This study investigates how abnormally hot temperatures affect firms’ environmental behavior in China. We find that firms exposed to abnormally hot temperatures participate in more environmental engagement. We also find that this improvement effect is driven mainly by environmental concerns, including public concerns, CEOs, and governments. Our results remain intact after an array of robustness tests. Further analysis shows that the effect of abnormally hot temperatures on corporate environmental engagement is more pronounced in SOEs, heavily polluting firms, and firms located closer to local environmental protection agencies. Moreover, the positive impact of environmental engagement on firm value is stronger when firms are exposed to abnormally hot temperatures. Overall, this study sheds light on the potential stimulation of firms’ environmental actions by global warming, which is yet to be fully understood.

Corporate misconduct poses significant risks to financial markets, undermining investor confidence and economic stability. This study investigates the influence of World Heritage culture, with its social, historical, and symbolic values, on reducing corporate misconduct. Using firm-level data from China, with its rich cultural heritage and ancient civilization, we find a significant negative association between the number of World Heritage sites near a company and corporate misconduct. This suggests that a richer World Heritage culture fosters an informal institutional environment that mitigates corporate misconduct. This effect is robust across 100 km, 200 km, and 300 km thresholds and remains significant when using a binary misconduct indicator. The results also show that World Heritage culture enhances corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social capital, which in turn reduces corporate misconduct. Additionally, the impact of World Heritage culture is more pronounced in firms located in high social trust areas, those with high institutional investor supervision, and those farther from regulatory authorities. These findings advance academic knowledge and offer practical implications for policymakers and investors.

We study the mandated introduction of a supervised auction for the primary bond market in China. The regulatory intervention significantly reduced the cost of debt for Chinese issuers. Most of the benefits flowed from reduced agency conflict between underwriters and issuers. Using unique bidder-level data from a lead underwriter, we develop replicable tools and techniques to identify collusive bidding behavior resulting in artificial (and economically costly) increases in bond yields. Such evidence can benefit global regulators, issuers, and investors currently using unsupervised auction mechanisms, for example, in securities issuance, construction projects, and procurement.

This study documents how the political hierarchy plays a significant role in determining corporate environmental governance. By conducting difference-in-differences analysis to investigate listed firms in China, this study demonstrates that local and central SOEs headquartered in jurisdictions far removed from central government supervision have worse environmental governance than POEs. Verticalization reforms implemented in 2016 enable provincial environmental protection bureaus to direct lower-level bureaus. Local governments cannot control environmental protection bureau leaders for economic development. This study finds that the corporate environmental governance of local SOEs has significantly improved following the reform, as local environmental protection bureaus no longer have conflicts of interest with local governments. However, the reform has not resulted in improvements to corporate environmental governance in central SOEs, whose executives occupy higher status than provincial Environmental Protection Bureau leaders, nor in POEs, which were already managed before the reform. Further evidence indicates that local SOEs experience an increase in abatement investments and relationship building expenses following the reform. Lastly, our study reveals that verticalization reform costs are negligible. Local SOEs have not experienced a decline in financial performance or corporate valuation. This study suggests that policymakers should consider the political ranking of government agencies and enterprises to improve environmental governance.

