We examine a unique phenomenon among exchange traded funds (ETFs) in the Chinese stock market, finding that ETFs pervasively participate in initial public offerings (IPOs) to profit from underpricing. The ETF IPO participation passes primary market benefits to retail investors, providing benefits from hard-to-reach investment opportunities. These active moves showing ETFs are not entirely passive highlight the gains of the active management. However, we observe that this activity leads to increased non-fundamental volatility and short-term return reversals, as well as decreased investment-q sensitivity among ETF member stocks, presenting a negative externality. Using a policy shock as the quasi-natural experiment, we establish the causality of these effects, underscoring the dual nature of ETFs active management.

This paper employs a difference-in-differences approach to study whether a Chinese audit firm improves its competencies through organizational learning after one of its audit teams has a client cross-listed in the US. Among a group of companies that are listed only in China, we define those audited by firms that have cross-listed clients as the treatment group, and companies audited by other firms as the control group. We find an improvement in audit quality for the treatment group after their audit firms have cross-listed client experience in the US. A large-scale survey of auditors corroborates these findings and sheds light on specific actions undertaken by audit firms to facilitate learning. Both the empirical and survey results highlight the benefits of auditing crosslisted clients in the US and its positive externality on improving the audit quality of non-US-listed companies.

This paper employs a difference-in-differences approach to study whether a Chinese audit firm improves its competencies through organizational learning after one of its audit teams has a client cross-listed in the US. Among a group of companies that are only listed in China, we define those audited by Chinese audit firms that are not international Big 4 affiliates and have cross-listed clients as the treatment group, and companies audited by other audit firms as the control group. We find an improvement in audit quality for the treatment group after their audit firms have cross-listed client experience in the US, and this improvement is not attributable to the effect of joining an international accounting firm network, registration with the PCAOB, or the consolidation in the audit market. A survey of auditors corroborates these findings and provides evidence on audit firms’ specific actions to facilitate learning. Our findings shed light on the benefits of auditing cross-listed clients in the US and its positive externality on improving the audit quality of non-US-listed companies in China.

This study focuses on the unexplored informational role of labour dividend in the municipal corporate bond (MCB) market given China’s distinctive institutional origins. We aggregate the annual employments of public firms to the prefecture-city level and find that the firms’ employments aggregated are positively associated with contemporaneous scale of the MCB, whereas negatively associated with the issuing rate of the MCB. In the further analyses, we find that this information externality is conditional on the attributes of the employment characteristics (i.e., education, functional departments, and ownership nature). Mechanism analyses indicate that information accessibility, processing, dissemination, and efficacy are important channels through which the aggregate labour intensity is mobilized. And such information externality is reinforced after an institutional change enhancing the authenticity of employment information. This paper echoes previous studies of the macro value of aggregate accounting information and enriches the literature in labour and finance by highlighting that the labour dividend still exists and triggers MCB issuance in China.

Many studies suggest a positive and monotonic relationship between technological progress and wage income inequality since 1980s for industrialized economies. We examine this topic in the context of the Chinese economy where new technologies like automation, AI and digitalization have witnessed worldís most rapid growth in the last decade. Surprsingly, we Önd an inverted U-Shaped relationship - a "Digital Kuznets Curve", using a panel dataset constructed in line with the newly published "2021 Categorization of Core Industries of Digital Economy". We then set out a task-based growth model with heterogenous human capital and occupational choice, and show that this hump-shaped relationship can emerge either by introducing an erosion e§ect of digitalization on worker ability that increasingly counterveils the skill-biasing e§ect, or by directly adding a dynamic learning cost that captures the externality of digitalization. Our study contributes to the understanding of the nature of digitalization in re-shaping labor market structure.

This paper develops a growth model for understanding the mechanisms behind industrial upgrading in a catching-up economy. In the model, when the market of new consumption varieties emerges, the rising demand drives the incentives of domestic innovation, resulting in technology progress and cost reduction. The cost reduction of existing varieties in turn leads to ìsurplusî of aggregate capital, which seeks opportunities in next new industries that produce new varieties. The dynamic feedback of ìcapital-push new marketîand ìdemand-pull innovationî moves forward the domestic technology frontier and the consumption frontier in an upward spiral, and in this process the dual-sector economic structure ó the co-existence of domestic technology-mature industries and domestic technology-immature industries ó evolves endogenously. Because of the presence of dynamic externality, the laissez-faire equilibrium is inefficient and the optimal development policy involves two-side interventions: suppressing consumption and enhancing capital accumulation in the early stage of the development while reversing the sign to stimulate consumption in a later stage.

We study the potential negative externalities of mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure. Our analysis exploits a unique regulatory change in China that requires a subset of firms to report their contributions to poverty alleviation—on top of reporting general ESG issues—using a difference-in-differences design. We find that treated firms significantly increase their anti-poverty spending, but also increase their pollution, after the regulatory change came into force. The negative environmental externality is more concentrated in firms that are more financially constrained, as well as firms that are facing fiercer market competition. We further show that this effect is driven by a firm’s incentive to strategically cater to politicians’ agenda in order to obtain preferential treatment. These findings suggest that mandating ESG disclosure in selected areas may induce firms to trade off different ESG goals by prioritizing more conspicuous ESG issues at the cost of trivializing other, longer-term, issues.

The integration of two vertically linked business units allows the single owner to choose the compensation contracts of the managers of the two units coordinatively and thus internalizes a production externality when there is technological synergy or complementarity. On the other hand, vertical integration changes the way in which a disagreement is handled when the two managers cannot agree on a transfer price for the intermediate product. Specifically, integration gives the single owner an extra option: transfer the product without establishing a price. Knowing that the owner cannot commit to costly outside trade, the managers have stronger incentives to disagree on the transfer price and hence the information that would be conveyed by the market prices is lost. Consistent with the conventional wisdom, two key determinants of vertical integration in our model are intermediate-product-market uncertainty and production synergy between the two units. The model yields new predictions linking both the integration decision and contract choices to several variables commonly thought to be important for vertical integration.