We evaluate how prior mutual fund working experience affects private fund managers' performance. Using a novel Chinese private fund database from 2012 to 2016, we document significantly lower excess returns and higher left-tail risks for private fund managers with prior mutual fund working experience. Such effect is concentrated in switched managers with lower performance ranks in mutual funds. Additionally, the underperformance is attributable to reduced research support, change in investment styles, and deteriorated market timing skills, while incentive schemes help alleviate such underperformance. Our findings demonstrate the key role of industry-specific human capital in the asset management industry.

Environmental information disclosure is an effective way for corporate to fulfill environmental protection responsibilities and encourage environmental self-inspection and management. In this paper, we utilize the environment fee to tax reform implemented in 2018 as a quasi-experiment, to investigate the impact of mandatory environmental regulation change on firm environmental information disclosure quality. Using data from listed companies in China between 2015-2020, we found that the mandatary environment regulation positively affects the monetary and non-monetary environmental information disclosure in heavy polluting industries. We also found that, firms with higher environmental subsidies and market value tend to disclose more information. The mechanism analysis shows that external governance and internal control mediate the effect of mandatory environmental regulation on environmental information disclosure quality. Compared to a growing literature on voluntary regulation, our findings provide evidence emphasizing the role of mandatory regulation of government incentives in environmental improvement.

This paper studies how centralizing environmental administration affected air pollution in China. China launched a vertical administration reform in 2016 to empower upper-level Environmental Protection Bureaus to administer lower-level bureaus vertically through personnel control. Exploiting a stacked difference-in-differences strategy and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the verticalization reform significantly reduced air pollution. The effect was stronger in places where air pollution is less likely to be affected by spillovers from other provinces or where local governments paid less attention to environmental protection before the reform. Additionally, we find that the reform significantly increased the intensity of inspection by local agencies and environmental investments by heavily polluting firms.

Climate change has become mankind’s main challenge. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from shipping are not irresponsible for this, representing 3% of the global total; an amount equal to that of Germany’s emissions. The Fourth Greenhouse Gas Study 2020 of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) predicts that the proportion of GHG emissions from shipping will rise further, as global trade continues to recover and grow, along with the economic development of India, China and Africa. China and the European Union have proposed to include shipping in their carbon emissions trading systems (ETS). As a result, the study of the relationship between the carbon finance market and the shipping industry, attempted here for the first time, is particularly important both for policymakers and shipowners. We use wavelet analysis and the spillover index methods to explore the dynamic dependence and information spillovers between the carbon finance market and shipping. We discover a long-term dependence and information linkages between the two markets, with the carbon finance market being the dominant one. Major events, such as the 2009 global financial crisis; Brexit in 2016; the 2018 China-US trade frictions; and COVID-19 are shown to strengthen the dependence of carbon finance and shipping. We find that the dependence is strongest between the EU carbon finance market and dry bulk shipping, while the link is weaker in the case of tanker shipping. Nonetheless, carbon finance and tanker shipping showed a relatively stronger dependence when OPEC refused to cut production in 2014, and when the China-US trade dispute led to the collapse of oil prices after 2018. We show that information spillovers between carbon finance and shipping are bidirectional and asymmetric. The carbon finance market is the principal transmitter of information. Our results and their interpretation provide guidance to governments on whether (and how) to include shipping in emissions trading schemes, supporting at the same time the environmental sustainability decisions of shipping companies.

It has been confirmed that sustainable investments contributing to environmental protection can benefit from the deterioration of air pollution, but this influence mechanism has not been fully discussed. This paper proposes a mediation model to study air pollution's influence on green bonds. Theoretically, air pollution raises public environmental awareness and perceptions of physical health risks, leading to increased public concern. Enhanced public concern drives investors' green preference and environmental responsibility, thus expanding green bond demand. Our studies show air pollution is significantly positive related to public concern. Public concern positively links with green bond investment willingness, resulting in increased volatility. The total positive effect of air pollution on green bond is partly absorbed by the effect of public concern. These findings confirm the mediation role of public concern. In addition, major crisis events (e.g., COVID-19) may hinder the mediation process by generating a negative trend and distracting the public.

