This study examines how firm-level exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic affects the speed of leverage adjustment among 3260 US-listed firms from 2019q1 to 2022q1. Using a novel measure of COVID-19 exposure, we find that higher exposure significantly reduces the speed at which firms adjust their leverage towards target levels. This effect is more pronounced for financially constrained firms and those operating in competitive markets. We further show that COVID-19 exposure adversely impacts corporate liquidity, default risk, and financial flexibility. Our findings highlight the role of exogenous shocks in shaping corporate financing decisions.

This paper explores the impact of the three kinds of heterogeneity of the executive team on the enterprise's total factor productivity and the mechanism of the impact of the heterogeneity of the executive team on the enterprise's total factor productivity, with the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in China as the research samples in the period of 2010-2022. The final results of the study found that (1) the heterogeneity of the professional background of the executive team, the heterogeneity of the overseas experience, and the heterogeneity of the financial background of the military contribute to the increase in the total factor productivity of the enterprise. (2) Improving the financial flexibility of the enterprise, improving the quality of the internal control of the enterprise, and improving the research and development and innovation of the enterprise are effective paths for the rise in the level of the enterprise's total factor productivity.

This research analyses the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic on China's economy, examining the divergent epidemic prevention policies used by local governments. Empirical evidence highlights that the emergence of COVID-19 cases correlates with a 1.13% reduction in quarterly GDP growth. However, when a city's secretary maintains an informal ties with the provincial secretary, GDP growth remains resilient. Analyzing micro-level data, we observe that city secretaries with informal ties tend to enact flexible anti-contagion measures. This flexibility stems from a decreased likelihood of reprimand for virus transmission. Such shields exclusively manifests when incumbent provincial secretaries share informal ties with central leadership. This underscores the interplay of political networks in shaping localized economic responses.

This paper proposes a novel bond return (price or yield curve) prediction methodology, unifying the classical no arbitrage pricing framework, which is ubiquitous and serves as a fundamental and theoretical building block in mathematical finance, and empirical asset (bond) pricing methodologies, e.g., Bianchi, Büchner, & Tamoni (2021) for treasury bonds and Gu, Kelly, & Xiu (2020) for equities. The methodology can be viewed as a unification of theoretical and empirical asset pricing frameworks. Our method is mathematically and theoretically rigorous, arbitrage-free and meantime enjoys the flexibility offered by the empirical asset pricing framework, i.e., a potentially rich factor structure and accurate function approximations via machine learning regression. Real market back-testing studies show that our predictions are accurate, in the sense that the formulated equally-weighted treasury bond portfolios in China exchange-based markets bear significant positive returns. The average hit rate for yield curve prediction reaches 77.71% across all tenors and the related long-only trading strategy based on the prediction results in an annualized absolute return as high as 12.35% with Calmar ratio achieving 7.31 for equally-weighted portfolios. As a by-product of our prediction framework, spot yield curves can be predicted accurately in an arbitrage-free manner.

Using a panel of listed Chinese firms over the period 2001-2008, we investigate the interactions among corporate investment, financing, and payout decisions within a simultaneous equations system, where each decision is treated as endogenous and is subject to the constraint that sources much equal uses of cash, as implied by the flow-of-funds framework. We find that capital investment and dividend payout, being the competing uses of limited funds, are negatively interrelated, whilst both of them are positively connected to net amount of new debt issued, suggesting the existence of a joint determination of corporate decisions under financial constraints. In addition, we find that the simultaneity among the corporate decisions becomes more intensified for firms that are more financially constrained, which may reduce managerial flexibility of Chinese firms. Therefore, our result reveals new insight into the complex interdependence of corporate behaviour under financial constraints.

