Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is intended to boost financial inclusion and limit threats to bank stability posed by private cryptocurrencies. Our study examines the impact of implementing CBDC on the bank stability of two countries in Asia and the Pacific, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India, that initiated research on CBDC within the last ten years (2013 to 2022). We construct a bank stability index by utilizing five dimensions, namely capital adequacy, profitability, asset quality, liquidity, and efficiency, using a novel “benefit-of-the-doubt” approach. Employing panel estimation techniques, we find a significant positive impact of adopting CBDC on bank stability and a moderating role of monetary policy. We also find that the effect is greater in India, a lower-middle-income country, than in the PRC, an upper-middle-income nation. We conclude that by taking an accommodative monetary policy stance, adopting CBDC favors bank stability. We confirm our results with various robustness tests by introducing proxies for bank stability and other model specifications. Our findings underscore the potential of adopting CBDC, when carefully managed alongside appropriate monetary policy, for enhancing bank or overall financial stability.

We study tail-risk contagion in Belt and Road (BRI) stock markets by conditioning on shocks from China and global commodities. We construct time-varying contagion indices from conditional higher co-moments (CoHCM) estimated within a DCC-GARCH model with generalized hyperbolic innovations, and apply them to daily data for 32 BRI markets. The higher-moment index isolates two channels: a China-driven financial-institutional channel and a WTI-driven commodity-real-economy channel, whereas a covariance benchmark fails to recover this separation. Furthermore, the system-GMM estimates link the China-conditional channel to institutional quality and financial depth, and the WTI-conditional channel to real activity. In out-of-sample portfolio tests, the WTI-conditional signal improves risk-adjusted performance relative to equally weighted and mean-variance benchmarks, while the China-conditional signal does not. Tail-based measurement thus sharpens identification of contagion paths and yields information that is economically relevant for risk management in interconnected emerging markets.

This study investigates the influence of smart supply chain management on the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance of Chinese manufacturing firms spanning from 2009 to 2022. Our findings reveal a positive association between smart supply chain management and enhanced ESG performance, a relationship consistently upheld across various analytical methodologies. Additionally, we uncover that smart supply chain practices stimulate corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure, contributing to heightened transparency and subsequently bolstering ESG metrics within firms. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the positive effect of smart supply chain management on ESG outcomes is particularly pronounced among firms that are operating in less competitive and more environmentally impactful industries, receiving heightened media scrutiny, and influenced by Confucian principles. This research provides actionable insights for firms seeking to advance their ESG initiatives.

The commodity and financial characteristics of carbon emission allowances play a pivotal role within the Carbon Emission Trading Scheme (CETS). Evaluating the effectiveness of the scheme from the perspective of carbon price is critical, as it directly reflects the underlying value of carbon allowances. This study employs a time-varying Difference-in-Differences (DID) model, utilizing data from publicly listed enterprises in China over the period from 2010 to 2023, to examine the effects of carbon price level and stability on Total Factor Productivity (TFP). The results suggest that both an increase in carbon price level and stability contribute to improvements in TFP, particularly for heavy-polluting and non-stateowned enterprises. Mechanism analysis reveals that higher carbon prices and stability can stimulate corporate engagement in green innovation, activate the Porter effect, and subsequently enhance TFP. Furthermore, optimizing the system environment proves to be an effective means of strengthening the scheme's impact. The study also finds that allocating initial quotas via payment-based mechanisms offers a more effective design. This research highlights the importance of strengthening the financial attributes of carbon emission allowances and offers practical recommendations for increasing the activity of trading entities and improving market liquidity.

The growing significance of sustainable development has underscored the importance of integrating corporate sustainability indicators into corporate strategies. As external stakeholders increasingly emphasize corporate environmential performance, social responsibility and governance (ESG), understanding its impact on corporate value becomes essential, especially in emerging markets like China. This research aims to bridge these knowledge gaps by empirically investigating the influence of ESG ratings on firms’ value among Chinese listed firms, with a special emphasis on the mediating roles played by financial distress and financing constraints. By analyzing data from listed companies of China over the period 2018 to 2022, this research explores the correlation between firms’ value and ESG ratings. The findings indicate a positive association between firms’ value and ESG ratings. Enhanced ESG ratings directly boost market valuation and indirectly elevate firm value by mitigating financing constraints and financial distress. Further analysis reveals the positive effects of ESG ratings are more noticeable in industries that are not heavily polluting and in state-owned enterprises. This research provides valuable insights for enterprise management by systematically examining how ESG ratings contribute to corporate value through the mitigation of financial distress and constraints, while also highlighting the variations in ESG strategy implementation across different types of enterprises.

