Digitalization is widely promoted as a means to enhance faculty development, yet in resource-constrained regions like Northwest China, structural inequalities persist. This qualitative case study examines how national policy, institutional capacity, and faculty agency interact to shape digital support in higher education. Drawing on institutional records and interviews with faculty from two universities, the study reveals stark disparities in funding, infrastructure, and training strategies. Research-intensive institutions benefit from policy-backed resources and expert-led programs, while regional universities rely on low-cost lectures and collaborations. Faculty report limited autonomy, disciplinary biases, and insufficient support for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this regional context, these findings challenge assumptions of resource neutrality and technological determinism in digital education policy. The study proposes a governance-oriented framework that emphasizes institutional responsibility, faculty empowerment, and context-sensitive digital strategies. It offers insights for policymakers and institutions seeking to advance equitable and sustainable faculty development in digitally transforming higher education systems.

The Excellence Initiatives represent a significant investment in higher education, yet little is known about the causal impact of these programs on doctoral students and future researchers. Using a comprehensive student-level dataset, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to identify how China’s Double World-Class (DWC) Project affects PhD students’ research productivity. Our results indicate that the DWC Project significantly increases both the quantity and the quality of research output among PhD students in supported disciplines, even after controlling for supervisor-related effects. In addition, these impacts vary significantly across institutional tiers and academic fields. Lower-tier universities experience considerable increases in publication volume with slight enhancements in quality, while top-tier institutions show no notable variation in either aspect. Disciplinary patterns also vary: Science and medicine show improvement in both measures, while engineering displays little change overall. These findings demonstrate how excellence initiatives influence human capital development via doctoral training and provide evidence-based recommendations for education policymakers aiming to maximize returns on strategic higher education investments worldwide.

Research Question/Issue: This study investigates whether and how political connections affect customer complaints in the Chinese market, using a comprehensive dataset from the country’s largest online complaint platform. Research Findings/Insights: Analyzing 22,644 firm-year observations from 2018 to 2023, we find that politically connected firms experience significantly fewer customer complaints. A one-unit increase in political connection strength is associated with a 9% reduction in complaints relative to the sample mean. This effect operates through two primary mechanisms: a reputation-motivation channel and a financial resource channel. The mitigating effect is more pronounced for firms in highly marketized regions, those with higher advertising expenditures, companies facing greater earnings pressure, and those with lower tangible asset ratios. Theoretical/Academic Implications: Our study contributes to the literature on political connections and corporate governance by demonstrating how political capital translates into tangible consumer experience advantages. It also advances research on the determinants of customer complaints by highlighting the role of internal governance mechanisms, particularly managerial political ties. Our findings support the Corporate Reputation and Financial Resource Hypotheses while challenging alternative explanations based on regulatory shielding or managerial complacency. Practitioner/Policy Implications: For corporate leaders, our results underscore the importance of reputation management and quality investment, particularly when political connections are absent. Policymakers should consider strengthening public monitoring institutions to reinforce reputational incentives across markets. Investors may use customer complaints as an indicator of product quality and operational stability in their investment decisions.

We examine whether firms with high organization capital (OC) are more likely to purchase Directors’ and Officers’ (D&O) liability insurance, using a panel of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2021. We document a robust positive association between OC and the propensity to carry D&O insurance. The effect remains statistically and economically significant after controlling for firm characteristics and employing multiple identification strategies to address endogeneity. We propose two economic channels through which OC affects D&O insurance demand, namely, agency and information asymmetry. Consistent with these mechanisms, we find that the positive OC–D&O relationship is significantly stronger in firms with weaker internal governance and those facing opaquer information environments. Additional cross-sectional analyses show that this effect is concentrated in privately-owned firms and in regions with more developed market institutions, suggesting that external pressures accentuate the value of insuring key decision-makers. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and remain stable after using propensity score matching, instrumental variable approaches, and the Heckman two-stage model. Overall, the findings highlight OC as a critical internal driver of corporate insurance decisions. Firms with substantial intangible assets strategically obtain D&O coverage to strengthen governance and reduce information frictions, especially in emerging markets like China where formal investor protections are still evolving.

This paper examines the interactional phenomenon where an institutional complainee initiates a complaint and becomes a co-complainant with their original complainant against a third party that is proposed to have caused grievances to both participants. Institutional complainees initiate their third-party complaints when their complainants repeatedly refuse to affiliate with their attempts to shift responsibility or their proposed solutions. This shift from being the complainee to being a co-complainant is regularly accomplished through practices in which the institutional complainee: 1) produces implicit counter-complaints; 2) partitions complainants and themselves as sharing similar identities; and 3) highlights and upgrades their own grievances. Once complainants affiliate with their complaints, institutional complainees attempt to end the complaint sequences. The interactions end with a sense of solidarity sustained between the participants, even though no satisfying solutions are offered to the original complainants. The findings suggest that institutional actors can make relevant their non-institutional identities and go against what is expected of them as institutional actors to achieve the institutional task of directing blame away from their institutions. Recorded phone conversations between local residents and various institutional actors during COVID-19 lockdowns in China serve as data for this study.

