The discussion on the innovative effects of intellectual property pledge financing is a mainstream trend. In this context, this study has improved the existing research from several aspects, such as broadening the dimensions of innovation, adding dynamic analysis, refining multidimensional mediation mechanisms, and employing unique samples. Ultimately, we come to the following conclusions: (1) Intellectual property pledge financing suppresses enterprise innovation, especially innovation quality, but this pattern will be broken by raising the threshold of innovation conditions. The reason is that strict innovation conditions can lead to a poor innovation foundation for enterprises, which are rarely affected by the fluctuation of funds obtained from intellectual property pledge financing. (2) Intellectual property pledge financing has a non-linear effect on firm innovation, characterized by an increase followed by a decrease, suggesting that intellectual property pledge financing in current China can only provide a temporary stimulus for firm innovation. (3) The relationship between intellectual property pledge financing and enterprise innovation is strongly moderated by the ownership, type, and size of the enterprise, with the inhibitory effect of intellectual property pledge financing on enterprise innovation occurring mainly in state-owned enterprises, high-tech enterprises, and small enterprises, while its positive effects are more pronounced in private enterprises, non-high-tech enterprises, and medium-sized enterprises. (4) Financing constraints, internal incentives, external supervision, and signaling mechanisms are indeed key pathways through which intellectual property pledge financing affects firm innovation, especially when we analyse these mechanisms using dynamic models.

We investigate the effect of third-party certification for green bonds by analyzing its impact on issuer's future green innovation performances. We find that third-party certification for green bonds can significantly promote issuer's future green innovation performances. Furthermore, the promotion effect is more prominent in non-state-owned issuers, large issuers and heavy polluting issuers, and can be more significantly exerted by professional and reputable third-party certification agencies. Besides, third-party certification for green bonds can play the effect by reducing the issuer's tax expenditure, increasing the issuer's loan financing, and receiving a positive response in stock returns. But unexpectedly, it cannot play the effect by further reducing the credit spread of green bonds. Our findings indicate that independent external supervision can play a positive role in green bond issuance, but there is still a long way to go.

We examine the impact of state-owned shareholders on fraud within private firms. Utilizing a sample of A-share private listed firms in China observed from 2008 to 2021. We discover a significant negative association between state-owned shareholders and the likelihood of fraud in private firms. State-owned shareholders primarily act as inhibitors of fraud, and their effect on the probability of fraud being detected is not statistically significant. This finding remains robust even after conducting a series of sensitivity tests to mitigate potential selectivity bias and reverse causality endogeneity issues. In the analysis of heterogeneity, we found that state-owned shareholders play a more active role under conditions of imperfect external institutional development, and they also exert a more significant inhibitory effect on enterprises with lower governance levels and higher business risks. Our mechanism test demonstrates that the inhibitory effect of state-owned shareholders on corporate fraud is achieved by improving corporate governance and alleviating financial distress. This study also examines the impact of state-owned shareholders' local characteristics, external supervision mechanisms, and internal governance mechanisms in unique Chinese enterprises on fraudulent behaviour by private enterprises. Overall, our study provides empirical evidence that state-owned shareholder ownership is associated with reducing fraudulent behaviour within private firms.

In the wave of digital and intelligent transformation, corporate governance is undergoing profound changes. This paper, from the perspective of green governance and sustainable development, explores the new trends in corporate governance under this background, such as data-driven decision-making and the application of intelligent technologies in supervision; analyzes the new challenges faced, including data security and privacy protection, and the digital divide; and based on relevant theories, combined with practical cases and using data models and other methods, explores new paths, aiming to provide theoretical and practical guidance for enterprises to achieve the coordinated and simultaneous progress of digitalization, intelligentization, greenization, and sustainable development.

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.