How enterprises can leverage frontier technologies to achieve synergy between environmental governance and high-quality development has become a critical issue amid the deepening global push for sustainable development and the green economic transition. Based on micro-level data of Chinese enterprises from 2009 to 2023, this study systematically examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on corporate green governance performance and explores the underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that AI significantly enhances green governance performance at the enterprise level, and this effect remains robust after accounting for potential endogeneity. Mechanism analysis shows that AI empowers green transformation through a dual-path mechanism of “cognition–behavior,” by strengthening environmental tendency and increasing environmental investment. Further heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive effects are more pronounced in nonheavy polluting industries and state-owned enterprises, suggesting that industry characteristics and ownership structure moderate the green governance impact of AI. This study contributes to the theoretical foundation of research at the intersection of digital technology and green governance, and provides empirical evidence and policy insights to support AI-driven green transformation in practice.

Under the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, taking environment, social responsibility, and corporate governance (ESG) as the important investment factor has become an action guide and standard for capital market participants. The practice of the ESG concept is not only a new way for enterprises to form new asset advantages and realize green and low-carbon transformation, but also important access for promoting high-quality and sustainable development. Based on Chinese-listed companies within the period of 2009 to 2015, we investigate the impact of ESG responsibility performance on export performance as well as its mechanism. We theorize and find out show that ESG responsibility performance can significantly and stably promote enterprises’ export performance. Mechanism analysis shows that ESG can improve export performance by reducing financing costs and easing financing constraints, and the green technology innovation effect is also an important channel for ESG to affect export performance. Therefore, government should strengthen the supervision and incentive of ESG performance, encourage enterprises to improve their environmental, social and governance performance in order to adapt to the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutrality and promote the high-quality development of export trade. Future research may consider combining ESG accountability with other factors such as supply chain management, intermediate imports, and transnational spillovers to more fully understand its impact on export performance, so as to create more value for society.

It has been widely recognized that firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performances are crucial for shaping their information environments. Nonetheless, the impact of ESG performances on important analyst report attributes still remains clear. Our study reveals that superior firm. ESG performances significantly enhance the analyst report readability. The mechanism analysis demonstrates that this effect is primarily driven by increased information accessibility (the information acquisition channel) and greater analysts’ research efforts (the analyst effort channel). As expected, this effect is more pronounced in firms operating in highly polluted industries, firms with opaque financial infomration and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Finally, our findings reveal that the release of analyst reports triggers higher market reactions for firms with superior ESG performances. In overall, our study highlights the criticial role of firm ESG performances in boosting financial analysts’ information production process.

This study investigates the "stars effect" of recruiting overseas scholars as deans and its impact on academic output in China from 2001-2019. We find that appointing a returnee dean increases a department's English publications by 40% annually. This positive effect applies to both top-tier and non-top-tier journals, without crowding out Chinese publications. The magnitude of the effect correlates with the dean's international connections and the ranks of the destination and source institutions. Returnee deans enhance output through knowledge spillovers, expanded networks, and increased overseas personnel, but not additional research grants. Our findings demonstrate the positive role and extensive influence of power-granted talent initiatives in developing regions.

This study examines how full-time external supervisors affect corporate irregularities using listed Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as a research sample. We find that full-time external supervisors restrain corporate irregularities. This outcome continues to hold after accounting for potential endogeneity concerns. Further mediating effect analysis shows that full-time external supervisors mitigate corporate irregularities by curbing managers' opportunistic behavior. Additionally, the heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that the impact of full-time external supervisors on corporate irregularities varies significantly across different types of SOEs and internal control environments. Overall, this paper enriches and expands the literature on the effectiveness of full-time external supervisors in emerging economies and provides new insights for dealing with corporate irregularities.