Compared to previous literature on external FinTech, this paper is more interested in the role played by bank FinTech. Based on panel data from Chinese commercial banks spanning 2010 to 2021, this paper investigates the impact of digital transformation on bank soundness and its potential mechanisms. The empirical findings demonstrate a positive association between digital transformation and bank soundness, driven primarily by strategic and management digitization. Mechanistic analysis indicates that digital transformation improves bank soundness by mitigating risk-taking behavior and promoting diversification. The positive effect of digital transformation is more pronounced in state-owned and joint-stock banks, banks with higher liquidity mismatch as well as in sub-samples with greater levels in external FinTech development and economic policies uncertainty. Additional analysis suggests that digital transformation can still enhance bank soundness even in the presence of relatively easy monetary and macroprudential policies, highlighting the harmonization and complementarity between internal innovation from digital transformation and external regulatory policies in maintaining banking stability. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature on bank FinTech, factors influencing bank stability. And it also provides a novel explanation for the relationship between financial innovation and financial stability.

As many ESG rating agencies have flourished to meet rising interests in ESG investing, we examine the information provider role of these rating agencies. We hypothesize that new ratings can add information useful to investors about rated firms besides any changes to the average level and dispersion in ratings. We exploited the empirical setting where the introduction of various ESG ratings in China is staggered over time and across firms. We show that an increase in the number of ratings by different agencies for a given firm will induce more mutual funds’ investments towards that firm. This is unexplained by rating inflation or rating shopping channels. We further show that such effect is more pronounced when incumbent and entrant agents provide complementary information. For different types of funds, we find different sensitivities to the arrival of new agents in accordance with their explicit requirements for ESG mandate. And interestingly ESG funds that track ESG indices are not responsive to new ratings as ESG indices are sticky in choosing the reference rating. We also provide evidence that the documented effects are not due to endogenous actions taken by incumbent agencies or the firms. Our paper provides interesting and causal evidence of the incremental information from additional ESG ratings which have important implications for the market competition and regulations of ESG rating agencies.

The integration of two vertically linked business units allows the single owner to choose the compensation contracts of the managers of the two units coordinatively and thus internalizes a production externality when there is technological synergy or complementarity. On the other hand, vertical integration changes the way in which a disagreement is handled when the two managers cannot agree on a transfer price for the intermediate product. Specifically, integration gives the single owner an extra option: transfer the product without establishing a price. Knowing that the owner cannot commit to costly outside trade, the managers have stronger incentives to disagree on the transfer price and hence the information that would be conveyed by the market prices is lost. Consistent with the conventional wisdom, two key determinants of vertical integration in our model are intermediate-product-market uncertainty and production synergy between the two units. The model yields new predictions linking both the integration decision and contract choices to several variables commonly thought to be important for vertical integration.