This paper examines the role of institutional investors in shaping pricing dynamics within China’s nascent infrastructure Real Estate Investment Trust market. Introduced in 2021, China’s REITs have rapidly gained policy and market attention as a tool for financing large-scale infrastructure projects through equity-based securitisation. Unlike mature REIT markets, China’s infrastructure REITs are characterised by a high concentration of institutional ownership dominated by state-owned financial institutions. Using panel data on first 9 REITs from May 2021 to April 2024, we find that institutional ownership significantly boosts the premium to net asset value. This effect operates primarily through two channels: reduced market liquidity and increased idiosyncratic return volatility, likely reflecting institutions’ trading activity and informational advantages. The findings highlight how institutional capital serves as a confidence signal in China’s emerging REITs ecosystem. The study contributes to the global REITs literature by offering insights from an emerging market context and provides policy recommendations to guide China’s REITs market development toward greater transparency, diversity, and long-term resilience.

This study investigates the impact of RegTech adoption in the M&A regulatory review process on deal performance. Leveraging the staggered implementation of the SOEs Online Supervision System (SOSS) by China’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) across its central and 31 provincial offices from 2018 to 2021, we find that SOSS directly enhances SASAC’s decision-making efficiency and improves its capacity to screen and approve higher-quality M&A deals. More importantly, SOE-led M&A transactions exhibit higher announcement returns as well as improved long-run stock and operating performance following the system’s implementation. The positive impact of SOSS is more pronounced for acquirers with stronger technological infrastructure, in transactions characterized by low transparency and weak governance, and in provinces with more stringent external scrutiny. Overall, by addressing regulator-firm information asymmetry and reinforcing managerial accountability, SOSS improves regulatory effectiveness in overseeing major investment activities among SOEs.

With the digital transformation of the capitalist economy, some contemporary scholars have put forward the Techno-Feudalism narrative of the digital economy. This narrative emphasizes that digital platform enterprises, as emerging market entities in the digital economy, have many practices that are highly similar to those of feudal lords. For example, digital platform enterprises plundering user data is similar to feudal lords plundering land; digital platform enterprises collecting digital rent is similar to feudal lords collecting land rent; digital platform enterprises controlling users and workers is similar to feudal lords controlling slaves. However, this narrative has many theoretical fallacies. Marx's theory of surplus value shows that the above phenomena are essentially still the contemporary form of capital seizing surplus value through technological innovation. The techno-feudalism narrative ignores the internal logic of capital using technological iteration to reconstruct the exploitation mechanism and falls into a superficial misjudgment. In contrast, the Chinese governance practice of digital economy breaks the monopoly of platforms on data elements through the innovation of the separation of three rights of data property rights; promotes fair competition and optimal allocation of resources in the digital economy by strengthening anti-monopoly supervision and promoting the construction of digital infrastructure; proves that the socialist system can break the capital proliferation cycle and achieve "people-centered" development by building a labor rights protection system to promote the creation and sharing of value and transcending the techno-feudalism phenomenon of the digital economy.

We construct a new geospatial measure using high-resolution river vector data from National Geomatics Center of China (NGCC) to study how urban riparian exposure shapes local government debt financing costs. Our base-line results show that cities with higher riparian exposures have significantly lower credit spreads, with a one-standard-deviation increase in riparian exposure reducing credit spreads by approximately 12 basis points. By comparing cities crossed by natural rivers with those intersected by artificial canals, we disentangle the dual role of riparian zones as sources of natural capital benefits (e.g., enhanced transportation capacity) versus climate risks (e.g., flood vulnerability). We find that climate change has amplified the impact of natural disasters, such as floods and droughts, particularly in riparian zones, thus weakening the cost-reducing effect of riparian exposure on bond financing. In contrast, improved water infrastructure and flood-control facilities strengthen the cost-reduction effect. Our findings contribute to the literature on natural capital and government financing, offering valuable implications for public finance and risk management.

The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on firm performance is an emerging issue in both practice and research. However, discussions surrounding the effect of AI on productivity are enshrouded in a paradoxical quandary. This study examines the relationship between AI implementation and total factor productivity (TFP), considering the moderation effects of digital infrastructure quality, business diversification, and demand uncertainty. Using data from 2155 Chinese firms over 2016-2021, our empirical analysis reveals a nuanced pattern: while moderate AI implementation achieves the best TFP, excessive and insufficient implementation yields diminishing returns. The curvature of this inverted U-shaped relationship flattens with higher levels of digital infrastructure quality but steepens when firms undertake diversified businesses and face heightened demand uncertainty. The findings suggest that the impact of AI on TFP is not universally beneficial, and the relationship between AI and TFP varies across different contexts. These findings also provide implications on how firms can strategically implement AI to maximize its value.

