This paper examines the effects of superstitious psychology on investors’ decision making in the context of Mercury retrograde, a special astronomical phenomenon meaning “everything going wrong”. Using natural experiments in the Chinese stock market, we find a significant decline in stock prices, approximately -3.14% in the vicinity of Mercury retrogrades, with a subsequent reversal following these periods. The Mercury effect is robust after considering seasonality, the calendar effect, and well-known firm-level characteristics. Our mechanism tests are consistent with model-implied conjectures that stocks covered by higher investor attention are more influenced by superstitious psychology in the extensive and intensive channels. A superstitious hedge strategy motivated by our findings can generate an average annualized market-adjusted return of 8.73%.

This study shows that investment decisions drive tail risks (i.e., systemic risk and stand-alone tail risk) of TBTF (Too-Big-to-Fail) banks, while financing decisions determine tail risks of non-TBTF banks. After the Dodd-Frank Act, undercapitalized non-TBTF banks continue to gamble for resurrection, and their stand-alone tail risk become more sensitive to funding availability and net-stable-funding-ratio than TBTF banks. We show that implementing a slimmed-down version of TBTF regulations on non-TBTF banks cannot efficiently contain the stand-alone risk of non-TBTF banks and cannot eliminate TBTF privilege. Moreover, non-TBTF banks together generate larger pressure of contagion on the real economy, and they herd more when making financing decisions after the Act. Our findings highlight the need for enhanced regulations on the liability-side of non-TBTF banks.

This paper examines the effects of superstitious psychology on investors’ decision making in the context of Mercury retrograde, a special astronomical phenomenon meaning “everything going wrong”. Using natural experiments in the Chinese stock market, we find a significant decline in stock prices, approximately -3.14% in the vicinity of Mercury retrogrades, with a subsequent reversal following these periods. The Mercury effect is robust after considering seasonality, the calendar effect, and well-known firm-level characteristics. Our mechanism tests are consistent with model-implied conjectures that stocks covered by higher investor attention are more influenced by superstitious psychology in the extensive and intensive channels. A superstitious hedge strategy motivated by our findings can generate an average annualized market-adjusted return of 8.73%.

We examine the impact of political connections on the investment decisions of Chinese mutual funds. We identify a direct link between mutual funds’ political connections and stocks held from the same political network using hand-collected information on the professional backgrounds of Chinese mutual fund managers and fund management company (FMC) shareholders. While mutual funds tend to allocate more investments to stocks based on their political connections, this effect alleviates somewhat after the 2012 anti-corruption campaign. Our findings suggest that anti-corruption campaigns can help to reduce the political effects of government-related agencies on fund holdings and contribute to better market fairness.

The advantages and disadvantages of universal banking have long been debated. Using the successive granting of lead underwriter qualifications to commercial banks in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we study the impact of universal banking on non-financial firms’ investment decisions. We find that after a firm’s main lending banks qualify as lead underwriters, the firm’s investment increases by 7.7 to 8.3 percent on a gross or net basis. The underlying mechanism is that universal banking can generate informational economies of scope and relax constraints on the provision of external finance. In contrast, we find no evidence on the conflict of interest between universal banks and their customers. Our study, therefore, sheds light on the potential gains from universal banking.

Using a large sample of over 5,000 start-ups across various industries and 524 media outlets in China between 2000 and 2016, we examine the effects of media coverage of start-ups on VC investment decisions and performance. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time in the finance literature, we have discovered that media coverage of start-ups significantly affects VC investment decisions and exit performance. Specifically, such coverage, especially positive coverage, significantly increases the probability and amount of VC investments in start-ups. It also significantly improves the exit performance of VC investments. The significant effects of media coverage of start-ups on VC investments are driven by market-oriented instead of state-controlled media. We further find that VC investments in a focal start-up are significantly influenced by the average media coverage of other start-ups in the same industry or the same city. Our results are robust to a battery of robustness tests. Our research contributes to the behavioral finance literature by showing that an increasingly prominent type of institutional investors, venture capitalists, just like individual investors, are also subject to limited attention. Our research also extends the research by You, Zhang and Zhang (2018) by revealing the heterogeneous effects of market-oriented and state-controlled media on VC investments. Last but not the least, we are the first to discover that peer start-ups’ media coverage matters for VC investments in the focal firms, thereby pushing the frontier of research on the roles of media in finance.

