Health

  • 详情 Immediate effects and cumulative effects: Does stock returns affect hypertension incidence?
    This study examines the impact of stock market returns on the incidence of hypertension and related outpatient visits using daily data from both regular and major-illness outpatient visits for hypertension. We find that the number of hypertension consultations increases significantly as the stock market declines. Specifically, the effect of market downturns on outpatient visits is more prominent among the seniors and those with poor baseline health. While ambient temperature has a relatively weak effect on regular outpatient visits for hypertension (ROV), it explains a greater share of the variation in major-illness outpatient visits for hypertension (MOV). Both sets of findings suggest that the health effect of stock market volatility is immediate and transient. Using monthly data on MOV, we also find a significantly negative association between MOV and stock market returns, especially during periods of extreme volatility such as market crashes. These findings suggest that stock price declines may increase outpatient visits for hypertension through psychological stress or wealth-loss channels.
  • 详情 Unintentional Man-Made Disasters, Risk Preferences, and Insurance Demand
    While unintentional man-made disasters constitute the majority of man-made catastrophes, empirical evidence on their economic consequences remains scarce. Utilizing a unique dataset on extremely severe accidents (ESAs) in China and a nationally representative longitudinal household survey, we find that unintentional man-made disasters reduce individuals' willingness to take risks. We further demonstrate that the severity of official penalties following ESAs is positively correlated with both fatalities and economic losses, yet these punitive measures fail to mitigate the negative impact on risk preferences. Additionally, we find that ESAs reduce demand for riskier, high-return-oriented insurance products, though they do not diminish demand for protection-oriented, non-investment productslike health insurance. Our findings address a critical gap in the literature regarding the effects of unintentional manmade disasters on risk attitudes and insurance demand.
  • 详情 Effect Evaluation of the Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) System on the Health Care of the Elderly: A Review
    Background: How to cope with the rapid growth of LTC (long-term care) needs for the old people without activities of daily living (ADL), which is also a serious hazard caused by public health emergencies such as COVID-2019 and SARS (2003), has become an urgent task in China, Germany, Japan, and other aging countries. As a response, the LTCI (longterm care insurance) system has been executed among European countries and piloted in 15 cities of China in 2016. Subsequently, the influence and dilemma of LTCI system have become a hot academic topic in the past 20 years.Methods: The review was carried out to reveal the effects of the LTCI system on different economic entities by reviewing relevantliterature published from January 2008 to September 2019. The quality of 25 quantitative and 24 qualitative articles was evaluated using the JBI and CASP critical evaluation checklist, respectively. Results: The review systematically examines the effects of the LTCI system on different microeconomic entities such as caretakers or their families and macroeconomic entities such as government spending. The results show that the LTCI system has a great impact on social welfare. For example, LTCI has a positive effect on the health and life quality of the disabled elderly. However, the role of LTCI in alleviating the financial burden on families with the disabled elderly may be limited. Conclusion: Implementation of LTCI system not only in reducing the physical and mental health problems of health care recipients and providers, and the economic burden of their families, but also promote the development of health care service industry and further improvement of the health care system. However, the dilemma and sustainable development of the LTCI system is the government needs to focus on in the future due to the sustainability of its funding sources.
  • 详情 Spatiotemporal Correlation in Stock Liquidity Through Corporate Networks from Information Disclosure Texts
    The healthy operation of the stock market relies on sound liquidity. We utilize the semantic information from disclosure texts of listed companies on the China Science and Technology Innovation Board (STAR Market) to construct a daily corporate network. Through empirical tests and performance analyses of machine learning models, we elucidate the relationship between the similarity of company disclosure text contents and the temporal and spatial correlations of stock liquidity. Our liquidity indicators encompass trading costs, market depth, trading speed, and price impact, recognized across four dimensions. Furthermore, we reveal that the information loss caused by employing Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) topology significantly affects the explanatory power of network topology indicators for stock liquidity, with a more pronounced impact observed at the document level. Subsequently, by establishing a neural network model to predict next-day liquidity indicators, we demonstrate the temporal relationship of stock liquidity. We model a liquidity predicting task and train a daily liquidity prediction model incorporating Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) modules to solve it. Compared to models with the same parameter structure containing only fully connected layers, the GCN prediction model, which leverages company network structure information, exhibits stronger performance and faster convergence. We provide new insights for research on company disclosure and capital market liquidity.
  • 详情 The Safety Shield: How Classified Boards Benefit Rank-and-File Employees
    This study examines how classified boards affect workplace safety, an important dimension of employee welfare. Using comprehensive establishment-level injury data from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and a novel classified board database, we document that firms with classified boards experience 12-13% lower workplace injury rates. To establish causality, we employ instrumental variable and difference-in-differences approaches exploiting staggered board declassifications. The safety benefits of classified boards operate through increased safety expenditures, reduced employee workloads, and enhanced external monitoring through analyst coverage. These effects are strongest in financially constrained firms and those with weaker monitoring mechanisms. Our findings support the bonding hypothesis that anti-takeover provisions facilitate long-term value creation by protecting stakeholder relationships and provide novel evidence that classified boards benefit rank-and-file employees, not just executives and major customers. The results reveal an important mechanism through which governance structures impact employee welfare and challenge the conventional view that classified boards primarily serve managerial entrenchment.
