Purpose – This paper takes the Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect as a quasi-natural experimentand investigates the impact of capital market liberalization on the corporate debt maturity structure. It also aimsto provide some policy implications for corporate debt financing and further liberalization of the capital marketin China. Design/methodology/approach – Employing the exogenous event of Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong StockConnect and using the data of Chinese A-share firms from 2010 to 2020, this study constructs a difference-in-differences model to examine the relationship between capital market liberalization and corporate debt maturitystructure. To validate the results, this study performed several robustness tests, including the parallel test, theplacebo test, the Heckman two-stage regression and the propensity score matching. Findings – This paper finds that capital market liberalization has significantly increased the proportion of long-term debt of target firms. Further analyses suggest that the impact of capital market liberalization on thedebt maturity structure is more pronounced for firms with lower management ownership and non-Big 4 audit.Channel tests show that capital market liberalization improves firms’ information environment and curbsself-interested management behavior. Originality/value – This research provides empirical evidence for the consequences of capital marketliberalization and enriches the literature on the determinants of corporate debt maturity structure. Further thisstudy makes a reference for regulators and financial institutions to improve corporate financing through thegovernance role of capital market liberalization.

Based on institutions' general role and the specialty of motivated investors' relatively larger stake, we examine whether ownership by motivated investors is associated with the focal firm's ESG rating disagreement in China. Our results suggest that ownership by motivated investors can decrease the focal firm's ESG rating disagreement. That relationship is strengthened by a better internal or external information environment. What's more, ownership by motivated investors can increase the quality of ESG disclosure and the level of consensus ESG rating. ESG rating disagreement increases stock return volatility and price synchronicity, while motivated investors can mitigate those negative effects. Our results confirm that motivated investors have greater incentive and capability to discipline managers and influence corporate policies and actions even in an emerging market with weak investor protection and the popularity of exploration by ultimate controllers. That would shed valuable insights into the high-quality development of other emerging markets, especially those in south-east Asian.

With China being a large developing economy, the trading in China’s stock market is dominated by retail investors, and its government actively participates in this market. These features are quite different from those of typical developed markets, and This review focuses on two important questions: how do retail and institutional investors trade in China and why? We have three main findings after reviewing 100+ previous studies. First, small retail investors have low financial literacy, exhibit behavioral biases, and not surprisingly, negatively predict future returns; whereas large retail investors and institutions are capable of process information, and they positively predict future returns. Second, the macro- and firm-level information environment in China is slowly but gradually improving. Finally, the Chinese government actively adjusts their regulations of the stock market to serve the dual goals of growth and stability, with many of them being effective, while some may not generate intended consequences.

This paper investigates the impact of local fintech development on analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy. We use the method of web text mining to construct the local fintech development index for empirical test and find that local fintech development significantly improves analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy by promoting firm digital transformation, improving firm information transparency, and alleviating the information asymmetry between firms and outsiders. Furthermore, this effect is more significant for analysts without equity pledge associations and those with weaker buy-side pressure. This study shows that local fintech development can optimize the capital market information environment.

Chinese companies have a distinctive feature by embedding Communist Party of China (CPC) into governance structure. In this study, we examine the impact of embedded CPC governance on disclosure quality in Chinese private firms. We find that embedded CPC governance improves disclosure quality. We also document that internal control mediates the relationship between embedded CPC governance and disclosure quality. Further analyses show that our results are pronounced for private firms with greater peer pressure, stronger industry competition, and poorer information environments. Overall, our findings aid our understanding of the role of embedded CPC in influencing disclosure practices in private enterprises.

This study investigates whether and how the central discipline inspection of the securities regulators affects the information environment and investor valuation in the Chinese capital market. Based on the private equity placement (PEP) events, we find that the self-interested media outlets provide more negative coverage of the passed PEP firms during the inspection period than those passed outside the inspection period, resulting in poorer stock returns. Additionally, we find that the negative effect of the inspection on the PEPs’ market reactions is attenuated in media-connected firms and firms with higher advertising expenditure. However, we do not find significant long-term market performance differences between the passed PEP firms during the inspection period and those passed outside the inspection period. Additional results show that during the inspection period, the securities regulators tend to approve the PEP applicants with better initial announcement returns. Moreover, sophisticated investors pay a higher price for the shares of these passed PEP firms during the inspection period. Collectively, our findings suggest that anti-corruption campaigns have unintended effects that hinder retail investors’ access to objective information.

This paper examines the relationship between controlling shareholder equity pledges and their pricing using data on new debt financing instruments issued by Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010-2021. The findings suggest that controlling shareholder equity pledges lead to higher credit spreads on new debt financing instruments issued. Further findings suggest that this significant relationship only exists in groups where listed companies are on the eastern seaboard, where there is a higher risk of the share price collapse, and where management is more competent. It was also found that this relationship was not heterogeneous in the quality of the firm's information environment group and was only significant in the low hollowing out-group, thus ruling the hollowing out hypothesis and the information hypothesis and validating the uniqueness of the control transfer risk hypothesis in this paper.

Using the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) disclosure policy in China as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper analyzes the impact of firm TPA disclosure on analyst forecast accuracy using a staggered difference-in-differences model. The results show a significant increase in the accuracy of analysts’ forecasts after firm disclosure of TPA information, and this effect is more pronounced in firms with more greater information asymmetry and firms with less experienced analyst following. Our study provides theoretical and empirical evidence for regulators concerned with information environment of capital market.

Distinct from existing studies on general institutional investors and institutional investor cliques, this study examines how common institutional owners, who simultaneously hold more than 5% equity blocks in at least two publicly traded firms within the same industry, influence firms’ bad mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in China. Contrary to the “conspiracy tort” view, according to which common institutional owners are more likely to vote for bad M&A deals to pursue internalized gains from industry portfolios (Antón et al., 2022b), our results strongly support the “synergy governance” view, according to which common institutional owners perform more actively and effectively in monitoring against bad M&As and improving M&A quality. There is further evidence that common institutional owners with greater peer linkages and industry power and longer-term holdings are more likely to oppose deals with negative acquirer returns. Finally, we find that the effect of common institutional ownership on M&As is more pronounced among firms with stronger earnings management, moderate stock return synchronicity, less management shareholding and higher management expenses. The results are consistent with the “synergy governance” hypothesis whereby common institutional owners are able to leverage their advantages of industry information and supervisory experience to improve the information environment and corporate governance of the firms they hold. Overall, in China’s market, common institutional owners play an active external governance role and effectively improve M&A quality.

In recent years, numerous Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms have collapsed, prompting us to investigate the regulation and monitoring of the fintech industry. Using a unique dataset of P2P lending platforms in China, we investigate the effect of the information environment on regulatory monitoring and platform collapse. Using the platforms’ proximity to regulatory offices as a proxy for information asymmetry, we show that an increase in distance reduces regulatory monitoring and increases the likelihood of platform collapse. Specifically, for every 1% increase in the driving distance between the local regulatory office and a P2P lending platform’s office, the platform’s likelihood of collapse increases by 1.011%. To establish causality, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis that exploits two exogenous shocks: government office relocation and subway station openings. We provide evidence that proximity enhances monitoring quality by facilitating soft information collection, reducing platform failures. We further find two channels of this effect: (1) the information channel through which greater regulatory distance reduces the likelihood and frequency of regulators’ on-site visits and (2) the resource-constraint channel, through which greater regulatory distance significantly increases the local regulatory office’s monitoring costs. Overall, this study highlights the importance of the acquisition of soft information for regulatory monitoring to ensure the viability of fintech firms.