Exploiting staggered COVID-19 lockdowns and reopening across different regions in China, we study how lockdowns affect the investment decisions of venture capital (VC) investors and whether such changes are temporary or enduring in the post-pandemic era. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that lockdowns exacerbate the “tyranny of distance” (i.e., VCs avoid investing in remote ventures), our findings suggest the “death of distance”: VCs invest in remoter ventures during a lockdown and such effects persist even after the economy reopens. Such lockdown effects are more pronounced when there is better internet infrastructure, when the level of information asymmetry between VCs and entrepreneurs is lower, and when VCs are more experienced. The lockdown effects can be explained by the advancement and adoption of remote communication technology as a response to the social distancing requirements. As geographic boundaries of VC investment are shattered by remote communication technology, local competition among VCs has been intensified, the monopoly power of VCs has been curtailed, and the regional inequality of entrepreneurial access to VC financing has been mitigated.

Fluctuations in investor demand dramatically affect firms' valuation and access to capital. To quantify its real impact, we develop a dynamic investment model that endogenizes both the demand- and supply-side of capital. Strong investor demand elevates equity prices and dampens price impacts of issuance, facilitating investment and financing, while weak investor demand instead incentivizes firms to optimally repurchase shares at favorable prices, which can crowd out investment, especially among firms with liquidity constraints. We estimate the model using indirect inference by matching the endogenous relationship between investors' portfolio holdings and firm characteristics. Our estimation suggests that investor demand substantially distorts firms' real investment decisions and impedes the efficient capital allocation across firms. Eliminating excess demand reduces dispersion in the marginal product of capital by 10.74% and TFP losses by 16.20%. Investor demand also influence firm size distributions and generates a heavy right tail---large excess demand provides firms with market power and opportunities to profit from their financial market activities, contributing to the emergence of superstar firms.

We investigate how a firm’s political connections may affect its corporate policies. We propose and test the hypothesis that firms’ political connections enhance investors’ endorsement of managerial decisions, which elevates firm investment and encourages equity issuance and less cash payout. Using a sample of non-state owned Chinese firms, we find strong evidence in support of this hypothesis. Specifically, politically connected firms are less likely to pay dividends and pay less if they pay. The dividend announcement returns are significantly lower in connected firms than in otherwise similar but unconnected firms. Investors prefer firm investments to cash payouts by politically connected firms with high growth opportunities, and tend to value these firms’ investment decisions significantly higher. Finally, connected firms are also more able to tap public equity market for external funds. Our evidence is more consistent with political connections being an investor endorsement device rather than the expropriation device as suggested in the prior literature.

We investigate how social capital in both the home and host countries affects foreign direct investment in high tech firms. Difference in the social capital (trustworthiness) among provinces of the host country, China, is shown to matter in foreign companies’ choice of location, ownership type, and investment in R&D. We find that the provinces in China characterized by high levels of social capital attract more foreign investment. We also find that the likelihood of foreign investors establishing joint ventures with local partners increases with the level of social capital prevailing in that area. Foreign high tech firms conduct more R&D investment and hire more R&D personnel in high-social-capital provinces. Moreover, foreign-owned firms located in high-socialcapital areas keep improving their intensity of R&D investments over time. By contrast, in lowsocial- capital areas, foreign high tech firms do not improve and actually diminish their R&D intensity over time. We further show that the social capital in the country of origin (the home country) of a foreign company also affects its investment decisions in China. Cultural difference between the home country and the host country magnifies the foreign company’s weighing of the regional social capital difference in the host country; foreign companies from higher uncertainty avoidance home country prefer to invest in regions with higher social capital in the host country; on the other hand, kinship decreases the need to deal with strangers, and thus reduces the reliance on the provincial social capital.