In the face of severe climate change, researchers have looked for assistance from financial instruments. They have examined how to hedge the risks of these instruments created by market fluctuations through various green financial derivatives, including green bonds (i.e., fixed-income financial instruments designed to support an environmental goal). In this study, we designed a green bond index option contract. First, we combined an autoregressive moving-average model (AMRA) with a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model (GARCH) to predict the green bond index. Next, we established a fractional Brownian motion option pricing model with temporally variable volatility. We used this approach to predict the closing price of the China Bond–Green Bond Index from 3 January 2017 to 30 December 2021 as an empirical analysis. The trend of the index predicted by the ARMA–GARCH model was consistent with the actual trend and predictions of actual prices were highly accurate. The modified fractional Brownian motion option pricing model improved the pricing accuracy. Our results provide a policy reference for the development of a green financial derivatives market, and can accelerate the transformation of markets towards a more sustainable economic development model.

Based on the sample data of Chinese listed companies, this paper finds that the increase in customer concentration significantly reduces the level of enterprise employment. The research results are robust to a series of tests. Further analysis shows that the increase of financing constraints, the increase of enterprise risk and the decrease of profitability are the mechanism of customer concentration affecting enterprise employment. In addition, the negative correlation between customer concentration and enterprise employment is stronger for enterprises with small size, fierce industry competition, and increasing economic policy uncertainty.

Individual institutions marginal contributions to the systemic risk contain predictive power for its potential future exposure and provide early warning signals to regulators and the public. We use higher-order co-skewness and co-kurtosis to construct systemic risk contribution measures, which allow us to identify and characterize the co-movement driving the asymmetry and tail behavior of the joint distribution of asset returns. We illustrate the usefulness of higher-order moment augmented approach by using 4868 stocks living in the Chinese market from June 2002 to March 2022. The empirical results show that these higher-order moment measures convey useful information for systemic risk contribution measurement and portfolio selection, complementary to the information extracted from a standard principal components analysis.

Identifying and addressing the factors influencing the within-firm pay gaps has become a pressing issue amidst the widening global income inequality. This study investigates the impact of corporate ESG ratings on employee income and pay gaps using data from Chinese-listed companies between 2017 and 2021. The results suggest that ESG ratings significantly increase employee income. Further research indicates that ESG ratings exacerbate the within-firm pay gaps and income inequality due to the varying bargaining power among employees. This effect is particularly pronounced in non-state-owned and large-scale companies. This is also true for all kinds of companies in traditional and highly competitive industries. However, reducing agency costs and improving information transparency can help vulnerable employees with weaker bargaining power in income distribution to narrow their pay gaps. The research findings offer important insights to promote fair income distribution within companies and address global income inequality.

With the increasing executive-employee pay disparity in recent years, research on executive compensation has grown exponentially. This paper reviews all articles on executive compensation published between 2000 and 2022 in the six accounting journals with the highest impact index in South Korea and China (five journals in China), and evaluates and analyzes the research in both countries. The analysis results are organized as follows: First, the research on executive compensation started earlier in South Korea than in China; second, the focus of the research on executive compensation differs between the two countries; then, the study on the determinants of executive compensation varies between the two countries; forth, the proxies for firm performance are mostly the same in the two countries; and finally, most of the studies in the two countries assert that executive compensation has a positive impact on firm performance. Based on the above research, this paper confirms that the agency theory, which has been widely validated in Western countries, is also valid in Asian countries. In addition, it provides an essential reference for future research on executive compensation in Asian countries.

The relationship between corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and its value has garnered increasing attention in recent times. However, the utilization of ESG scores by rating agencies, a critical intermediary in the linkage between ESG performance and value, presents challenges to ESG research and investment as a result of inherent subjectivity, hysteresis, and discrepant coverage. Fortunately, news can provide an objective, timely, and socially relevant perspective to augment prevailing rating frameworks and alleviate their shortcomings. This study endeavors to scrutinize the influence of ESG-related news on the Chinese stock market, to showcase its efficacy in supplementing the appraisal of ESG performance. The study's findings demonstrate that (1) the stock market is significantly impacted by ESGrelated news; (2) ESG-related news with different attributes (sentiments and sources) have notably diverse effects on the stock market; and (3) the heterogeneity among enterprises (industries and ownership structures) affects their ability to withstand ESGrelated news shocks. This study contributes novel insights to the comprehensive and objective assessment of corporate ESG performance and the management of its media image by providing a vantage point on ESG-related news.

As digital technologies proliferate, firms increasingly leverage digital transformation strategically, necessitating new orientations attuned to digital technological change. This study investigates how digital orientation (DORI)- the philosophy of harnessing digital technology scope, digital capabilities, digital ecosystem coordination, and digital architecture configuration for competitive advantage – influences firms’ environmental, social, and governance performance (ESG_per). Analysis of Chinese A-share firms from 2010-2019 reveals DORI is associated with superior ESG_per, operating through the mediating mechanism of enhanced digital finance (DIFIN) as a fund-providing facilitator for sustainability initiatives. Additional analysis uncovers important heterogeneities – private firms, centrally owned state-owned enterprises, politically connected, and emerging companies exhibit the strongest DORI - ESG_per linkages. Prominently, the study findings are validated through a battery of robustness tests, including instrumental variable methods, and propensity score matching. Overall, the results underscore the need for firms to purposefully develop multifaceted digital orientation and furnishes novel theoretical insights and practical implications regarding DORI’s role in improving ESG_per.

This article examines the impact of the Green Financial Regulatory Policy on corporate strategic ESG behavior against the backdrop of the 2017 policy integration of “green finance” into the Macro-Prudential Assessment by the central bank. The research identifies that GFRP may shift corporate focus towards the disclosure of ESG performance while neglecting the actual practices of ESG engagement, potentially inducing firms to engage in ESG greenwashing. It is further posited that corporate green perception and executives’ environmental backgrounds serve as primary mechanisms in this dynamic. Additionally, the policy efficacy of GFRP on strategic ESG behavior exhibits heterogeneity

Developing an early warning model for company financial crises holds critical significance in robust risk management and ensuring the enduring stability of the capital market. Although the existing research has achieved rich results, the disadvantages of insufficient text information mining and poor model performance still exist. To alleviate the problem of insufficient text information mining, we collect related financial and annual report data from 820 listed companies in mainland China from 2018 to 2023 by using sophisticated web crawlers and advanced text sentiment analysis technologies and using missing value interpolation, standardization, and data balancing to build multi-source datasets of companies. Ranking the feature importance of multi-source data promotes understanding the formation of financial crises for companies. In the meantime, a novel Attention-based Fuzzy Neural Network (AFNN) was proposed to parse multi-source data to forecast financial crises among listed companies. Experimental results indicate that AFNN exhibits significantly improved performance compared to other advanced methods.

The e-CNY, with its information transparency and financial inclusion, activates an innovative solution to cure the financing obstacles among the small and medium enterprises in China. The research establishes a game model between enterprises and commercial banks embedded in information asymmetry, and incorporates the e-CNY payment choice within the framework to analyse the cure effect of e-CNY on enterprise financing obstacles. With equilibrium results calculated, it simulates the outcomes of changing parameters on the behaviours of enterprises and banks. The findings involve that, based on the incremental utility of e-CNY and subsidies attached, e-CNY is preferred in transaction, reducing the bad debt risk caused by misalignment when both achieving excess returns. The People’s Bank of China must strengthen a more transparent publicity of e-CNY and structure an inclusive system of financial regulation to well use digital currency and realise high-quality socio-economic development.