本文针对商业银行流动性风险国际监管框架的演变，探讨监管重点与流动性风险变化的互动关系，从而梳理出国际流动性风险监管的目的、手段和发展趋势，进而研究其对我国流动性风险监管实践的影响。 本文从分析商业银行流动性风险的成因入手，指出其根源是银行存款和贷款业务所形成的期限错配，因此这种风险是银行在经营活动中难以避免的。流动性风险区别于银行面临的其他风险的主要表现是其低频率、高损失的特点，这使得银行一旦面临流动性危机的打击就很难在短时间内恢复过来，所以必须引起银行管理层和监管机构的重视。从20世纪90年代起单一的流动性指标监管方法已经逐渐被综合的流动性风险管理体系所取代，但各国之间尚存在较大差异。 本文对次贷危机前美国、英国和东亚各国的流动性风险监管框架作了横向比较。经过比较后发现，在流动性风险监管体系中，存在两种不同的方法，即定性方法和定量方法。前者偏重在制度层面对银行进行指导以提高其流动性风险管理能力，而后者则偏重以硬性指标客观计量和评估流动性风险，两者互有优劣，不可偏废。相对来说，英美国家因为金融制度比较完善、人才水平较高，其监管机构以使用定性方法为主；而东亚各国由于金融发展水平较低，产品结构简单，从业人员水平参差不齐，所以更偏好使用定量方法。 当各国金融监管机构还在为如何在定性方法和定量方法之间进行取舍的时候，美国次贷危机和之后席卷全球的金融危机不期而至，这大大加快了流动性风险管理理念和监管实践的发展速度。作为次贷危机的受害者，本文深入分析了英国北岩银行（Northern Rock plc）的挤兑危机案例，对危机背景、银行的经营特点、事件经过和后续影响都作了较为细致的论述，并指出银行自身流动性风险管理不善是形成危机的主要原因，这表现在不合理的资产负债结构、期限错配、利率缺口以及内部控制的缺失。尽管北岩银行管理层对于流动性危机的发生负有不可推卸的责任，但是监管失败的教训同样发人深省，这间接促成了巴塞尔银行监管委员会（Basel Committee on Banking Supervision，以下简称巴塞尔委员会）制定后危机时代的流动性风险监督管理新框架。 本文回顾了历年巴塞尔委员会制定的流动性风险监管文件，将其大致分为次贷危机前和次贷危机后两大类。本文指出，巴塞尔委员会早期制定的流动性监管框架已经很难适应飞速发展的国际金融形势，面临诸多迫切需要解决的问题，包括融资渠道的变化、资产证券化、复杂金融工具的泛滥、抵押品的广泛应用、支付结算系统和日内流动性需求以及跨境资金流。在这些问题中，很大部分也同样存在于危机前的北岩银行，因此危机的爆发带有某种必然性。巴塞尔委员会在次贷危机后发布的《流动性风险管理和监督稳健原则》和《第三版巴塞尔协议：流动性风险计量、标准和监测的国际框架》奠定了第三版巴塞尔协议下国际流动性风险监管新框架的基石。前者制定的17项流动性风险监管新原则和后者引入的流动性覆盖率（Liquidity Coverage Ratio，简称LCR）和净稳定资金比例（Net Stable Funding Ratio，简称NSFR）两大指标分别从定性方法和定量方法两方面完善了现有的流动性风险监管框架，这也反映了未来国际流动性风险监管的趋势。 正如在本文开篇提到的，流动性风险是银行不可避免的风险，对于中国银行业来说，也不能置身事外。经过分析我国银行业的流动性风险现状，笔者认为我国银行的资产负债结构仍属传统，偏重以存款作为融资来源、以贷款作为盈利来源，因此长期流动性风险不容忽视而短期流动性风险尚属可控。同时，不同类型商业银行的流动性风险来源也有所不同。此外，国内银行的流动性风险管理水平也有待提高。与巴塞尔协议类似，在次贷危机前后，我国的流动性风险监管框架也有了质的飞跃，这主要归功于中国银监会颁布的《中国银行业实施新监管标准的指导意见》、《商业银行流动性风险管理指引》和《商业银行流动性风险管理办法（试行）》（征求意见稿）。这些法规系统性地借鉴巴塞尔委员会的先进经验，辅以本地化的监测工具，从而形成了兼顾定性方法和定量方法的有中国特色的流动性风险监督管理新框架。 本文最后指出，无论是定性方法还是定量方法，在流动性风险监管中都起着举足轻重的作用，两者不可偏废。监管机构在设计流动性风险监管框架并实施现场或非现场监管时，应灵活运用定性方法和定量方法并结合压力情景评估银行的流动性风险，这样才能全面有效地实施流动性风险监管，避免系统性的流动性危机。另外，本文还建议我国监管机构在本地化国际流动性风险监管框架方面做更多尝试。 With respect to the evolution of the international supervision framework for commercial bank’s liquidity risk, this article aims to discuss the interaction between the regulatory focuses and the diversification of liquidity risk, in order to sort out the purposes, approaches and development trends of the international supervision on liquidity risk and their impacts on China’s supervision practice of liquidity risk. In regard to the causes of commercial bank’s liquidity risk, this article points out that the mismatch of maturity between the bank’s deposits and loans is the fundamental reason. Such risk is inevitable when conducting banking business. The features of liquidity risk (i.e. low frequency but extremely severe) distinguish itself from other risks that the bank faces, which hinders the bank from a quick recovery after being stricken by a liquidity crisis. Therefore, both the bank management and the regulators must draw their attentions to it. From 1990s, the monitoring method of single indicator has been gradually replaced with the comprehensive liquidity risk management system. However, there are still big variances between different countries. This article compares the framework for liquidity risk supervision between the United States, the United Kingdom and the East Asian countries prior to the subprime mortgage crisis. It is noted after comparison that there are two different approaches in the liquidity risk supervision system, namely the qualitative approach and the quantitative approach. The former emphasizes improving the bank’s liquidity risk management skill by guiding the bank from governance perspective, while the latter prefers measuring and evaluating the liquidity risk by means of objective indicators. Each of these two approaches has its pros and cons that neither should be overemphasized at the expense of the other. Relatively speaking, the Anglo-American countries prefer qualitative approaches due to their mature financial system as well as professional practitioners. By contrast, East Asian countries rely on quantitative approach because of their under-developing financial system, simple product structure and less experienced practitioners. When the financial regulators in various countries were still wondering whether to adopt the qualitative approach or the quantitative approach, the subprime mortgage crisis occurred in the United States and thereafter became a global financial crisis. This crisis accelerated the development of the management theory and the supervision practice of liquidity risk. This article analyzes the bank run on Northern Rock plc (the Bank) in the United Kingdom, a victim of the subprime mortgage crisis, by elaborating