This study focuses on the unexplored informational role of labour dividend in the municipal corporate bond (MCB) market given China’s distinctive institutional origins. We aggregate the annual employments of public firms to the prefecture-city level and find that the firms’ employments aggregated are positively associated with contemporaneous scale of the MCB, whereas negatively associated with the issuing rate of the MCB. In the further analyses, we find that this information externality is conditional on the attributes of the employment characteristics (i.e., education, functional departments, and ownership nature). Mechanism analyses indicate that information accessibility, processing, dissemination, and efficacy are important channels through which the aggregate labour intensity is mobilized. And such information externality is reinforced after an institutional change enhancing the authenticity of employment information. This paper echoes previous studies of the macro value of aggregate accounting information and enriches the literature in labour and finance by highlighting that the labour dividend still exists and triggers MCB issuance in China.

When the government is simultaneously the owner and regulator of the securities market, the evolution of securities market regulation follows a path of compulsory institutional change. China’s government authorities have played a dual role in this process by acting both as the securities market regulator and the controlling owner of the stock exchanges. This paper uses the evolution of China’s securities market regulation from 1980 to 2007 to illustrate this theoretical framework. It provides unique evidence of how securities regulation evolves in response to government direction and supervision if the government is both the owner and the regulator of the securities market.