Amid growing global interest in state interventions, this paper examines the impact of Chinese government infrastructure investments on improving firm productivity. It centers on a policy aimed at directing regional governments to foster a more conducive market environment for private enterprises. Our analysis reveals that the positive effect of infrastructure investment on firm productivity is increased by 42.5% for private firms in industries that benefitted from improved market entry opportunities and an even more striking 97.9% in provinces where arbitrary fines were curtailed. These findings underscore the complementary roles of state interventions and the development of market mechanisms in boosting firm productivity.

Under the guidance of the dual-carbon target, the development of the carbon financial system is of great significance to compensate for the gap between green and low-carbon investment. Considering the current state of the development of carbon financial system, China has initially formed a carbon financial system, including participants, carbon financial products and macro and micro operation structures, but the system is still in the initial development stage. Given the current restrictions on the development of carbon finance, it can be seen that there are still problems such as unreasonable economic structure, insufficient market construction, single product category, low utilization rate and urgent construction of relevant judicial guarantee system. Therefore, the system should be improved at the economic level and the legal level. The economic level includes adjusting the layout of economic development structure, strengthening the construction of market infrastructure, encouraging the diversification of carbon financial products and strengthening publicity and education promotion strategies. The legal level includes improving the top-level design, formulating judicial interpretation to promote carbon financial trading, promoting commercial law amendment, and promoting the linkage mechanism between specialized environmental justice and carbon finance and other safeguard measures. Finally, improving the carbon finance system is required to promote and protect the orderly development of carbon finance. To promote the reform of the pattern of economic development, the concept of ecological and environmental protection in the financial sector needs to be implemented to form an overall pattern of pollution reduction, carbon reduction and synergistic efficiency improvement.

This study investigates the effect of government digital attention on firm digital innovation. Using data from Chinese listed firms over 2012–2020, we find government digital attention can significantly propel the improvement of firms' digital innovation levels, primarily driving an increase in the quantity of digital innovations rather than a qualitative enhancement. Further analysis indicates that government attention achieves this impact by elevating the regional digital infrastructure, increasing firms' digital subsidies, alleviating firms' financing constraints, encouraging firms to intensify R&D investment, fostering a positive attitude towards digital transformation, and consequently, boosting the overall level of firms' digital innovation.

The study aims to explain the economic impact of Internet implication in tourism sector by taking sample of mega project listed countries (which provide big pitch to boost tourism business). Our work find the volatility cause of tourism revenue at country i, by examining the inbound tourist expenditures as a factor of technological infrastructure. We deploy data ranging from 1990 to 2017 and uses error correction model as representative of Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL) model after addressing diagnostic tests (for data reliability concern). We found long- and short-run association between tourism expenditure and information and communication technology (ICT) proxies in case of developed economies, while only short-run association in underdeveloped countries. The startling scenario about underdeveloped economies are also confirmed by one-way causation in our analysis. After sensitive analysis at each slot, the study concludes that tourism revenue is streaming low across those boundaries where tourists a

This research study primarily examines the digital transformation’s internal mechanism promoting enterprises’ total factor productivity (TFP) based on the matching and learning mechanism. Afterward, this research article empirically examines the digital transformation’s influential mechanism on enterprises’ TFP, using the Chinese listed companies’ data on the “A” stock market for the time period ranging from 2007 to 2019. The major study findings are as follows: (1) the improvement of the digital transformation significantly increases enterprises’ TFP. The proposed conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness- and the endogeneity test. (2) Furthermore, mechanism analysis reveals that digital transformation effectively enhances enterprises’ TFP by eliminating resource misallocation in the industry. In addition to this, digital transformation relies on the mechanism of “learning by doing” to promote the technological innovation’s spillover effect; hence, effectively enhancing enterprises’ TFP. (3) Heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that the digital transformation’s impact on enterprises’ TFP is heterogeneous in the context of enterprise size, enterprise type, and enterprise ownership. Lastly, this study puts forward that government bodies should intensify the construction and investment in digital infrastructure, promote a series of institutional reforms, and support digital technological R&D practices.