the crisis background, the business features of the Bank, the incident course as well as the subsequent impacts. The major cause of the bank run was the Bank’s own mismanagement of its liquidity risk, which included unbalanced structure of assets and liabilities, maturity mismatch, interest rate gap and ineffective internal control as well. Although the management of the Bank bore the ultimate responsibility for this liquidity crisis, the lesson of the supervision failure was thought-provoking. It also indirectly led to the renewed framework for the post-crisis liquidity risk management and supervision by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (the Basel Committee). This article reviews the historical documents of liquidity risk supervision that were formulated by the Basel Committee and divides them into two categories, i.e. before and after the subprime mortgage crisis. This article points out that the framework for liquidity risk supervision which was established by the Basel Committee at the early stage could no longer meet the rapid development of the international financial environment and faced many problems which need be solved urgently. These problems included the change of financing channels, asset securitization, misapplication of complex financial instruments, extensive use of collaterals, payment-settlement system, demand for intraday liquidity and cross-border cash flow. Northern Rock plc had most of these problems prior to its bank run crisis. Therefore, the crisis was with certain inevitability. After the subprime mortgage crisis, the Basel Committee issued “Principles for Sound Liquidity Risk Management and Supervision” and “Basel III: International Framework for Liquidity Risk Measurement, Standards and Monitoring” which laid the foundation of the renewed international framework for the liquidity risk supervision under Basel III. The former defines 17 new principles of liquidity risk supervision whilst the latter introduces two key indicators, i.e. the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) and the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR). Both of the two foundational documents improve the existing framework for liquidity risk supervision from qualitative and quantitative aspects respectively. They also reflect the trends of international liquidity risk supervision. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the liquidity risk is inevitable to all banks including the China’s banks. Based on the analysis of the status quo of the Chinese banks’ liquidity risk, the author draws the conclusion that the structures of assets and liabilities of the China’s banks are traditional, i.e. the deposits are the source of financing while the loans are the source of profit. Hence, their long-term liquidity risk cannot be ignored whilst their short-term liquidity risk is still under control. In addition, the liquidity risk management skills of the China’s banks need further improvement. Similar to the Basel Accord, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (the CBRC) promulgated “Guidance Opinions on the Implementation of the New Supervisory Standards of Basel III in China Banking Sector”, “Guidelines on Liquidity Risk Management for Commercial Banks” and “Administrative Measures on Liquidity Risk Management for Commercial Banks (Trial) (Draft for Consultation)” right after the subprime mortgage crisis, which made great improvement in the framework for liquidity risk supervision in China. By referring to the advanced experiences of the Basel Committee, together with the help of the localized monitoring tools, these regulations forms a new framework for liquidity risk management and supervision with Chinese characteristics which takes into account both the qualitative and quantitative approaches. Finally, this article reminds that both the qualitative and quantitative approaches play equally important roles in the field of liquidity risk supervision that neither of them is dispensable. When designing the framework for liquidity risk supervision and conducting the on-site or off-site inspections, the regulators should apply flexibility in the use of qualitative and quantitative approaches and attach importance to the stress scenarios to assess the bank’s liquidity risk. By this means, comprehensive and effective supervision on liquidity risk can be achieved to prevent systemic liquidity crisis. Furthermore, it is suggested that the domestic regulators should make more efforts to localize the international framework for liquidity risk supervision.

