Using Chinese A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2024, this study examines whether supply chain shareholding (SCS) affects stock price synchronicity. We find that SCS significantly reduces stock price synchronicity. This finding remains robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. Mechanism tests provide evidence consistent with information asymmetry and agency costs as two channels linking SCS to lower stock price synchronicity. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effect is more pronounced among firms with low supply chain concentration and those operating in unfavorable business environments. Overall, these findings identify SCS as a relationship-based governance arrangement that improves capital market information efficiency, particularly where relational governance and informal institutional substitution are more valuable.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are widely regarded as a critical instrument for industrial consolidation and capacity rationalization. Utilizing a dataset of China’s major national and regional steel enterprises from 1998 to 2013, this study empirically evaluates the efficacy of M&A in resolving over1capacity. We document a striking heterogeneity in outcomes: while M&A generally alleviates overcapacity, this effect is exclusively driven by inter-provincial transactions; intra-provincial mergers show no significant impact. Mechanism analysis reveals that inter-provincial M&A facilitates the transfer of control rights, effectively insulating firms from local government intervention. In contrast, intra-provincial mergers are undermined by local intervention through mechanisms of "internal control" and "external defense." Furthermore, despite the reduction in capacity, we find that inter-provincial mergers suffer from incomplete post-merger integration. There is a persistent lack of governance coordination, and no convergence in capacity management performance is observed between the merging entities over time. These findings offer critical policy implications for mitigating local protectionism and enhancing integration efficiency to resolve industrial overcapacity.

This paper explores the impact of the Integrated Government Service Platform (IGSP) reform, a large-scale digital regulatory initiative in China, on firms’ investment efficiency. Using a firm-level panel dataset of Chinese listed firms, we find that the IGSP reform significantly enhances firms’ investment efficiency. Mechanism analyses indicate that the IGSP enhances firms’ investment efficiency by improving governance service quality and convergence of governance services across cities within a province, thereby reducing economic policy uncertainty and reinforcing market expectations. The heterogeneity analyses reveal that the effect is more pronounced for firms without political connections, those operating in high business volatility and high-tech industries, and regions with stronger informal institutions. Finally, the IGSP encourages firms to expand their investment activities to other cities within the same province. This finding is fully consistent with the underlying mechanisms identified in this study. Our findings provide novel evidence on the economic consequences of digital regulatory integration and offer policy implications for advancing service-oriented and efficiency-driven governance in developing economies.

Digital technologies are often portrayed as disruptive levers for decarbonisation, yet many digital green initiatives improve transparency and efficiency without redesigning how environmental value is authorised, coordinated, and appropriated. We address this puzzle by theorising green digital business model innovation as the evolution of venture-level configurations under multi-domain selection in policy-steered sustainability transitions. Building on the activity-system view of business models and on innovation-studies, we define business model radicality as coupled reconfiguration across content, structure, and governance rather than technology novelty alone. We further theorise a cross-domain convergence requirement: configurations are retained only when they align simultaneously with institutional role allocations, market interfaces, technological infrastructures, and ecological verification demands. A comparative longitudinal study of three blockchain-enabled initiatives in China’s energy-finance nexus shows that radical disintermediation is screened out early when any single domain withholds authorisation or credible settlement, whereas incumbent-compatible configurations are retained through sequencing, interpretive pruning, and boundary-spanning alignment work. The study contributes to innovation studies by treating business models as meso-level selection objects, sharpening configuration-level radicality, and explaining why digital green opportunities often remain incremental in regulated transition systems.

Against the backdrop of escalating global carbon emission reduction urgency and China’s "dual carbon" goals, individual carbon trading (ICT) has emerged as a key measure to tap into consumer-side emission reduction potential. However, the current ICT mechanism remains in the exploratory stage, plagued by limited access to formal trading channels, strict entry barriers, and low public penetration, only 5 carbon exchanges in China allow individual participation, with fewer than 10,000 total participants. Focusing on mechanism integrity and integrating the carbon inclusive system, this study explores the influencing factors of ICT operation and constructs targeted optimization strategies. Based on Mechanism Design Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and Value-Belief-Norm Theory, a theoretical model covering five core ICT components was established. Using data from 1,200 questionnaires across 15 Chinese cities, multiple linear regression and hierarchical regression were employed to analyze the impacts of institutional fairness, technical usability, social atmosphere, and individual cognition. Results show: (1) Institutional fairness increases quota compliance by 38% through transparent rules; (2) User-friendly technical tools boost engagement by 1.8x, enhancing accounting accuracy and platform efficiency; (3) Social atmosphere moderates the effect of individual cognition on incentive conversion, particularly strongly in rural areas; (4) Individual cognition mediates the relationship between social atmosphere and trading platform efficiency. Additionally, optimizing mechanism components is more critical for long-term operation than single incentives. This study proposes a multi-dimensional optimization framework, providing theoretical and policy references for improving ICT integrity and advancing "dual carbon" goals.