  • 详情 Spatiotemporal Correlation in Stock Liquidity Through Corporate Networks from Information Disclosure Texts
    The healthy operation of the stock market relies on sound liquidity. We utilize the semantic information from disclosure texts of listed companies on the China Science and Technology Innovation Board (STAR Market) to construct a daily corporate network. Through empirical tests and performance analyses of machine learning models, we elucidate the relationship between the similarity of company disclosure text contents and the temporal and spatial correlations of stock liquidity. Our liquidity indicators encompass trading costs, market depth, trading speed, and price impact, recognized across four dimensions. Furthermore, we reveal that the information loss caused by employing Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) topology significantly affects the explanatory power of network topology indicators for stock liquidity, with a more pronounced impact observed at the document level. Subsequently, by establishing a neural network model to predict next-day liquidity indicators, we demonstrate the temporal relationship of stock liquidity. We model a liquidity predicting task and train a daily liquidity prediction model incorporating Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) modules to solve it. Compared to models with the same parameter structure containing only fully connected layers, the GCN prediction model, which leverages company network structure information, exhibits stronger performance and faster convergence. We provide new insights for research on company disclosure and capital market liquidity.
  • 详情 Auctions vs Negotiations under Corruption: Evidence from Land Sales in China
    This study investigates whether corruption differentially affects contracting through auctions and negotiations. Using data on Chinese land-market transactions, where corruption is known to be present, we first show that, on average, it exerts similar effects on transactions carried out via auctions and negotiation. However, this finding masks important heterogeneity – auctions featuring healthy competition are less affected by corruption, and significantly less so than negotiation. We then develop a simple model of bidding under the possibility of corruption that rationalizes our findings.
  • 详情 Do Investors Herd Under Global Crises? A Comparative Study between Chinese and the United States Stock Markets
    This paper investigates the impact of two global crises, the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, on herding behavior in the Chinese and U.S. stock markets. We find no evidence of herding behavior during these two global crises in the U.S. stock market, yet significant herding emerges under the COVID-19 crisis in Chinese mainland stock market. Additionally, the observed herding behavior in mainland China is primarily driven by sentiment. Our results reveal and explain the differences in the effects of financial crisis and public health crisis on herding behavior, as well as variations between emerging and developed stock markets.
  • 详情 Institutional Innovation of China's Wealth Market Regulation
    The development of the wealth management market is based on the needs of investors. The logic of market regulation should also be based on the interests of investors. On the basis of summarizing the regulatory experience of the global wealth management market, suggestions are put forward to improve the system of China's wealth management market . The fundamental driving force for the establishment of a regulatory legal system for the wealth management market comes from the needs of the development of the wealth management market. Moreover, the structure and process of this institutional construction are also closely related to the structure and development of market demand. China's current wealth management market has become a huge financial sector, and the deepening of the market and the diversification of participants all put forward requirements for the construction of a fair and scientific regulatory system. Wealth management business is different from traditional financial business in many aspects such as function, business standard and business model, and its basic legal relationship is also far from traditional business. The commonality of business in China's current wealth management market is in line with the basic elements of the legal relationship of trust. From the perspective of the realistic basis and the nature of the industry, it is appropriate to define the basic legal nature of wealth management business as a trust relationship. Due to factors such as information asymmetry and economic scale, financial investors are in a serious imbalance and imbalance when they trade with financial institutions. Therefore, the financial supervision system should grasp this core contradiction, give investors the status of consumer protection, and establish the concept of protecting wealth consumers. The regulation of wealth management operators should grasp the requirements of the basic trust relationship, take the basic principle of supervising the performance of trustee duties by financial management institutions, and implement a series of rules for trustees to be loyal and prudent in financial management. These rules should focus on risk prevention, and include establishment of access standards for wealth management business, supervision of independent development of wealth management business, supervision of full performance of prudent management duties by wealth management institutions, and guidance for healthy development of wealth management institutions. The experience in the supervision of developed wealth management markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Singapore shows that the establishment of a legal system for the protection of wealth management consumers is an inevitable result of the development of the financial market, and it is necessary to set up special institutions and mechanisms to implement the concept of wealth management investor protection, and emphasize wealth management products. Providers' fiduciary obligations to investors, and functional supervision based on a unified system in the regulatory system can be used as a reference for China . China's wealth management market regulatory system include inconsistent rules, weak protection, biased guidance, and lack of independence. Due to the separate regulatory system, different game rules apply to homogeneous wealth management business operated by different types of financial institutions, resulting in rule conflicts and market injustice. However, the substantive rights of wealth management investors still exist in a vacuum that cannot be confirmed. At the same time, the status of consumers is far from being officially confirmed, and the consumer protection mechanism cannot truly achieve justice. As regulatory guidance still favors the concept and tools of supervising traditional businesses, wealth management institutions mainly expand extensively by selling products, and wealth management products also present serious "bond-like" characteristics. The "non-neutral " positioning of financial regulatory agencies has externalized into phenomena such as rule conflicts, "policy following suit" and "excessive maintenance of stability". Constructing and continuously improving China's wealth management market supervision system is: the purpose of supervision is to restore the effective operation of the market mechanism. The basic legal relationship in China's wealth management market should be recognized as a trust relationship. This is not only an essential requirement of the wealth management market, but also a practical need to integrate regulatory chaos. It is the trend of financial and economic development that the regulatory system positions the position of wealth management consumers. It should start with legislative policies, make key breakthroughs around consumers' substantive rights and protection mechanisms, and gradually improve investor protection mechanisms. The regulatory system should focus on supervising financial institutions to fulfill their fiduciary obligations, and establish sound access rules, business independence rules, prudent management rules, and strict market exit mechanisms. China's wealth management market supervision system should be based on unified legislation and gradually implement functional supervision in order to achieve effective management and harmonious development of the wealth management market.