Policy actions by the Federal Reserve during the recent financial crisis often involve recapitalization of banks. This paper offers a theory of the non-neutrality of money for policy actions taking the form of injecting capital into banks via nominal transfers, in an environment where banking frictions are present in the sense that there exists an agency cost problem between banks and their private-sector creditors. The analysis is conducted within a general equilibrium setting with two-sided financial contracting. We first show that even with perfect nominal flexibility, the recapitalization policy can have real effects on the economy. We then study the design of the optimal long-run recapitalization policy as well as the optimal short-run policy responses to banking riskiness shocks.

We investigate the following important questions in international business: How do MNEs choose ownership strategies when facing strong uncertainty in foreign market entries? How are the choices affected by industry contingencies? Following the key tenets of real options theory, we propose that, under a high level of market uncertainty, MNEs choose more flexible (rather than more committed) ownership strategies that allow adjustment of investment decisions in future. We further suggest that using flexible strategies in response to uncertainty becomes less valuable for MNEs when the industry they enter in the host country enjoys strong sales growth potential, requires less irreversible investments, and has intense competition. Empirically, we analyze the ownership strategies (ownership structure and equity share) of over 5,000 new foreign investments in manufacturing industries in China during 2000- 2006. We find qualified support for our hypotheses and discuss the industry boundary conditions of adopting flexible ownership strategies in foreign market entries.

Based on a compound random process including geometric Brownian motion and Poisson process, we established a model which can describe the environmental uncertainty more flexible. And then, we use a stochastic optimal control model to address the issue of resource allocation. Our study conclusions indicate the following: (1) if rare events can be described using a Poisson process, then the fixed-point theorem can be used to solve resource allocation scheme; and (2) if a certain asset or a certain department’s facing a rare event leads to a reduction in value, then the rare event will not only affect investment in this asset or department but will also have ramifications for investment in related assets or departments. After that, we briefly discuss the resource allocation issues of financial institutions and manufacturing enterprises. The results show that the uncertain, flexible environmental of financial institutions can improve the efficiency of asset allocation. Manufacturing companies can respond effectively and positively to such uncertainty through a flexible asset allocation strategy. The contribution of our paper lies mainly in its use of new methods to describe uncertainty. When we re-define the environment of uncertainty, the flexible resource allocation scheme can effectively mitigate the impact of random adverse effects of the environment. In addition, if the description methods are closer to the facts themselves, then the scheme for flexibility in resource allocation may also bring about an excess return.

Business groups organized by pyramids enable the ultimate shareholders to control a portfolio of firms with less cash requirement. Further, corporate pyramid induces an internal capital market and makes capital transfer more convenient within the pyramid. In China, the state and business groups control a large number of listed firms through pyramidal ownership structure. What role does the corporate pyramid play in firms’ investment decisions? What is its influence on firm performance? This paper investigates the capital investment and firm performance from the perspective of pyramidal ownership structure. We find that as the layers of corporate pyramid increases, the capital overinvestment declines. The negative relations between pyramid and overinvestment exist for both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs), which indicate that increasing the layers within corporate pyramid reduces the likelihood of overinvestment of the listing firm and improving investment efficiency. Moreover, we show that the effects of increasing the layers of corporate pyramid on accounting performance are different for SOEs and NSOES. For SOEs, increasing the layers of pyramid results in less government interference on the listed firm and more flexibility in operate. Therefore, increasing pyramidal layers is positively related to accounting performance. While for NSOEs, pyramiding is to build an internal capital market for the ultimate shareholder’s capital investment. Although pyramid may reduce overinvestment of the listing firm, agency costs may offset the positive effect and induce a lower accounting performance.