Exploiting China’s 300 billion RMB Special Central Bank Lending Facility for the Clean and Efficient Use of Coal as a quasi-natural experiment across 12,816 firm-year observations from 2018 to 2023, we show that subsidized transition credit increased targeted coal and thermal power firms’ aggregate carbon emissions by 14.18 log points. We establish this backfire as a Financial Jevons Paradox, whereby credit-induced scale expansion overwhelms unit efficiency gains. Although the facility raised total factor productivity and stabilized emission in-tensity, it lowered debt costs, expanded bank loans, and induced production-biased patenting, proving that transition finance requires binding aggregate emission caps.

We examine whether and how the cultural background of corporate chairpersons, specifically clan culture, influences firm-to-firm lending decisions. Using hand-collected data on Chinese entrusted loans, a major segment of the country’s shadow banking sector, we find that firms led by chairpersons from prefectures with stronger clan culture are more likely to originate entrusted loans and charge lower spreads. We identify distinct mechanisms governing affiliated versus nonaffiliated transactions. In affiliated lending, our evidence suggests an in-group favoritism channel: culturally embedded chairpersons support affiliated parties despite higher ex-post default risk. Conversely, non-affiliated lending operates via an informational channel, where the positive impact of clan culture is more pronounced when geographic barriers are low, and manifests in larger size dispersion. Overall, our findings highlight the dual role of cultural norms in shadow banking, demonstrating that clan culture facilitates credit allocation while generating sharply different efficiency implications across relationship-based and arm’s-length markets.

This paper investigates the sales seasonality premium (Gustavo et al., 2020) in the Chinese stock market. We document a significant sales seasonality premium in the cross section of stocks listed on Chinese market. A long-short strategy of buying low-sales stocks and shorting high-sales season stocks generate a monthly return of 0.84% with a Newey-West t statistic of 2.94. The return spreads between low-sales season stocks and high-sales season stocks are robust to well-known anomalies and are larger in magnitude among large-cap companies. We also find that the return spreads are more pronounced within industries with relatively fixed patterns in product demand. The sales seasonality premium in the Chinese stock market is found to be a combined result of investor rationality and irrationality.

The global financial system is currently navigating a profound transformation driven by digitalization and the rise of decentralized financial innovations. In response, central banks are increasingly exploring or implementing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a sovereign digital evolution of fiat money. This study investigates the dual nature of CBDCs, evaluating whether they represent a strategic opportunity to modernize the economy or a systemic threat to existing financial stability. Employing a qualitative methodology, the research analyzes official policy frameworks from the IMF and BIS alongside diverse real-world case studies, including China’s e-CNY, the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, Nigeria’s eNaira, and the European Central Bank’s Digital Euro. The findings suggest that while CBDCs offer significant benefits—such as enhanced payment efficiency, reduced transaction costs, and improved financial inclusion—they also introduce critical risks. These include the potential disintermediation of commercial banks, heightened cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and concerns regarding individual data privacy and government surveillance. The study concludes that the successful integration of CBDCs is not merely a technical challenge but a social and strategic one. Adoption is heavily dependent on infrastructure, digital literacy, and public trust. Ultimately, the research highlights that there is no "one-size-fits-all" model; the future of money will be shaped by how effectively individual nations balance technological innovation with the preservation of financial architecture.

This paper develops a delegation-based framework to explain how institutional design shapes pricing incentives under risk. Using China’s 2016 IPO reform—which abolished prefunding requirements and transferred payment obligations from investors to underwriters—as a natural experiment, we show that introducing subscription-payment risk (SPR) renders underwriter’s partial residual claimants with respect to unpaid allocations. Building on Baron’s (1982) delegation model, we argue that the reform amplifies information asymmetry and induces underwriters to adopt more conservative pricing strategies to manage perceived payment risk. Empirically, IPOs exposed to SPR exhibit greater underpricing and lower offer prices, particularly when investor bids reflect stronger valuation pessimism. The effect tends to be less pronounced for reputable underwriters and when foreign institutional investors participate. Overall, the evidence demonstrates how risk redistribution and institutional frictions jointly shape underwriter behavior and pricing efficiency in primary equity markets.