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.

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.

We find evidence that firms engage in earnings management to potentially diminish environmental regulatory attention after the implementation of an automatic air pollutant monitoring system in China. Polluting firms increase their use of discretionary accruals and reduce the informativeness of earnings, compared to non-polluting firms. Polluting firms that are larger, more profitable, located near monitoring stations, and situated in less market-oriented regions exhibit heightened earnings management, consistent with the greater environmental regulatory exposure these firms face. The behavior is moderated by stronger customer-supplier relationships and lower market competition, when the cost of earnings management is higher. Our findings highlight the conflict between environmental and governance issues.

In this study, we investigate the impact of the development of the digital economy on corporate innovation and value using data of listed firms in China spanning the years 2011 to 2018. Our findings reveal a positive correlation between the development of the digital economy and corporate innovative activities, with a more pronounced effect observed in growth-stage firms, labor-intensive enterprises, and companies situated in underdeveloped regions. To establish a causal relationship, we employ a quasi-experimental approach utilizing the "Broadband China" pilot program. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we establish a causal link between the advancement of the digital economy and the increased innovative activities. Furthermore, our research underscores that digital economy development enhances firm value by promoting innovative activities. These results support the view that the digital economy plays a pivotal role in increasing firm value and fostering sustainable development in the overall economy.

This study analyzes the network structures of institutional shareholders and examines the influence of institutional investor cliques on corporate innovation. Our empirical results reveal that institutional investor cliques significantly enhance both innovation input and output. To mitigate endogeneity concerns and establish causality, we adopt multiple empirical strategies. Further evidence suggests that the beneficial impact of institutional investor cliques on firm innovation can be attributed to increased innovation investment efficiency, enhanced employee productivity, reduced information asymmetry, and decreased managerial myopia. Additionally, we find that the positive effect of institutional investor cliques on firm innovation is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and is particularly evident in firms with severe agency conflicts, CEO duality issues, highly competitive product markets, and for firms that have low stock liquidity.