This paper exploits China’s culture-oriented institutional reform as a quasinatural experiment to examine the impact of cultural policies on water pollution. Using a difference-in-differences approach with city-level panel data from 2003 to 2020, we find that the reform leads to a significant reduction in water pollution in pilot cities. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect is more pronounced in cities with better economic performance, higher administrative status, richer tourism resources, and more abundant human capital. The reform prompts a shift in local industrial structure toward less-polluting sectors, with a marked contraction in pollution-intensive activities. It also strengthens local environmental regulation and enhances green innovation, thereby contributing to pollution reduction. Our findings highlight the spillover environmental effects of policies not explicitly designed for environmental purposes.

Against the backdrop of escalating global carbon emission reduction urgency and China’s "dual carbon" goals, individual carbon trading (ICT) has emerged as a key measure to tap into consumer-side emission reduction potential. However, the current ICT mechanism remains in the exploratory stage, plagued by limited access to formal trading channels, strict entry barriers, and low public penetration, only 5 carbon exchanges in China allow individual participation, with fewer than 10,000 total participants. Focusing on mechanism integrity and integrating the carbon inclusive system, this study explores the influencing factors of ICT operation and constructs targeted optimization strategies. Based on Mechanism Design Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and Value-Belief-Norm Theory, a theoretical model covering five core ICT components was established. Using data from 1,200 questionnaires across 15 Chinese cities, multiple linear regression and hierarchical regression were employed to analyze the impacts of institutional fairness, technical usability, social atmosphere, and individual cognition. Results show: (1) Institutional fairness increases quota compliance by 38% through transparent rules; (2) User-friendly technical tools boost engagement by 1.8x, enhancing accounting accuracy and platform efficiency; (3) Social atmosphere moderates the effect of individual cognition on incentive conversion, particularly strongly in rural areas; (4) Individual cognition mediates the relationship between social atmosphere and trading platform efficiency. Additionally, optimizing mechanism components is more critical for long-term operation than single incentives. This study proposes a multi-dimensional optimization framework, providing theoretical and policy references for improving ICT integrity and advancing "dual carbon" goals.

This study examines how emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) respond to cross-national diversity in environmental regulation. Prior research suggests that internationalization exposes EMNEs to diverse environmental standards and may facilitate regulatory learning, yet offers a limited understanding of the mechanisms through which such exposure translates into green innovation. Drawing on institutional theory, we argue that green innovation is particularly fostered when EMNEs operate across host countries whose environmental regulatory regimes are more stringent than those in the home country, and when such exposure varies across multiple host locations. We theorize that this form of environmental regulatory diversity creates learning pressures and legitimacy incentives that motivate EMNEs to upgrade their environmental capabilities through green innovation. Using panel data comprising 9,362 firm-year observations from 1,088 Chinese MNEs over the period 2008–2021, we find support for our arguments. We further show that these effects are contingent on organizational and institutional conditions, specifically top management teams’ technological expertise and the strength of intellectual property enforcement in home-country locations. These findings advance research on EMNE learning and sustainable innovation under complex global environmental governance.

This opinion paper analyzes China’s new mandatory climate disclosure standards, which were formally launched between December 2024 and December 2025. We argue that China has not simply adopted the investor-focused model of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) or the European Union’s comprehensive double materiality approach. Instead, it has crafted a distinct “third way”—a new model of sustainability governance marked by a deliberate blending of global convergence and national priorities. Through a close, provision-level comparison, we identify eight specific provisions where China’s standard goes beyond both IFRS S2 (Climate-related Disclosures, issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board) and ESRS E1 (Climate Change, issued under the European Sustainability Reporting Standards), revealing a consistent rationale that treats corporate disclosure as an instrument of national governance, reaching institutional completeness by simultaneously issuing assurance standards, and maintaining developmental sensitivity through mechanisms like the proportionality principle. While considerable implementation challenges persist, this paper concludes that China’s approach presents a useful and reproducible model for other developing nations, positioning China as an active contributor to the evolving global standards architecture.

In recent years, despite China’s sustained expansion of public investment in education, pronounced regional disparities in educational development persist, revealing the practical constraints of the existing fiscal sharing structure in advancing equity objectives. In particular, the mechanism through which the allocation of fiscal responsibilities between central and local governments influences educational equity performance remains insufficiently examined in a systematic and empirical manner. From the perspective of fiscal structure, this study seeks to identify and explicate the evolutionary trajectory of educational fiscal equity in China, as well as its underlying institutional determinants. To this end, the study constructs a fiscal performance evaluation framework comprising seven core indicators. Objective weights are assigned using the entropy method, and the TOPSIS model is subsequently employed to conduct a comparative ranking analysis of national education fiscal performance over the period from 2013 to 2023. The results indicate that educational fiscal equity has exhibited an overall upward trend during the study period; however, its evolution displays clear stage-specific characteristics. In the initial phase, improvements in equity were primarily driven by fiscal expansion, leading to rapid gains. In the subsequent period, progress became increasingly constrained by structural optimization bottlenecks, with fiscal performance gradually stabilizing at a plateau in more recent years. Further analysis reveals that the persistently heavy fiscal burden borne by local governments, coupled with the relatively limited regulatory and equalization capacity of the central government, constitutes a key structural impediment to the sustained improvement of educational equity. By elucidating the internal mechanism through which the allocation of fiscal responsibilities shapes educational equity performance, this study provides both theoretical grounding and quantitative support for deepening fiscal system reform and optimizing policies related to the allocation of educational resources.

