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.

Traditional production function theory treats executive characteristics as exogenous fac-tors, failing to capture how managerial heterogeneity dynamically influences productiv-ity. This study integrates Upper Echelon Theory and Dynamic Capabilities Theory to develop an endogenous production function framework where executive attributes serve as dynamic parameters reshaping capital and labor elasticities. Using fixed effect-s panel-data models, we analyze Chinese listed companies, examining how executives’ education, experience, and compensation interact with production parameters. Re-sults show executive characteristics significantly moderate factor productivity: higher education and board independence enhance capital productivity, while compensation intensity transforms labor elasticity from negative to strongly positive values. Hetero-geneity analysis reveals effects vary across ownership types and technology intensity, with technology-intensive firms showing strongest responsiveness. This research recon-ceptualizes executives as active architects of production processes, provides a rigorous framework for endogenizing management factors, and offers evidence-based guidance for corporate governance and talent strategy optimization.

This study constructs a three-dimensional space model based on fund investment styles, using a sample of open-end equity and mixed funds from 2005 to 2021 to measure the degree of style convergence. The research explores how style convergence impacts fund managers’ window dressing behavior. The results indicate that, after accounting for the effects of fund performance, style convergence exacerbates window dressing behavior among fund managers. Specifically, this is reflected in fund managers increasing their holdings in winning stocks and selling off losing stocks, which indirectly highlights the intense competition within China’s open-end fund industry. The findings remain robust after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests. Further analysis reveals that style convergence contributes to the risk of client attrition, thereby intensifying the agency problem within the fund industry. The window dressing effect due to style convergence is particularly pronounced in funds managed by individuals with lower educational backgrounds, lower investment skills, smaller family sizes, and lower institutional investor ownership. The paper offers valuable insights into the agency problems arising from investment style convergence and provides guidance for mitigating fund managers' self-interested behavior.

Does digital financial inclusion alleviate poverty? This study investigates this question by integrating the Digital Financial Inclusion Index of Peking University with microdata from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to examine how the expansion of digital financial inclusion affects household multidimensional poverty in China. Anchored in Amartya Sen ’ s capability approach and operationalized through the Alkire–Foster (A–F) framework, the study identifies multidimensional poverty across five key dimensions: income, health, education, insurance, and living standards. Probit models are employed to estimate how digital financial inclusion influences both the likelihood and structure of multidimensional poverty, while instrumental variable techniques are used to address potential endogeneity. Beyond the average effects, the study further explores the mechanisms through which digital financial inclusion contributes to poverty alleviation, focusing on three channels—promoting household consumption, increasing financial investment, and enhancing access to credit. The results reveal that digital financial inclusion significantly mitigates multidimensional poverty, particularly by improving income, living standards, and health outcomes, though its effects on education and insurance are limited. These findings underscore the transformative role of digital finance in fostering inclusive growth, suggesting that policies expanding digital financial infrastructure and literacy can amplify its poverty-reducing effects and advance equitable development.

Assessment in vocational education institutions is frequently organized around performance metrics—graduation rates, employment outcomes, and satisfaction scores—gathered too tardily to avert institutional dysfunction. In increasingly unstable policy situations, these models have become precarious: they quantify collapse more frequently than they avert it. This paper presents fuse logic as an innovative mechanism for risk-responsive governance in technical and vocational education and training (TVET). Utilizing systems control theory and the analogy of circuit breakers, fuse logic is a threshold-sensitive, dynamically activated assessment paradigm designed to disconnect institutional activities prior to complete failure. The research formulates a four-stage model—situational sensing, threshold definition, fuse activation, and adaptive reconfiguration—and implements it in a simulated scenario reflecting Chinese TVET trends. When critical metrics surpass risk thresholds (e.g., dropout rate, employment mismatch), fuse logic triggers systematic program shutdowns, stakeholder consultations, and conditional reintegration procedures.This study's contribution is in redefining evaluation from measurement to protection. It advocates a governance framework that permits temporary disconnection to maintain system integrity. Fuse logic enhances conventional quality assurance frameworks by providing an integrated, failure-tolerant layer of organizational resilience. The report concludes with a discussion on transferability, ethical considerations, and prospective avenues for implementation across varied educational systems.

This study employs a Triple-Difference (Triple-DID) model, utilizing balanced panel data at the district level from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou between 2018 and 2024, to critically evaluate the effectiveness of the Multi-School Zoning Policy (MSZP) in suppressing the capitalization of educational resources into housing prices and promoting educational equity. The research explicitly accounts for spatial and institutional heterogeneity as well as household strategic behavior.The results indicate that: (1) MSZP significantly reduced the average housing price premium associated with elite school districts by 15.2%, with the strongest effect observed in Beijing and the weakest in Hangzhou; (2) The policy's effectiveness diminishes as the spatial concentration of high-quality educational resources increases, highlighting persistent structural inequalities; (3) In areas characterized by resource monopolization and strong institutional inertia, the policy's suppressive effect on educational capitalization and its gains in educational equity are both constrained.The findings suggest that MSZP alone cannot fully overcome the "spatial lock-in" effect of high-quality educational resources. Achieving lasting equity requires complementary deeper institutional innovations, such as robust cross-district teacher rotation, transparent resource allocation mechanisms, and adaptive zoning algorithms. This research offers quantitative evidence for optimizing policy and institutional tools in the pursuit of comprehensive urban education reform.

This paper examines the impact of social distrust on household saving in China using a microsample from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). We find that social distrust leads to an increase in savings within households, in which households not living alone, with higher levels of education and urban households are more affected. We also find that social distrust affects household savings through raising risk expectations, reducing credit availability and amplifying risk spillovers from real estate markets.

The relationship between ESG factors and corporate performance is contentious, partly due to the literature's neglect of organizational demographic differences. Using data from 5,127 Chinese companies (2009-2022), we empirically analyze ESG's impact on corporate performance, factoring in the demographic heterogeneity of executive teams. Our findings indicate that although ESG indeed enhances corporate performance, its conversion effect is significantly influenced by the vertical dyads of gender and education within the top management teams (TMT). Additionally, our extended analysis reveals that these two types of vertical dyads exhibit distinct structural characteristics.

This study investigates the impact of early leadership experiences on innovation performance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China. Using Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC) cross-sectional datasets, it examines the mediating role of psychological traits and the moderating effect of age in this relationship. The analysis employs fixed effects models to control for regional and industry-specific unobserved characteristics. Results indicate a significant positive relationship between early leadership experiences and innovation, with psychological traits mediating this relationship strongly in younger entrepreneurs. For older entrepreneurs, early leadership has a more direct and stronger impact on innovation. These findings underscore the importance of early leadership development in education phase and suggest that the influence and pathways evolve with age, offering particular insights into the formation and application of social and human capital in the entrepreneurial journey