In the international context of the surging tide of anti-globalization, China will raise the establishment of pilot free trade zone as a national strategy, and achieve the goal of promoting highquality economic growth through a series of reform measures, such as promoting investment liberalization and facilitation, improving investment promotion and protection mechanisms, and improving the level of overseas investment cooperation. To study the role of the pilot free trade zones on investment, the panel data of 46 cities from 2005 to 2018 are used to empirically test the investment growth effect and investment spillover effect of the pilot free trade zones by using the Difference-in-Differences Spatial Dubin Model. The results show that the pilot free trade zones can significantly promote investment growth and have a spillover effect on investment in surrounding areas. Through the grouping regression of the eastern, central, and western regions, it is found that the eastern pilot free trade zones have the most obvious investment spillover effect on the surrounding areas, and the central pilot free trade zones have a siphon effect on the investment in the surrounding areas. In addition, different batches of pilot free trade zones or the same batch of pilot free trade zones have different investment spillover effects on surrounding areas at different time points. Finally, policy suggestions are put forward: strengthen the strategic implementation of the pilot free trade zones, improve the spatial radiation mechanism, promote linkage development and differentiated development, and make the pilot free trade zones better promote investment growth and investment spillover.

Declining worker bargaining power has been advanced as an explanation for dramatic generational changes in the U.S. macroeconomic environment such as the substantial decline in labor’s share of the national income, the loss of consumer purchasing power, and growing income and wealth inequality. In this paper, we investigate microeconomic implications by examining the effect of declining worker power on firm-level investment responses to a labor cost shock (mandated increases in the minimum wage). Over the past four decades, we find that investment-wage sensitivities go from negative to insignificant as management becomes less constrained and can pursue outside options. Consistent with drivers of weakening worker power, investment-wage sensitivity changes are more significant for firms that are more exposed to globalization, technological change, and declining unionization.

This paper examines how globalization process shapes the corporate ESG efforts in emerging markets. Using a staggered difference-in-difference model based on the gradual inclusion of China's A-shares in the MSCI index, we find that public companies improved their ESG performance and disclosure quality after being included. The results are robust to propensity score matched sample. Notably, the impact on ESG disclosure was significantly greater than on ESG performance, and the effect is more pronounced for non-SOEs and firms with weak governance. The inclusion also leads to significant increasesin foreign holdings, the proportion of women directors, and analyst attention, which have promoting effects on corporate ESG performance and disclosure ratings. This study sheds light on the macro-level determinants of corporate ESG engagement.

Current integration and co-movement among international stock markets has been boosted by increased globalization of the world economy, and profit-chasing capital surfing across borders. With a reputation as the fastest growing economy in the world, China’s stock market has continued gaining momentum during recent years and incurred growing attention from academicians, as well as practitioners. Taking into account economic and geographical considerations, the US and Hong Kong are considerably the most comparable stock markets to China. As the usual vector error correction model (VECM) could overlook the long memory feature of cointegration residual series, which can in turn exert bias on the resulting inferences, we chose to employ a fractionally integrated VECM (FIVECM) in this paper to investigate the long-term cointegration relations binding China’s stock market to the aforementioned stock markets. In addition, by augmenting the FIVECM with multivariate GARCH model, the return transmission and volatility spillover between market return series were revealed simultaneously. Our empirical results show that China’s stock market is fractionally cointegrated with the two markets, and it appears that China’s stock market has stronger ties with its neighboring Hong Kong market than with the world superpower, the US market.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) form a new class of institutional investors with significant influence on the global financial market. Assets under management (AUM) of global SWFs totaled around US$3.0 trillion at the end of 2007, and are still rising. Three developments are behind the current cause of SWFs: First, reform of international monetary system is the core reason for the rise in SWFs; Secondly, the phenomenal raise of energy price is an important reason contributing in the expansion of SWFs; finally, the economic globalization facilitates SWFs’ operation. According to the model of "National Economic Man" model, the foreign reserve of a nation will increase sharply and gradually this nation will invest surplus wealth during the economic stage of early expansion or fast-growing stage. Whereas, with the decreasing of the production factors, accumulated wealth of a nation will gradually attain to peak. When the economy enters into wealth-oriented stage or the stage of sustainable low growth, the nation will increasingly rely on wealth accumulated by consumption, and incline to invest in risk-free assets. At present, the aims of SWFs are mainly focused on the following five aspects, including stabilization the national balance sheet for different periods, diversification of the central bank's reserves, smoothening inter-generation revenue of country, prevention of national socio-economic crisis and assistance of the government’s overall development strategy.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) form a new class of institutional investors with significant influence on the global financial market. Assets under management (AUM) of global SWFs totaled around US$3.0 trillion at the end of 2007, and are still rising. Three developments are behind the current cause of SWFs: First, reform of international monetary system is the core reason for the rise in SWFs; Secondly, the phenomenal raise of energy price is an important reason contributing in the expansion of SWFs; finally, the economic globalization facilitates SWFs’ operation. According to the model of "National Economic Man" model, the foreign reserve of a nation will increase sharply and gradually this nation will invest surplus wealth during the economic stage of early expansion or fast-growing stage. Whereas, with the decreasing of the production factors, accumulated wealth of a nation will gradually attain to peak. When the economy enters into wealth-oriented stage or the stage of sustainable low growth, the nation will increasingly rely on wealth accumulated by consumption, and incline to invest in risk-free assets. At present, the aims of SWFs are mainly focused on the following five aspects, including stabilization the national balance sheet for different periods, diversification of the central bank's reserves, smoothening inter-generation revenue of country, prevention of national socio-economic crisis and assistance of the government’s overall development strategy.

Following the economic theory of venture capital financing, a corporate governance framework would be economically efficient for VC investments if it can help to reduce the agency costs resulted from information and incentive problems. As a highly successful model in global VC industry, the standard VC investment contracts in the Silicon Valley practice largely embody such framework. By analyzing the currently effective laws and regulations of China that are relevant to the investments by foreign venture capitalists, this paper paints a practical picture of how can foreign VC investors do business in China. It is shown that, the recent (starting from 2005) outflow of a set of new legal norms can be seen as a dividing point for the VC investing practice in China – the previously prevalent mode “offshore structuring, offshore listing” is challenged, and both the investment and exit are gradually pulled onshore. This being said, the current Chinese laws and institutions still cannot fully entertain the contracting and governance model prevalent in the Silicon Valley VC investment practices, and in this light, this paper goes on to discuss, in particular, various strategies that may be availed by foreign VC firms to tap and/or subvert the Chinese laws and regulations when financing Chinese new ventures. Finally, under the theme of globalization and crossborder corporate governance convergence, this paper provides a general comment on the currently applicable Chinese legal framework, and stresses the importance of converging towards efficient legal rules through contracts in the global competitive village.

金融约束是金融发展理论中较前沿的问题，其理论对发展中国家金融发展有重要的借鉴价值。本文简要介绍了金融约束中租金的作用，然后运用金融约束这一框架分别分析了租金在全球化和不同所有制结构条件下的流动，得出了金融约束将受到甚至变形的结论，并结合我国金融发展的实际情况，提出了一些建议。 Abstract: Financial restraint is a frontier issue in the theory of finance development; it has important use for reference during the process of financial development in the developing countries. Firstly, this paper present the function of rent in the financial restraint, then we use this framework to analyze the rent flow under the globalization and different ownership structure respectively, find that financial restraint will be weakened, even distorted. In the end, we provide some suggestions combined with the situation of China.

Asian monetary cooperation: a case of financial globalization in the new millennium