Against the backdrop of recurrent global crises, economic uncertainty, and mounting environmental and social pressures, corporate resilience—defined as a firm’s capability to withstand external systemic shocks—has emerged as a critical determinant of long-term sustainability. This study empirically exames the effect of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance on corporate resilience in China’s A-share market, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to identify causal effects. The sample comprises 651 A-share listed firms, excluding financial institutions, real estate firms, and ST/*ST companies, over the period from January 20, 2020, when the pandemic was officially announced in China, to June 30, 2024. ESG performance is measured as the average of 2018–2019 ratings issued by three major domestic agencies, thereby capturing firms’ pre-shock conditions and mitigating concerns of reverse causality. Corporate resilience is evaluated along two dimensions: resistance, measured by the severity of losses in net income, revenue, and stock price, and recovery, measured by the time required for ROA, EBIT, stock price, and Tobin’s Q to return to pre-shock levels. To ensure the robustness of the findings, this study employs linear regression models with industry-clustered robust standard errors, an instrumental-variable approach using R&D intensity and analyst coverage as instruments, and a Cox accelerated failure time model to estimate recovery duration. The empirical results indicate that stronger pre-shock ESG performance significantly enhances corporate resistance and shortens recovery time. Mechanism analyses further reveal that ESG strengthens corporate resilience by improving total factor productivity, alleviating financing constraints, and enhancing corporate reputation. These findings remain robust to multicollinearity diagnostics and a range of additional robustness tests. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence of the value of ESG in strengthening corporate resilience and offers important implications for firms, policymakers, and investors.

This study investigates how venture capital (VC) reputation affects initial public offering (IPO) exits in the Chinese VC market using a two-sided matching mechanism. Research that distinguishes the sorting and influence effects of VCs in the Chinese market is lacking. To address this gap, Chinese VC transaction data, comprising 3,606 VC firms and 8,173 investment transactions, was used to construct a structural econometric model. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo Bayesian estimation techniques were employed to identify the sorting and influence effects of VC reputation. We demonstrate that the likelihood of IPO exits is considerably increased by VC reputation, whereas historical investment experience has a dampening effect on exit outcomes. The IPO success rates are significantly higher for firms in the biotechnology, electronics, medical, and late-stage industries. The difficulty of IPO exits increases with investment age. Compared to influence effects, sorting effects were the dominant mechanism. VCs with a high reputation systematically selected firms with potential advantages, such as high-quality management teams, to promote IPO success. This study’s novelty lies in its application of an endogenous two-sided matching solution to the Chinese VC market. Using a structural model, we discovered the importance of the reputation sorting effect in the Chinese VC market and refined the VC’s investment preferences in high-tech industries. This study’s practical significance lies in the findings that enterprises must pay attention to the sorting capabilities of VC institutions, the government can guide capital flows to efficient exit industries, and VC institutions should optimize the resource allocation structure.

Prevailing research, assuming developed financial markets, concludes that Chinese firms heavily rely on “short-term credit for long-term investment.”We challenge this view, arguing that China's vibrant informal financial system provides crucial alternative funding. Consequently, the severity of this maturity mismatch is likely overestimated. To investigate this, we examine strategic alliances as a representative informal institution. Our analysis confirms that such alliances significantly mitigate maturity mismatch, revealing that they enhance information sharing and reduce transaction costs. This provides initial evidence of informal institutions' critical role in addressing this issue. Given the prevalence of similar arrangements in China—like private lending and inter-corporate financing—our findings highlight the need to look beyond formal systems. This perspective not only recalibrates the understanding of corporate financing in China but also opens ample avenues for future research on informal finance's role in emerging economies.

This paper examines the role of institutional investors in shaping pricing dynamics within China’s nascent infrastructure Real Estate Investment Trust market. Introduced in 2021, China’s REITs have rapidly gained policy and market attention as a tool for financing large-scale infrastructure projects through equity-based securitisation. Unlike mature REIT markets, China’s infrastructure REITs are characterised by a high concentration of institutional ownership dominated by state-owned financial institutions. Using panel data on first 9 REITs from May 2021 to April 2024, we find that institutional ownership significantly boosts the premium to net asset value. This effect operates primarily through two channels: reduced market liquidity and increased idiosyncratic return volatility, likely reflecting institutions’ trading activity and informational advantages. The findings highlight how institutional capital serves as a confidence signal in China’s emerging REITs ecosystem. The study contributes to the global REITs literature by offering insights from an emerging market context and provides policy recommendations to guide China’s REITs market development toward greater transparency, diversity, and long-term resilience.

In the realm of financial stability, accurate credit default discrimination models are crucial for policy-making and risk management. This paper introduces a robust model that enhances credit default discrimination through a sophisticated integration of a filter-wrapper feature selection strategy, instance selection, and an updated version of majority voting. We present a novel approach that combines individual and ensemble classifiers, rigorously tested on datasets from Chinese listed companies and the German credit market. The results highlight significant improvements over traditional models, offering policymakers and financial institutions a more reliable tool for assessing credit risks. The paper not only demonstrates the effectiveness of our model through extensive comparisons but also discusses its implications for regulatory practices and the potential for adoption in broader financial applications.