The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped regional economic landscapes. However, academic research has not yet sufficiently addressed how external investment in regions has been transformed under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its influence on industrial evolution patterns. In this paper, we integrate insights from economic geography literature and develop a conceptual framework to further theorise the relationship between external shocks, changes in the industrial heterogeneity of investment from regional core cities, and local industrial dynamics. Using the COVID-19 pandemic and the Yangtze River Delta region as a case study, we employ an intensity-based Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach and draw on business registration and enterprise investment databases to estimate the impact of the pandemic shock on the evolution of local industrial dynamics between 2018 and 2024. Our findings indicate that after the core cities underwent the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, the path dependence of industrial evolution in their surrounding areas significantly increased. The stronger the economic linkage with Shanghai, the more pronounced this effect. However, this impact also exhibits spatial heterogeneity across the Yangtze River Delta, associated with regional industrial division of labour and cooperation. This paper offers an innovative examination of how changes in the industrial heterogeneity of investment inflows from core cities—specifically, dimensions such as relatedness to local industries, industrial upgrading, and diversification—shape the mechanisms of local industrial evolution following the COVID-19 shock. Our findings offer important implications for regional development and adaptive responses in the post-pandemic era.

We interpret industry discount rates as proxies for value investment, grounded in Q theory, while capturing gambling preferences through salience theory. Integrating these perspectives, we propose a novel asset pricing model (ST-ICAPM) that unifies value investment and salience factors, evaluating its pricing efficacy across Chinese industries from 2004 to 2023. Empirical results show that investment factors tend to negatively predict future returns, while growth factors command risk premia. However, profitability factors exhibit limited explanatory power. Investor expectations are primarily driven by profit growth, emphasizing the need to enhance profit stability for a value-oriented market. Salience intensity, especially when measured via eigenvector centrality within industry networks, serves as a strong negative predictor of returns, emphasizing the importance of conceptual connections over purely economic linkages in shaping investor behavior. Robust tests confirm that the ST-ICAPM outperforms benchmark models (FF3, CARHART4, FF5, ICAPM, and STCAPM) in terms of pricing power. Our findings emphasize the need to promote value investing and restrain gambling behavior as essential strategies to cultivate a resilient capital market in China.

We conduct a comprehensive study on momentum spillovers in the Chinese stock market using varioustypes of economic linkages. We find that the news co-mention momentum spillover is signiffcantly strongercompared to other forms of momentum spillovers. Using spanning tests and Fama-MacBeth regressions,we further show that the news co-mention momentum spillover uniffes all different forms of momentum spillover effects in the Chinese stock market. Notably, the analyst co-coverage momentum spillover effect, which is the dominant species in the US stock market, is subsumed by the news co-mention momentum spillover effect in the Chinese stock market. We further explore the differences in the information content of links implied by news co-mentioning and other proxies. We suggest that the dominance of news co-mention momentum spillover over others can be attributed to two primary factors: comprehensive information and prompt updates.

Exploiting ffnancial news stories data, we construct news-implied linkages and document a strong lead-lag effect of ffrms with shared news coverage in China’s stockmarket. The news-link momentum strategy generates a monthly return of 1.33% and a four-factor alpha (Liu et al., 2019) of 1.43%. While prior evidence on the attention dynamics among ffrms with joint news coverage is limited, we show that the momentum spillover of news-linked ffrms is largely driven by investor underreaction. The return predictability from news links is also robust to controlling for alternative economic linkages. The ffndings suggest that information diffuses sluggishly among news-connected ffrms, thereby providing new evidence on the implication of media coverage for pricing efffciency.