The development of the wealth management market is based on the needs of investors. The logic of market regulation should also be based on the interests of investors. On the basis of summarizing the regulatory experience of the global wealth management market, suggestions are put forward to improve the system of China's wealth management market . The fundamental driving force for the establishment of a regulatory legal system for the wealth management market comes from the needs of the development of the wealth management market. Moreover, the structure and process of this institutional construction are also closely related to the structure and development of market demand. China's current wealth management market has become a huge financial sector, and the deepening of the market and the diversification of participants all put forward requirements for the construction of a fair and scientific regulatory system. Wealth management business is different from traditional financial business in many aspects such as function, business standard and business model, and its basic legal relationship is also far from traditional business. The commonality of business in China's current wealth management market is in line with the basic elements of the legal relationship of trust. From the perspective of the realistic basis and the nature of the industry, it is appropriate to define the basic legal nature of wealth management business as a trust relationship. Due to factors such as information asymmetry and economic scale, financial investors are in a serious imbalance and imbalance when they trade with financial institutions. Therefore, the financial supervision system should grasp this core contradiction, give investors the status of consumer protection, and establish the concept of protecting wealth consumers. The regulation of wealth management operators should grasp the requirements of the basic trust relationship, take the basic principle of supervising the performance of trustee duties by financial management institutions, and implement a series of rules for trustees to be loyal and prudent in financial management. These rules should focus on risk prevention, and include establishment of access standards for wealth management business, supervision of independent development of wealth management business, supervision of full performance of prudent management duties by wealth management institutions, and guidance for healthy development of wealth management institutions. The experience in the supervision of developed wealth management markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Singapore shows that the establishment of a legal system for the protection of wealth management consumers is an inevitable result of the development of the financial market, and it is necessary to set up special institutions and mechanisms to implement the concept of wealth management investor protection, and emphasize wealth management products. Providers' fiduciary obligations to investors, and functional supervision based on a unified system in the regulatory system can be used as a reference for China . China's wealth management market regulatory system include inconsistent rules, weak protection, biased guidance, and lack of independence. Due to the separate regulatory system, different game rules apply to homogeneous wealth management business operated by different types of financial institutions, resulting in rule conflicts and market injustice. However, the substantive rights of wealth management investors still exist in a vacuum that cannot be confirmed. At the same time, the status of consumers is far from being officially confirmed, and the consumer protection mechanism cannot truly achieve justice. As regulatory guidance still favors the concept and tools of supervising traditional businesses, wealth management institutions mainly expand extensively by selling products, and wealth management products also present serious "bond-like" characteristics. The "non-neutral " positioning of financial regulatory agencies has externalized into phenomena such as rule conflicts, "policy following suit" and "excessive maintenance of stability". Constructing and continuously improving China's wealth management market supervision system is: the purpose of supervision is to restore the effective operation of the market mechanism. The basic legal relationship in China's wealth management market should be recognized as a trust relationship. This is not only an essential requirement of the wealth management market, but also a practical need to integrate regulatory chaos. It is the trend of financial and economic development that the regulatory system positions the position of wealth management consumers. It should start with legislative policies, make key breakthroughs around consumers' substantive rights and protection mechanisms, and gradually improve investor protection mechanisms. The regulatory system should focus on supervising financial institutions to fulfill their fiduciary obligations, and establish sound access rules, business independence rules, prudent management rules, and strict market exit mechanisms. China's wealth management market supervision system should be based on unified legislation and gradually implement functional supervision in order to achieve effective management and harmonious development of the wealth management market.

This paper provides the first theory and evidence on the role of presale policies in the residential housing market. We start with constructing a novel dataset of unfinished projects, presale policies, and land auction outcomes across 270 major cities in China. We then identify 2,330 unfinished residential projects from 2010 to 2017 on a citizen complaint website run by the central government. We find that both presale criterion and postsale supervision of construction costs relate to a lower probability of unfinished projects. But only presale criterion relates negatively to the pace of new housing development, measured by developers' multitasking and land auction outcomes. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average bundle of presale policies is inferior to the Pareto frontier in our sampled cities. Tightening the regulation on postsale supervision by 2 standard deviations may lead to a 58% reduction in the occurrence of unfinished projects, while keeping the pace of new housing development unchanged. Eliminating unfinished projects would entail a drastic increase in both presale criterion and postsale supervision, with slower housing development.