Low demand for crop insurance, even when subsidized at highly favorable rates, remains a challenge for policymakers in developing countries attempting to create insurance-based farm safety nets. Evidence from a series of surveys and experiments with 477 vegetable farmers in China reveals several anomalies in farmers’ demand for crop insurance as well as deviations from predictions under both expected utility theory and cumulative prospect theory. Farmers are willing to pay higher price for neutral-frame risk protection tool than for an insurance-frame equivalent. Moreover, they tend to be more likely to purchase low-coverage than high-coverage insurance, even when high coverage provides greater subsidized value. Among risk- and loss-averse farmers, who theoretically should be more interested in adopting risk protection tools, we find less willingness to purchase high-coverage level insurance.

The crypto and noncrypto markets used to be separated from each other. We argue that with the rapid development of stablecoins since 2018, risks are now transmitted between the crypto and noncrypto markets through stablecoins, which are both pegged to noncrypto assets and play a central role in crypto trading. Applying copula-based CoVaR approaches, we find significant risk spillovers between stablecoins and cryptocurrencies as well as between stablecoins and noncrypto markets, which could help explain the tail dependency between the crypto and noncrypto markets from 2019 to 2021. We also document that the risk spillovers through stablecoins are asymmetric—stronger in the direction from the US dollar to the crypto market than vice versa—which suggests the crypto market is re-dollarizing. Further analyses consider alternative explanations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional crypto holdings, and determine that the primary channels of risk transmission are stablecoins' US dollar peg to the noncrypto market and their transaction-medium function in the crypto ecosystem. Our results have important implications for financial stability and shed light on the future of stablecoin regulation.

Over the past decade, the rapidly digitizing economy in China has attracted much attention in both academic and policy circles. Most existing studies focus on the positive impact digitalization has had on China's inclusive growth. Few of them have attempted to measure the widening digital divide and its potential impact. Using the 2017 and 2019 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data, this paper: (i) provides the first evidence that the digital divide has a significant negative impact on household consumption. For every unit increase in the digital divide, the level of household consumption will drop by about 28 percent; (ii) finds the negative impact stems from an integrated channel of rising unemployment, intensified liquidity constraints, and declining financial literacy; and (iii) further discloses that the digital divide has differential impacts on household consumption by category, while hinders consumption diversification. The results are robust to correcting for potential endogeneity due to sample selection, household heterogeneity, and reverse causality. Our findings shed new light on some little-documented evidence and have profound implications for related socio-economic policies that fully utilize technology to drive efficiency and inclusivity in the digital economy.

We examine the role of borrowers' digital footprints in debt collection. Using a large sample of personal loans from a fintech lender in China, we find that the information acquired by the lender through borrowers' digital footprints can increase the repayment likelihood on delinquent loans by 18.5%. The effect can be explained by two channels: bonding borrowers' obligations with their social networks and locating borrowers' physical locations. Moreover, the lender is more likely to approve loan applications from borrowers with digital footprints, even though these borrowers may occasionally have a higher likelihood of delinquency. The use of digital footprints can remain legitimate under stringent privacy protection regulations and fair debt collection practices. Our findings suggest that digital footprints, as a new type of collateral, can ultimately enhance financial inclusion by facilitating the lender's collection of delinquent loans.

We examine the information content of changes in shareholdings after private issuance of public equity (PIPE) by mutual funds that participate in PIPEs in China. The results show that the changes in shareholdings is positively related to alpha and cumulative abnormal return (CAR) for PIPE issuers with high information asymmetry, suggesting that the participating mutual funds have superior information. These results are robust after controlling for investment skill, geographic location, and alumni relation. The positive relation between shareholding change and information content is driven by PIPE issuers with weaker corporate governance. In addition, the positive relation is stronger when the placement discount is lower. These results are consistent with a hypothesis that controlling shareholders/management in Chinese PIPE firms may collude with mutual funds to do tunneling.