The influence of informal institutions such as history and culture on corporate behavior has been widely recognized, but few studies have been analyzed from the perspective of the ruling party culture. Based on the data of the old revolutionary base areas (ORBA) in China, this paper makes an empirical test on the role of Red Culture in promoting enterprises green innovation. First, this paper finds that the stronger the Red Culture in the region where the enterprise is located, the higher the level of green innovation.Secondly, in the samples with high political sensitivity and less cultural conflict, the promoting effect of Red Culture is more obvious. This paper not only expands the relevant literature on the influence of informal system on enterprise green innovation, but also enriches the research on the influence of Chinese unique culture on enterprise management decision-making.

The study examines the impact of Government-Backed Financing Guarantee (GFG) programs on employment in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using data from the Zhejiang Guarantee Group and non-listed SMEs in China. The findings demonstrate that these programs have a significant positive effect on employment in SMEs, particularly in private firms, and non-ZhuanJingTeXin firms. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that GFGs can enhance firm employment rates by mitigating financing constraints. It also contributing to firm revenue growth.

This paper examines whether employees avoid firms that commit environmental, social and governance (ESG) misconduct in China where ESG norms are weak. We find that the number of employees grows slower when firms have more ESG incidents after accounting for performance, risk, corporate governance, and time-invariant firm characteristics. The result is mostly attributable to social incidents and incidents that affect China, better educated knowledge workers, and high tech and non-labor-intensive industries, and is unlikely to be caused by layoffs. Overall, workers with better job fluidity respond to incidents that affect them personally.

This paper utilizes the COVID-19 pandemic as an exogenous shock to investor uncertainty and examines the effect of uncertainty on stock liquidity. Analyzing data from Chinese listed firms, we find that stock liquidity dries up significantly in response to an increase in uncertainty resulting from regional pandemic exposure. The underlying reason for the decline in stock liquidity during the pandemic is a combination of earnings and information uncertainty. Funding constraints, market panic, risk aversion, inattention rationales, and macroeconomics factors are considered in our study. Our findings corroborate the substantial impact of uncertainty on market efficiency, and also add to the discussions on the pandemic effect on financial markets.

Using a comprehensive dataset for Chinese listed companies from 2009 to 2021, we find that online media is negatively associated with cash dividend level, and the proportion of positive news has a negative moderating effect on this relationship. Our results support the "information intermediary" effect and exclude the "external governance" and "market pressure" effects. We further propose that online media weakens the positive relationship between cash dividends and past earnings (rather than the future), indicating that cash dividends contain signals of improvement in past earnings and are replaced by online news. We also find that only firms with more positive news pay dividends that have signaling effects, and there is a synergistic effect between positive news and dividend signal. Additional results show that the effect of online media on dividend policy is more pronounced than traditional media, which has almost no influence. Our main conclusions remain valid after addressing potential endogeneity issues and conducting various robustness tests.

We use a sample of China’s listed firms and employ a naïve Bayesian machine learning algorithm to reveal that environmental information intangibility superficially promotes green innovation. We demonstrate that this effect is channelled through the acquisition of institutional resources, including bank loans and government subsidies. The impact of environmental information intangibility on green innovation is most pronounced within state-owned enterprises, large firms, and politically connected firms. Furthermore, we confirm that environmental information intangibility does not lead to improvements in innovation efficiency or quality. This implies that green innovation may serve as a symbolic environmental activity. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the consequences of environmental information intangibility, greenwashing behaviour, and their relationship to green innovation.

Utilizing a unique data set of corporate site visits to Chinese capital market from 2013 to 2022, this study provides new evidence on the economic benefits brought by corporate site visits from a social network perspective. Specifically, we examine that whether information transmission through network of corporate site visits. Our results show that network centrality is positively associated with market information efficiency. This positive effect is robust and remains valid after a battery of robustness checks and endogeneity analyses, which verify the existence of information interaction in the network of corporate site visits. Furthermore, we find evidence that network of company visits positively influence market information efficiency through lowering information asymmetry between investors and listed firms rather than the “irrational factor” mechanism. In brief, our paper contributes to the existing research by presenting evidence that corporate site visits are significant venues for investors to gain and exchange information about listed companies.

This study investigates the impact of early leadership experiences on innovation performance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China. Using Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC) cross-sectional datasets, it examines the mediating role of psychological traits and the moderating effect of age in this relationship. The analysis employs fixed effects models to control for regional and industry-specific unobserved characteristics. Results indicate a significant positive relationship between early leadership experiences and innovation, with psychological traits mediating this relationship strongly in younger entrepreneurs. For older entrepreneurs, early leadership has a more direct and stronger impact on innovation. These findings underscore the importance of early leadership development in education phase and suggest that the influence and pathways evolve with age, offering particular insights into the formation and application of social and human capital in the entrepreneurial journey

We study the effect of China’s inland-favoring land policy on firm-level productivity by employing a research design combining difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity at the policy border. We find that the inland-favoring land policy decreased the firm productivity gap between developed (eastern) regions and underdeveloped (inland) regions. The relative changes are mainly due to slower eastern firm productivity growth rather than faster inland firm productivity growth. Eastern firms reduced their R&D expenditure and capital usage as a response to the policy.

The 2008 Labor Contract Law of China stipulates that all employment relationships must be covered by a written labor contract. This regulation considerably strengthened employment protection for workers. Using a unique longitudinal dataset, the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (2012, 2014, and 2016 waves), this article estimates the impact of the formal contractualization of labor relations on workers’ labor market outcomes, social insurance participation, and job satisfaction. We find that gaining a labor contract was strongly associated with an increase in salary, a decrease in working overtime hours, and greater participation in unemployment and pension insurances. In terms of job satisfaction, workers who gained a labor contract reported being less satisfied with their workplace environment and income than they had anticipated. This finding suggests that workers had higher expectations from the benefits gained through contractualization, than what they actually derived.