negative sentiment also increase volatility and trading volume, but decrease future excess return. The magnitude of this effect is greater for positive sentiment reports than for negative sentiment reports. This article contributes to the empirical literature exploring sentiment anal- ysis and the response of the stock market to news on the Chinese stock market.

We find a negative relation between share repurchase and corporate risk-taking using a sample of Chinese listed companies covering the period of 2014–2021. Our analysis yields consistent evidence even after consideration of endogeneity issues and the conducting of other robustness tests. We find that the impeded effect of share repurchase on corporate risk-taking is more pronounced for Chinese non-state-owned enterprises, firms with high competition in the product market, and firms located in low marketization regions. The possible mechanisms underlying these dynamics include share repurchase increasing the restrictions on low-cost financing and reducing over-investment. Our findings provide important implications for policyand low-making and are generalizable to other emerging markets.

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 examines the impact of the rating of equity crowdfunding platforms in China on funding campaign success. We gather information from 2014 to 2021 on 583 fund raising campaigns. Our results suggest that campaign success is positively correlated with the reputation of the platforms but especially for the most reputable one. We also show that the level of technological intensity of the industries and services is positively correlated with the amount raised. Overall, our paper suggests that platform ratings provide a valuable signal to investors, especially when projects are risky and when information asymmetry is high.

Using the staggered intercity but within-province deregulation of local banks in China as exogenous variations, we evaluate the effect of banking integration across geographical segmentation on capital misallocation. Based on an administrative data set comprehensively covering Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that for firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), the integration increases physical capital by 19.3%, and reduces MRPK by 33.1% relative to low MRPK ffrms. Our findings are more pronounced for non-statedowned firms and firms with higher exposure to integrated banks. Integration also significantly increases the responsiveness of firms’ investments to deposit shock on other cities within the same province.