Portfolio underdiversification is one of the most costly losses accumulated over a household’s life cycle. We provide new evidence on the impact of financial inclusion services on households’ portfolio choice and investment efficiency using 2015, 2017, and 2019 survey data for Chinese households. We hypothesize that higher financial inclusion penetration encourages households to participate in the financial market, leading to better portfolio diversification and investment efficiency. The results of the baseline model are consistent with our proposed hypothesis that higher accessibility to financial inclusion encourages households to invest in risky assets and increases investment efficiency. We further estimate a dynamic double machine learning model to quantitatively investigate the non-linear causal effects and track the dynamic change of those effects over time. We observe that the marginal effect increases over time, and those effects are more pronounced among low-asset, less-educated households and those located in non-rural areas, except for investment efficiency for high-asset households.

This study assesses the impact of China’s Green Credit Guidelines (GCG) 2012 on the quality of firms’ green innovation and their financial asset allocations. While examining patent applications and grants, our findings reveal that, although the GCG 2012 led to a significant increase in green patent applications, its influence on granted patents, especially in the invention category, was minimal. This highlights a discrepancy between innovation intent and quality, suggesting that highpolluting enterprises (HPEs) prioritize rapid policy compliance rather than substantial environmental improvements. However, HPEs seem to prioritize liquidity over long-term financialization, potentially indicating enhanced credit allocation efficiency.

Firstly, the article elaborates on the concepts of metaverse and industrial metaverse, pointing out that the metaverse has driven changes and optimizations in multiple dimensions such as urban form, social organization form, and industrial production form; Secondly, the metaverse has empowered urban governance in Guangzhou, improving the efficiency of urban management, enhancing the city's emergency management capabilities, improving the quality of interaction between people and the city, and promoting the construction of a smart city; Once again, the focus was on the practices and good results achieved by Guangzhou in utilizing blockchain technology, digital twin technology, generative artificial intelligence technology, unmanned aerial vehicles+AI and other technologies in urban governance and serving the public; Finally, it is clarified that metaverse related technologies will promote the integration of carbon based civilization and silicon-based civilization in urban and social governance. Humans can use silicon-based civilization technology to expand their living space and improve their quality of life, while silicon-based civilization can also draw inspiration from the culture and emotions of carbon based life, achieving more comprehensive development.

This study identifies an incentive-compatible mechanism to foster individual environmental engagement. Utilizing a dataset comprising 100,000 randomly selected users of Ant Forest—a prominent personal carbon accounting platform embedded within Alipay, China's leading BigTech super-app—we provide causal evidence that individuals strategically engage in eco-friendly behaviors to enhance their credit limits, particularly when approaching borrowing constraints. These behaviors not only illustrate the green nudging effect of BigTech but also generate value for the platform by leveraging individual green actions as soft information, thereby improving the efficiency of credit allocation. Using a structural model, we estimate an annual green value of 427.52 million US dollars generated by linking personal carbon accounting with BigTech credit. We also show that the incentive-based mechanism surpasses green mandates and subsidies in improving consumer welfare and overall societal welfare. Our findings highlight the role of an incentive-aligned approach, such as integrating personal carbon accounts into credit reporting frameworks, in addressing environmental challenges.

We develop an information choice model where information costs are sticky and co-move with firm-level intrinsic uncertainty as opposed to temporal variations in uncertainty. Incorporating analysts' forecasts, we predict a negative relationship between information costs and information acquisition, as proxied by the predictability of analysts' forecast biases. Finally, the model shows a contrasting pattern between information acquisition and intrinsic and temporal uncertainty, where intrinsic uncertainty strengthens return predictability of analysts' biases through the information cost channel, while temporal uncertainty weakens it through the information benefit channel. We empirically confirm these opposing relationships that existing theories struggle to explain.

We examine the effect of minority shareholder voting rights on labor investment efficiency using a sample of Chinese firms. Taking advantage of the difference-in-difference setting, our study reveals that the expansion of minority shareholder voting rights has a detrimental effect on labor investment efficiency. Through analysis of holding period and a managerial shortsightedness index based on textual analysis, we find that this outcome can be attributed to the fact that minority shareholders typically prioritize short-term gains over long-term corporate growth. Moreover, the impact of voting power is more pronounced in determining the investment efficiency of rank-andfileemployees. Our results are more significant for firms that face severe financial constraints, are non-state-owned enterprises, exhibit lower levels of internal control, possess fewer female managers, demonstrate lower human capital quality and higher labor intensity. Taken together, our paper suggests that minority shareholders could be myopia in making labor decisions.

We investigate the unintended real effects of regulator-led minority shareholder activism on corporate innovation. We use manually collected data from the China Securities Investor Services Center (CSISC), a novel regulatory investor protection institution controlled by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) that holds 100 shares of every listed firm. We find that by exercising its shareholder rights, the CSISC substantially curtails the innovation output of targeted firms. This effect is amplified in cases involving a high level of myopic pressure and few innovation incentives. We further observe variation in the real effects of different intervention methods. Textual analysis reveals that CSISC intervention with a myopic topic and negative tone contributes to a decrease in innovation. The results of a mechanism analysis support the hypothesis that regulator-led minority shareholder activism induces managerial myopia and financial constraints, impeding corporate innovation. Furthermore, CSISC intervention not only diminishes innovation output but also undermines innovation efficiency. In summary, our findings suggest that regulator-led minority shareholder activism exacerbates managerial myopia to cater to investors and financial constraints, ultimately stifling corporate innovation.

Site visits allow visitors to physically inspect productive resources and interact with onsite employees and executives face-to-face. We posit that, by allowing visitors to acquire investmentrelated information and monitor the management team, site visits offer disciplinary benefits for corporate investments. Using mandatory disclosures of site visits in China, we find that corporate investments become more responsive to growth opportunities as the intensity of site visits increases, consistent with the notion that site visits yield disciplinary benefits. We also find that the positive association between site visits and investment efficiency is more pronounced when visitors can glean more investment-related information and when they have stronger incentives and greater power to monitor managers. This positive association is also stronger among firms with more severe agency problems and higher asset tangibility. The overall evidence supports the notion that site visits serve as a unique venue for institutional investors and financial analysts to acquire valuable information and serve a monitoring function, which generates disciplinary benefits for corporate investments.

This article presents a comprehensive examination of technical trading rules in the Chinese yuan-based foreign exchange market. The investigation employs daily data spanning seven years for 14 developed and 10 emerging market currencies. The analysis encompasses a vast universe of 41,660 trading rules, representing a significant expansion over the previous studies. The stepwise tests, which was employed to address the data-snooping bias, discover excess profitability in at least half of the developed and emerging currencies, implying the heterogeneous market efficiency across currencies. Our results are robust to sub-sample analysis and different parameter values of the stepwise tests.

This paper examines the consequences of Chinese regulators deviating from a long-standing full bailout policy in addressing the distress of a city-level commercial bank. This policy shift led to a persistent widening of credit spreads and a significant decline in funding ratios for negotiable certificates of deposit issued by small banks relative to large ones. Our empirical analysis reveals a novel contagion mechanism driven by reduced confidence in future bailouts (implicit non-guarantee), contributing to the subsequent collapse of other small banks. However, in the longer term, this policy shift improved price efficiency, credit allocation, and discouraged risk-taking among small banks.