Macro-prudential policy plays a crucial role in stabilizing the financial system and influencing banks' risk preferences and willingness to take risks. This study examines the influence of macro-prudential policies on bank risk-taking using unbalanced panel data from 126 commercial banks in China between 2010 and 2021. The difference-in-differences model is employed to analyze the data. The empirical findings demonstrate that implementing macro-prudential policies in China effectively enhances bank risk prevention measures. In other words, macro-prudential policy implementation facilitates the digital transformation of banks and subsequently reduces risk-taking behaviors. Moreover, the heterogeneity test reveals that macro-prudential policies have a more significant impact on the risk-taking behavior of commercial banks with higher capital adequacy ratios compared to those with lower ratios. Additionally, commercial banks with strong interbank dependence exhibit more pronounced effects on their risk profiles when subjected to macroprudential policies with stricter capital supervision requirements. Therefore, this study proposes policy recommendations for strengthening bank capital supervision through differentiated approaches, serving as a valuable reference for the regulatory authorities.

Establishing a comprehensive risk management system and establishing a sound and effective internal control mechanism are important conditions for the survival and healthy development of enterprises. Enterprises should continue to innovate their internal control mechanisms, continuously improve and strengthen their internal control and risk management functions, continuously improve their internal control effectiveness, and assist in high-quality development of enterprises. The article elaborates that the digital transformation of auditing helps to achieve internal audit goals and improve the effectiveness of internal control; Blockchain technology, due to its excellent characteristics of distributed decentralization, authenticity, transparency, and tamper resistance, will help transform the methods of financial and accounting business and audit supervision; The application of blockchain technology in the field of auditing will inevitably lead to the reshaping of audit work models; Blockchain technology will become a trigger point for the audit revolution, comprehensively empowering audit and risk management work. The article introduces JD's blockchain ABS standardization solution, while Tencent and TCL Group's industrial blockchain solve the reliable transmission of trust and value at low cost, confirming that the close combination of blockchain technology with enterprise finance and auditing can assist internal control and play an important risk prevention and control role in enterprise operations. The "blockchain+audit" can achieve online real-time audit, risk assessment and warning, and data analysis becomes the core of audit content; Blockchain+auditing will become an important tool for internal control and risk management in enterprises.

The improvement of production efficiency and the change of business model brought about by the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy have become an important driving force for industrial transformation and upgrading. This paper explains the necessity of digital transformation of manufacturing, the trends, paths and six technologies of financial digital transformation. In the digital era, relying on data, scenarios, and algorithms to explore the essential logic of business, make predictions and decisions based on business insights, and put forward higher requirements for financial empowerment business. As an important way for enterprise management transformation and upgrading, the core goal of financial digital transformation is to take "data-driven" as the main line, promote transformation based on the two principles of industry-finance integration and in-depth scenarios, and build "value-creating" finance, that is, based on the integrated application of digital technology, so that finance can expand the functions of supporting strategy, assisting decision-making, empowering business, preventing and controlling risks, lean management, operational excellence, quality and efficiency, compliance supervision and other functions on the basis of basic transaction accounting functions, and promote and even lead the value creation functions of enterprises. The article points out that the manufacturing industry should take enhancing competitiveness as the direction, financial management as the center, and improving quality and efficiency as the goal to accelerate digital transformation. Introduced Midea Group's financial digital transformation practices and results. It is proposed that enterprises should vigorously promote the deep integration of big data, Internet, cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, blockchain and the real economy, accelerate the digital transformation of finance, and inject new impetus into the high-quality development of enterprises.

China has now entered the pilot phase of the digital currency electronic payment, and the impact of the digital currency electronic payment on China's bank credit system is unknown. This paper analyzes the long-run equilibrium and short-run variation relationship between digital currency electronic payment and narrow money multiplier based on the long-run cointegration equation and short-run VECM using data from the first quarter of 2014 to the second quarter of 2022 for the scale of digital currency electronic payment usage and narrow money multiplier variables. It is found that the introduction of digital currency electronic payment will expand the narrow money multiplier by reducing the cash leakage rate and the excess reserve ratio, thus enhancing the credit creation capacity of China's banks; among the determinants of the narrow money multiplier, the proportion of factors that the central bank can control increases, and the central bank's monetary regulation capacity is enhanced. Finally, this paper proposes that the central bank should improve the technical construction of the central bank's digital currency, strengthen the cooperation with various participants, and enhance the supervision of merchant banks.