This article views the economic development history of New China as a history of openness and constant adjustment. We examine China’s economic development and early open policies from 1953 to 1978, analyze how the nation navigated between planned and open economic models during the formative period. Through a comprehensive review ofthe key Chinese and Western scholarship, investigates major initiatives including the Soviet-assisted 156 Projects, First Five-Year Plan, The policy of Eight Characters and the later “Four Three Plan” of the Western engagement. The study highlights both achievements and challenges, particularly in industrial growth and technology transfer, while assessing the impact of critical events like the Sino-Soviet split. Statistical analysis and quantitative models demonstrate how these early experiments with economic openness, despite ideological constraints and operational difficulties, established crucial institutional and technological foundations for China’s subsequent reform and modernization. The findings offer valuable insights into China’s unique development path and its implications for emerging economies.

This paper investigates the outstanding economic and scientific-technological achievements of the Soviet Union during the 1945–1953 period and analyzes how these successes influenced New China’s decision to adopt the Soviet development model. Drawing upon a review of the key Chinese studies and the influential Western works, this study synthesizes diverse research methods,including historical institutional analysis, archival research, and econometric modeling, to examine the driving forces behind Soviet economic development, its quantitative achievements, and its evolving international status relative to the United States. Moreover, the paper reviews the development of Sino-Soviet relations during both the Kuomintang era and the early years of the People’s Republic of China, and it provides a comprehensive factor analysis of why New China chose to introduce the “Soviet model.” The paper also discusses recent quantitative research that employs statistical models to assess the impact of Soviet achievements on China’s economic planning. The findings underscore that the rapid reconstruction and modernization of the Soviet economy not only set new benchmarks in industrial output and scientific progress but also provided a persuasive example that shaped China’s early development strategy.

This paper asks whether a personally experienced bubble crash leaves a lasting imprint on investment style. We study this in China’s stock market, where two technology-growth booms —the 2014–2015 Internet boom and the 2025–2026 AI hardware boom—share a similar narrative but are separated by a decade of generational turnover. Following managers across the mutual funds they run from 2013Q1 to 2026Q1, we compare those who lived through the 2015 crash with otherwise similar managers who entered afterwards. We find that the caution of veteran managers reflects a scar rather than a symptom of ageing. Conditional on age and career length, managers who lived through the 2015 crash hold more value exposure and chase technology stocks less when prices have been rising, and this reluctance deepens with how much the crash hurt them—crash-window tenure, performance shortfalls, redemption pressure—rather than with age. These demand differences reach asset prices as well: stocks held disproportionately by managers without bubble memories carry significantly higher subsequent left-tail risk, whereas crash-experienced ownership stabilises the stock, particularly when ownership is broad. Heterogeneous institutional beliefs rooted in career experience therefore shape not only how managers invest but also the crash risk of the assets they hold.

This study investigates the relationship between the number of stock concepts and future returns, as well as the economic mechanisms underlying this association. Using novel collected data, we find that stocks with a greater number of concepts earn significantly higher returns in the subsequent month, generating a six-factor adjusted annualized alpha of approximately 9.6% for a long-short portfolio. Although these stocks exhibit higher turnover, return volatility, and investor attention - features commonly associated with speculative concept-driven trading - an analysis of cross-listed AH twin stocks reveals that concept counts do not widen the AH premium. Moreover, the return premium persists for up to 15 months without significant reversal, whereas firms that engage in opportunistic concept-chasing exhibit pronounced long-run reversals, suggesting that the positive concept-return relation is not driven by speculative motives. The higher returns are primarily attributable to strong industrial policy support and sustained above-expectation operating performance. Firms with more concepts are more likely to receive government subsidies and deliver positive earnings surprises, effects that are amplified when their core concepts receive stronger national policy backing. In contrast, firms that pursue concepts lacking substantive business relevance are significantly less likely to obtain government subsidies and fail to achieve above-expectation growth. Regarding investor composition, institutional ownership of high-concept stocks increases modestly, while ownership by government-guided funds rises substantially - particularly for stocks whose core concepts are strongly supported by national industrial policies. Conversely, concept-chasing behavior by listed firms significantly reduces the ownership ratio of government-guided funds. Overall, our findings indicate that concept stocks in China’s capital market are not purely speculative but signal underlying national policies.

Firms frequently overstate digital transformation in public disclosures while committing less in observable investment, a phenomenon known as digital catering. We examine whether digital public financial infrastructure can discipline such symbolic behavior. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design on Chinese A-share listed firms over 2014--2024, we find that exposure to China's e-CNY pilot reduces digital catering by roughly 14% relative to the sample mean. The decline is driven almost entirely by reduced rhetorical digital transformation, while balance-sheet-based digital commitment rises only marginally: the e-CNY pilot is associated with substantially less digital talk, but not with a commensurate increase in digital walk in the short run. The effect operates through lower agency costs and reduced information asymmetry, and follows an amplification--substitution pattern---stronger among digital-sector and accounting-opaque firms, weaker where internal controls and institutional ownership are already strong. The evidence identifies financial-transaction verifiability as a novel source of discipline over corporate cheap talk: CBDC-related infrastructure constrains unsupported symbolic claims without immediately accelerating substantive digital investment.