This paper documents that the physical appearance of CEOs, specifically excess body weight, is priced in the capital market. In the absence of explicit health disclosures,market participants interpret obesity as a proxy for latent health risks and potential managerial disrupts, thereby demanding a compensation premium. Our analysis reveals that (1) IPOs of firms with obese CEOs have lower first-day performance, (2) these firms achieve a lower valuation, (3) the stocks of these firms have lower liquidity and (4) they provide higher stock returns thereafter. A quasi-natural experiment based on the invention of anti-obesity medications provides supporting causal evidence.

This paper investigates how government fiscal constraints transmit to the private sector through procurement. We exploit three rounds of VAT rate cuts in China (2017–2019) as exogenous shocks to local government revenues. Combining city-level fiscal pressure measures with 9,189 procurement contracts from A-share listed firms, we construct a firm-year exposure index weighted by procurement volumes across cities. We find that exposure to fiscally stressed government buyers significantly depresses firm valuation: a one-standard-deviation increase reduces Tobin's Q and price-to-sales ratios by 5.3% and 4.3%, respectively. This effect concentrates among private firms, those lacking industrial policy support, and firms with lower rent-seeking expenditures—precisely those with weaker bargaining power against government counterparties. Beyond valuation, such exposure leads to a subsequent deterioration in firm fundamentals, characterized by tightened liquidity constraints, reduced investment and financing, and worse information disclosure over a three-year horizon. Land finance partially buffers these effects. Our findings highlight an unintended micro-level consequence of macro fiscal policy: expansionary tax cuts designed to stimulate the private sector may inadvertently harm firms by weakening the government's capacity to fulfill procurement payments.

Mutual funds create liquidity for investors by issuing demandable equity shares while holding illiquid securities. We study the implications of this liquidity creation by examining frequent trading suspensions in China, which temporarily eliminate market liquidity in affected stocks. These suspensions cause significant mispricing of mutual funds due to inaccurate valuations of their illiquid holdings. We find that investors actively acquire information about suspended stocks held by mutual funds, driving flows into underpriced funds. This information is subsequently incorporated into stock prices when trading resumes. Our findings suggest that mutual fund liquidity creation stimulates information acquisition about illiquid, information-sensitive assets.

In this paper, we investigate alternative one-factor and two-factor continuous-time models with both affine and non-affine variance dynamics for the Chinese options market. Through extensive empirical analysis of the option panel fit and diagnostics, we find that it is necessary to include both the non-affine feature and the multi-factor structure. For performance evaluation, we examine various measures from both aggregate and dynamic perspectives. Our results are statistically significant.

This paper investigates the gambling preference of Chinese investors in the convertible bond (CB) market through a natural experiment—the 2018 amendment of Article 142 of the Company Law. Utilizing CB issuance data from 2016 to 2023, we employ a cohort difference-in-difference approach and find a 4% to 7% increase in IPO premiums for high-repurchase-expectation CBs across various measures. This significant increase indicates that the legal revision reshapes investors’ expectation and adjusts their valuation of CBs. Furthermore, the event-study analysis reveals the escalating impact of legal revision, driven by the herding behavior of gambling investors.

本文基于互联网企业价值评估的背景，重点探讨一种常用估值方法——相对估值法（Relative Valuation），并以阿里巴巴集团（Alibaba）为实证对象首先，文章回顾了互联网企业估值的特殊性与挑战；其次，介绍了相对估值法的理论基础、常用指标（如市盈率P/E、市净率P/B、市销率P/S、EV/EBITDA 等）及其优缺点；再次，从互联网企业特征出发，分析该方法在阿里巴巴所处环境中的适用性及限制。然后，结合阿里巴巴最新财报数据（截至FY 2024 期）整理公司基本资料、选取可比公司、计算关键估值指标，进而得出对阿里巴巴的估值区间与市场价值对比。最后，基于实证结果，从估值结果合理性、影响因素（如业务结构、成长预期、市场情绪）以及方法优化建议三个维度展开讨论。研究发现：对于快速成长、业务多元的互联网企业而言，虽相对估值法具备便捷性与可比性优势，但也易受到可比公司选取不当、成长预期偏差及无形资产难以量化等影响。论文建议在实际应用中，应辅以折现模型（DCF）等方法，并注意调整估值倍率以反映公司成长性与风险特征。本文的研究可为互联网企业估值提供一种实务参考，也为资产评估的教学与研究提供新的案例视角。

We conducted a nationwide field experiment with 4,800+ Chinese-listed companies, randomly raising ESG concerns to their management teams via high-visibility and high-stakes online platforms. Tracking the full impact-generating process, we find that companies respond to our concerns by providing high-quality answers, publishing ESG reports, and making commitments to investors. Over time, Environmental (E) inquiries boost stock valuations, while Governance (G) concerns prompt skepticism. Productive and opaque firms are more likely to respond, consistent with a signaling model where costly ESG actions signal firm quality under information asymmetry. Overall, ESG actions are likely driven by profit-oriented signaling rather than values-based motives.

The growing significance of sustainable development has underscored the importance of integrating corporate sustainability indicators into corporate strategies. As external stakeholders increasingly emphasize corporate environmential performance, social responsibility and governance (ESG), understanding its impact on corporate value becomes essential, especially in emerging markets like China. This research aims to bridge these knowledge gaps by empirically investigating the influence of ESG ratings on firms’ value among Chinese listed firms, with a special emphasis on the mediating roles played by financial distress and financing constraints. By analyzing data from listed companies of China over the period 2018 to 2022, this research explores the correlation between firms’ value and ESG ratings. The findings indicate a positive association between firms’ value and ESG ratings. Enhanced ESG ratings directly boost market valuation and indirectly elevate firm value by mitigating financing constraints and financial distress. Further analysis reveals the positive effects of ESG ratings are more noticeable in industries that are not heavily polluting and in state-owned enterprises. This research provides valuable insights for enterprise management by systematically examining how ESG ratings contribute to corporate value through the mitigation of financial distress and constraints, while also highlighting the variations in ESG strategy implementation across different types of enterprises.

In this paper, we present a rational expectation equilibrium model in which fundamental and ESG traders hold heterogeneous valuations towards the risky asset. Trading occurs based on private information and price signal which is determined by a weighted combination of these diverse valuations. Our findings indicate that higher level of ESG rating disagreement increases ESG information uncertainty, thereby reducing trading intensity among ESG traders and attenuating the price informativeness about ESG. We further discover that allowing fundamental traders access to ESG information increases the coordination possibilities in the financial market, leading to multiple equilibria exhibiting characteristics of strategic substitutability and complementarity. Additionally, through measuring the ESG rating disparities among four prominent agencies in China, we deduce that ESG rating disagreement negatively impacts price informativeness by decreasing stock illiquidity.

Recent research highlights the significant impact of managerial industry tournament incentives on internal firm decisions. However, their potential impact on external stakeholders-in the context of evolving product market relationships-has received scant attention. To address this gap, we examine the effect of customer aspiration, incentivized by CEO industry tournaments (CITIs), on supplier innovation. Utilizing customer-supplier pair-level data from 1992 to 2018, we establish that customer CITIs enhance supplier innovation, both in quantity and quality. Additionally, we identify that CITIs positively impact the relationship-specific innovation and market valuation for suppliers. The effect of CITIs is more pronounced when customers are larger, geographically closer, socially connected, and have long-standing relationships with their suppliers. The results remain robust to alternative specifications and considering potential endogeneity issues. Our study highlights the bright side of executives’ industry tournament incentives, which not only drive innovation within the sector but can also positively influence related sectors within the supply chain.