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.

This study investigates the impact of CIO on the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. Our analysis is based on a panel dataset comprising 2395 Chinese listed companies throughout the period from 2007 to 2020. Evidence from empirical results shows that CIO is positively correlated with ESG performance. In other words, CIO enhance the corporate ESG performance. The issue of endogeneity was duly considered, and appropriate measures were made to address it. Furthermore, robustness tests were conducted, and the findings remained consistent and reliable. The examination of the mechanism indicates that CIO enhance internal control quality that facilitates the advancement of ESG activities within firms. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by examining the impact of external governance systems on the promotion of ESG activities in Chinese enterprises. This study adds to the existing body of scholarship on the implications of Common institutional ownership. Findings recommend several possible policy and economic ramifications that might support Chinese enterprises in their endeavors to incorporate ESG initiatives and contribute to the overall sustainability of society.

We examine the impact of bankruptcy court establishment (BCE) on corporate acquisition activities using hand-collected data of city-level BCE in China from 2008 to 2020. The results show that BCE promotes corporate acquisition activities largely due to mitigated information asymmetry and decreased deal inefficiency. Our results highlight the important role of judiciary reform in corporate acquisition decisions in emerging markets.

We demonstrate that personal political preferences of corporate managers influence cor- porate policies. Specifically, Republican managers who are likely to have conservative personal ideologies adopt and maintain more conservative corporate policies. Those firms have lower levels of corporate debt, lower capital and research and development (R&D) expenditures, less risky investments, but higher profitability. Using the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Sept. 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy as natural experiments, we demonstrate that investment policies of Republican managers became more conservative following these ex- ogenous uncertainty-increasing events. Furthermore, around chief executive officer (CEO) turnovers, including CEO deaths, firm leverage policy becomes more conservative when managerial conservatism increases.

Biodiversity conservation incurs substantial economic costs. We investigate how financial markets price the risks such costs induce, exploiting the “Green Shield Action,” a major regulatory initiative launched in China in 2017 to enforce biodiversity preservation rules in national nature reserves. While improving biodiversity, the initiative led to significant increases in bond yields for municipalities with these reserves. The effects are driven by increases in local governments’ fiscal risk due to expected increases in transition costs resulting from shutting down illegal economic activities within reserves and additional public spending on biodiversity. Investors show little non-financial consideration towards endeavors counteracting biodiversity loss.

Although sentiment-driven investors are believed to play an important role in the Chinese stock market, there are very few sentiment measures at the individual stock level based on their trading activities. Due to the unique “T+1” trading rule in China, the low overnight return of stocks reflects intensified trading activities from short-term speculators. Therefore, we construct a sentiment measure for individual stocks based on the close-to-open return (CTO). We find that CTO positively predicts future stock returns in the cross-section, supporting the idea that low CTO, as an indicator of sentiment-driven excess demand, leads to lower subsequent returns. This finding is not driven by firm-specific news and alternative explanations based on risks, investor attention, or investor underreaction. Further analyses suggest that investors overpay for low-CTO stocks because of their inherent preference for this type of stock.

Based on the expected utility under uncertain probability distribution, we explore whether the ambiguity of individual stocks is priced in China’s A-share market and the mechanism behind the ambiguity premium phenomenon. Theoretically, when the asset price is in a specific price range, investors with ambiguity aversion do not participate in the transaction of the asset. As the ambiguity of assets increases, investors with high ambiguity aversion withdraw from the market, and investors with low ambiguity aversion remain in the market (the limited market participation phenomenon); investors who remain in the market due to lower ambiguity aversion are also willing to accept a low ambiguity premium. Empirically, we use "the volatility of the distributions of daily stock returns within a month" to measure monthly ambiguity; and find that (1) the equal-weighted average returns of the most ambiguous portfolios (top 20%) are significantly lower 1.38% than those of the least ambiguous portfolios (bottom 20%); (2) ambiguity still significantly negatively affects the cross-sectional stock return after controlling for common firm characteristics; (3) the higher the ambiguity, the lower the future trading activity, the empirical results are consistent to the theoretical predictions. Those findings reveal the mechanism of the negative ambiguity premium in the A-share market, provide new ideas for further building a factor pricing model suitable for the A-share market, and provide a fresh perspective for preventing systemic financial risk.

Based on the expected utility under uncertain probability distribution, we explore whether the ambiguity of individual stocks is priced in China’s A-share market and the mechanism behind the ambiguity premium phenomenon. Theoretically, when the asset price is in a specific price range, investors with ambiguity aversion do not participate in the transaction of the asset. As the ambiguity of assets increases, investors with high ambiguity aversion withdraw from the market, and investors with low ambiguity aversion remain in the market (the limited market participation phenomenon); investors who remain in the market due to lower ambiguity aversion are also willing to accept a low ambiguity premium. Empirically, we use "the volatility of the distributions of daily stock returns within a month" to measure monthly ambiguity; and find that (1) the equal-weighted average returns of the most ambiguous portfolios (top 20%) are significantly lower 1.38% than those of the least ambiguous portfolios (bottom 20%); (2) ambiguity still significantly negatively affects the cross-sectional stock return after controlling for common firm characteristics; (3) the higher the ambiguity, the lower the future trading activity, the empirical results are consistent to the theoretical predictions. Those findings reveal the mechanism of the negative ambiguity premium in the A-share market, provide new ideas for further building a factor pricing model suitable for the A-share market, and provide a fresh perspective for preventing systemic financial risk.

This paper models the effect of corporate information preference on stock return volatility based on optimization problems of information decisions for firms and investors. Our model hypothesizes a positive correlation between corporate information preference and volatility. Utilizing the ideal institutional background of the Chinese stock market, we empirically confirm that corporate information preference has a positive impact on volatility, particularly for firms facing more severe financial distress, limited investor attention, and fewer analyst coverage. Our study provides a new perspective for analyzing the interaction between information supply and asset price dynamics.

As a vital documentation for assessments, rewards and punishments in terms of political promotions, the intellectual property pilot city policy (IPPC), an strategic incentive measure to enhance innovation capacities at the city and firm level, may play a prominent role in innovation fostering in China. Yet patent bubbles that focus more on quantity over quality have been thrown into doubt, as local cadres and firms shall pay more attention to the easier observable low-quality innovation performance amid the pressure of political task. this paper conducts an investigation that drew upon listed firm data from 270 prefecture-level cities and employs a PSM-DID design to evaluate the IPPC policy effectiveness on innovation quality and innovation quantity. The results are obvious: The policy have boosted the number of innovations, but has a limited effect on improving the quality of innovation. We further apply a hierarchical liner modeling approach to deal with the stratified cityand firm-level data and to verify the mechanism through which policy distortions may affect corporate innovation. There also gives evidence that the IPPC policy comes into effect mainly through financial subsidies, institutional supply and the intensity of IPR protection at the local scale. This report concludes by proposing further policy implementations for the future optimization of China’s innovation strategies.