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.

This paper aims to empirically explore the cyclical attributes of dynamic correlation shifts between the stock and real estate market, and the factors that influence this correlation during different periods of the economic cycle. Our research uncovers a significant structural shift in the correlation towards the end of 2012. By taking into account macroeconomic growth, regulatory policies, financial market conditions, and developments within both the stock and real estate markets, we investigate the time-varying characteristics of these factors' influence. The results highlight the pronounced cyclical asymmetry of these influential factors. Currently, the wealth effect in China's stock and real estate markets has significantly diminished, and the credit-price effect has vanished. A marked seesaw relationship is evident between the two markets. This outcome supports that various restrictions imposed on the real estate market have reduced its investment appeal.

We investigate the impact of government environmental credit ratings on bond credit spreads based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2022. Empirical results demonstrate that a favourable environmental credit rating significantly reduces bond credit spreads, highlighting the incentivising effect of environmental credit ratings. Mechanism testing reveals that a good environmental credit rating diminishes information asymmetry and enhances an enterprise’s resource acquisition capabilities, reducing bond credit spreads. Furthermore, subgroup analyses suggest the reduction effect is more pronounced in enterprises with low debt and tax credit ratings.

We analyze the latent factors for the Chinese market through the recently proposed risk premium principal component analysis (RP-PCA). Our empirical research covers 95 firm characteristics. We demonstrate that the RP-PCA on the Chinese market can identify factors that capture co-movements and explain pricing. Compared to the traditional PCA approach, it explains a larger proportion of return variation in both double-sorted and single-sorted portfolios. The Sharpe ratios of the tangency portfolios are significantly higher than those of the standard PCA. Additionally, we show that the RP-PCA loadings are more closely associated with factor returns.

This study introduces a novel factor model based on self-attention mechanisms. This model effectively captures the non-linearity, heterogeneity, and interconnection between stocks inherent in cross-sectional pricing problems. The empirical results from the Chinese stock market reveal compelling ffndings, surpassing other benchmarks in terms of profftability and prediction accuracy measures, including average return, Sharpe ratio, and out-of-sample R2. Moreover, this model demonstrates both practical applicability and robustness. These results provide valuable evidence supporting the existence of the three aforementioned properties in crosssectional pricing problems from a theoretical standpoint, and this model offers a powerful tool for implementing profftable long-short strategies.

The Chinese stock market is known for high synchronicity and the market portfolio represents a prominent risk factor to investors in the Chinese stock market. We conjecture that as a result, stocks with high exposure to market risk in China earn higher returns. Indeed, we find that CAPM beta is positively related to daily and monthly stock returns in the Chinese stock market. To substantiate our argument, we further show that the betareturn relation is stronger during periods when market risk is high. Moreover, we find that market risk is priced only during the day but not overnight in the Chinese stock market. We explore the effect of several unique trading rules in China and show evidence that the “T+1” trading rule is likely the cause.

Regional financial development has greatly supported the rapid growth of Chinese municipal corporate bonds. This study introduces the concept of regional financial resources and constructs an informative measure of regional financial development by using principal component analysis (PCA), incorporating 13 indicators from three primary financial industries, including bank, security and insurance. Using a sample of municipal corporate bonds (MCBs) issued in China from 2009 to 2019, we find that an increase in regional financial development is associated with significant MCB credit spreads narrowing. This effect can be realized by improving fiscal stability and debt sustainability. Additionally, this narrowing varies among cities and provinces with different fiscal conditions and economic development. The results are also verified through a series of robustness tests. This study proposes possible policy suggestions for improving the Chinese fiscal management and MCBs market.

This study investigates the impact of the land rental market (LRM) on labor productivity in rural China. Particular attention is given to farm and non-farm labor productivity. Using 2012 household-level data and a multinomial endogenous switching treatment regression (MESTR) technique, we find that rural households renting-in farmland increased labor productivity in the farm sector by about 55%, while labor productivity in the non-farm sector decreased by about 6%. We also find that rural households renting-out farmland had lower labor productivity in both the farm and non-farm sectors by 13% and 9%, respectively. More family labor transferred from the farm to the non-farm sector after renting-out land.

The disordered and rampant local tax incentives have interfered with regular business competition and resource allocation, and whether they have the rationality of existence has also become an urgent problem to be clarified. In China, the government has undertaken a new round of policy adjustment to comprehensively sort out and standardize tax incentives, trying to realign value-oriented tax competition among local governments. Thus, this paper examines the real effect of standardizing tax incentives using China's State Council documents Nos. 62[2014] and No. 25[2015], with the measurement of abnormal tax burdens and abnormal fiscal subsidies. The result shows that this round of policy governance has maintained the steadiness of the overall tax burden and fiscal subsidy, and only abnormal tax burdens and fiscal subsidies have been reduced through structural adjustment; In addition, it has also taken into account the difference among regional economic development. The governance in the Midwest is generally lighter than in the East. Meanwhile, the effect of governance among different property companies has presented a reduced tendency as "state-owned enterprises -- local state-owned enterprises -- private enterprises".

This study investigates the compliance of local Chinese officials with the zero-Covid policy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. By examining biographical data from political elites and using a prefecture-day data set on risk levels – an indicator reffecting the status of zero-Covid policy - we discover a significant impact of prefecture leaders’ promotion incentives on their response to COVID-19 outbreaks. Our empirical analysis reveals that leaders with stronger promotion incentives tend to exhibit increased reactions to emerging cases. Evidence shows that such a phenomenon is driven by the different choices of the prefecture leaders facing relatively larger-scale COVID-19 outbreaks. Furthermore, local governors whose jurisdictions are more economically developed tend to enforce more stringent mobility restrictions. However, for prefecture leaders who oversee more developed regions and possess strong promotion incentives, the combined effects of these two factors tend to balance each other out in terms of pandemic response. These results suggest a natural tension between demands for crisis management during the pandemic and routine performance in economic development within the political framework of China.