The improvement of production efficiency and the change of business model brought about by the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy have become an important driving force for industrial transformation and upgrading. This paper explains the necessity of digital transformation of manufacturing, the trends, paths and six technologies of financial digital transformation. In the digital era, relying on data, scenarios, and algorithms to explore the essential logic of business, make predictions and decisions based on business insights, and put forward higher requirements for financial empowerment business. As an important way for enterprise management transformation and upgrading, the core goal of financial digital transformation is to take "data-driven" as the main line, promote transformation based on the two principles of industry-finance integration and in-depth scenarios, and build "value-creating" finance, that is, based on the integrated application of digital technology, so that finance can expand the functions of supporting strategy, assisting decision-making, empowering business, preventing and controlling risks, lean management, operational excellence, quality and efficiency, compliance supervision and other functions on the basis of basic transaction accounting functions, and promote and even lead the value creation functions of enterprises. The article points out that the manufacturing industry should take enhancing competitiveness as the direction, financial management as the center, and improving quality and efficiency as the goal to accelerate digital transformation. Introduced Midea Group's financial digital transformation practices and results. It is proposed that enterprises should vigorously promote the deep integration of big data, Internet, cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, blockchain and the real economy, accelerate the digital transformation of finance, and inject new impetus into the high-quality development of enterprises.

This paper explores the relationship between ESG ratings and real earnings management using the data of Chinese listed companies from 2008 to 2021. We find that ESG ratings and real earnings management are negatively correlated. It reveals that the improvement of ESG rating will help to improve the level of corporate governance, standardize the business activities of enterprises and thus help to reduce the real earnings management of enterprises. Our findings still hold after controlling for potential endogeneity and robustness issues. Further analysis shows that internal and external oversight of companies further strengthens the negative relationship between ESG ratings and true earnings management. Overall, the impact mechanism of ESG rating on real earnings management revealed by us has clear policy implications for how managers can improve the quality of information disclosure in emerging markets.

The improvement of production efficiency and changes in business models brought about by the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy have become an important driving force for industrial transformation and upgrading. This paper expounds the necessity of digital transformation of manufacturing industry and its path selection. The important role of industrial Internet and Internet platforms is pointed out, and the characteristics of industrial Internet platforms such as Midea Group and Siemens MindSphere and their effects on industrial transformation are analyzed. Enterprises should vigorously promote the deep integration of big data, the Internet, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, blockchain and the real economy, accelerate the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry, and inject new impetus into the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry.

This study investigates and compares the effects of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)'s negative price suggestion on prices and trading activities in the crude oil futures market to discuss the cause of negative crude oil futures prices. Through event studies, our results show that the COVID-19 pandemic no longer impacts crude oil futures prices in April after controlled market risk, while the CME’s negative prices suggestion can explain the crude oil futures price changes around and around even after April 8 to some degree. Moreover, our study uncovers anomalies in prices and trading activities by analyzing returns, trading volume, open interest, and illiquidity measures using vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The results imply that CME’s allowing negative prices strengthens the price impact on trading volume and makes illiquidity risk matter. Our results coincide with the following lawsuit evidence of market manipulation.

We show that government deleveraging causes corporate distress in a distorted financial market. Our difference-in-differences analysis exploits China’s top-down deleveraging policy in 2017, which reduces local governments’ borrowing capacity through shadow bank financing. Private firms with government procurement contracts experience larger accounts receivable increases, larger cash holdings reductions, and higher external financing costs. These firms also experienced greater likelihoods of ownership changes and deteriorated performance. Effects are muted for state-owned enterprises, which enjoy funding privileges in China’s financial system. Our paper thus reveals a novel channel of allocation inefficiencies where government deleveraging amplifies adverse impacts of financial distortions.

In the metaverse era，the digital transformation of manufacturing is an inevitable requirement to reshape the manufacturing value chain and enhance industrial competitiveness. The Industrial Metaverse combines digital technology with real industries， promotes the efficient development of physical industries， and builds a new manufacturing and service system covering the entire industry chain and value chain. Metaverse is a more concrete complex of the digital future， and a new area of digital economic innovation and industrial chain expansion. The Industrial Metaverse is a work platform that combines real employees and virtual employees， completes the industrial manufacturing value chain cycle， enables virtual digital technology to empower the real world， and realizes the symbiosis and integrated development of the real world and the digital world. Copy and change the real world in the digital world， and realize intelligent， humanized and crowd-innovative innovation management. The paper expounds that digital transformation is the only way for high-quality development of enterprises， and the industrial metaverse is a new time and space for the transformation and rebirth of manufacturing，and an important driving force for the future industry. The machine vision measurement of GETECH.CN and the digital twin solutions of SIEMENS and GE were briefly introduced and their effects.

China’s housing purchase restriction (HPR) policy imposes administrative restrictions on households’ home purchase eligibility to curb speculative demand. We quantify households’ willingness to pay (WTP) to re-acquire such eligibility. The empirical results based on the staggered DID specification suggest that when local governments implement the HPR policy, the transaction prices of judicial housing auctions legally exempted from HPR increase by 18.91%. This HPR-exempted qualification premium can be converted to an estimate of 22.48% of the transaction price as buyers’ WTP for home purchase eligibility. The heterogeneity analysis also suggests that the WTP significantly increases when speculative incentives are stronger in the housing market. If policymakers in mainland China consider replacing the HPR policy with an additional buyer transaction tax like that in Singapore and Hong Kong, China, the WTP estimates can serve as the benchmark in setting the tax rate.

We examine empirically and theoretically the effects of industrial robot adoption on corporate financing. Empirically, using firm-level panel data on robot deployment in China, staggered across both provinces and industries, we find that robot adoption reduces the cost of debt and increases leverage. We hypothesize that the underlying reason is that being a substitute for labor, robots provide a hedge against fluctuations in labor costs. A model based on this hedging argument delivers additional testable predictions concerning determinants of the relation between robot adoption and corporate financing, which are borne out in the data, providing support for the proposed mechanism. Our evidence is inconsistent with alternative channels behind the observed relations.

In the era of digital economy, innovation in industrial chain and supply chain is an important part of industrial transformation and upgrading, and also an inevitable choice for enterprises to win competitive advantages. The competition between enterprises is not only about products and services, but also about the industry chain, supply chain, and value chain; The autonomy and controllability of the supply chain and its management level determine the quality of enterprise operation and development. This paper analyzes the characteristics of Midea Group's intelligent supply chain management, discusses the supply chain financial characteristics of Haier, Sany Group and Xiaomi, and confirms the importance of industrial chain and supply chain Financial innovation for high-quality development of manufacturing industry. Pointing out the necessity and feasibility of digital technology empowering innovation in logistics and supply chain management, smart supply chain is the guarantee for large-scale personalized customization, and supply chain finance plays an important role in the development of industrial clusters.

In the new wave of sustainable finance, firms are under increasing pressure from stakeholders to engage in ESG activities, among which the role of financial analysts is a key driving factors of corporate sustainability. This paper investigates the effect of analyst coverage on corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Using the dataset of listed firms in China from 2009 to 2020, we find that analyst coverage significantly improves the target firm’s ESG scores. We validate three non-mutually exclusive channels through which analyst coverage encourages ESG engagement: (1) encourage firms’ awareness on ESG issues via ESG-oriented information production; (2) alleviate ESG undervaluation and strengthen the financial relevance of ESG performance; (3) mitigate financial constraints to support corporate ESG activities. We establish causality with an instrumental variable estimation and a difference-in-differences approach. Our findings highlight the information intermediary role of financial analysts in driving corporate sustainability.