Recently, the Chinese Government has strengthened the enforcement of bankruptcy laws to protect creditors’ rights. This study shed light on the effect of creditor protection on asset-debt maturity mismatch by employing a quasi-natural experiment in China. The results show that creditor protection mitigates maturity mismatch, and the effect is more pronounced among financially constrained firms. Results remain robust after the dynamic effects test, placebo test, propensity score matching approach, entropy balancing method, and controlling for COVID-19 shocks. Mechanism tests show that creditor protection decreases the cost of debt and reduces over-investment. The effect of creditor protection is pronounced in private companies, financially independent companies, and companies with secured loans. Creditor rights can alleviate maturity mismatch in firms with medium ownership concentration and managerial ownership levels. Economic consequences studies suggest that creditor protection reduces corporate default risk. This study reveals the mechanism and effect of creditor protection on asset-debt maturity mismatch in emerging markets, providing recommendations to policymakers for assessing and improving bankruptcy law regimes.

We study how investor composition is related to future return, trading volume, and price volatility in the cross- section of the music-content non-fungible tokens (music NFTs). Our results show that the breadth of NFT ownership negatively predicts weekly collection-level median-price returns and trading counts. In contrast, ownership concentration and the fraction of small wallets are positive predictors. The fraction of large NFT wallets is a bearish signal for future collection floor-price returns. Investor composition measures have weak predictive power on price volatility. Further analysis indicates that an artist’s Spotify presence moderates the predictive power of investor composition for future NFT returns and trading volume, consistent with the notion that reducing information asymmetry helps improve price efficiency.

This paper investigates the free cash flow productivity of SOEs compared with non-SOEs and examines its possible determinants. We find that SOEs have slightly weak free cash flow productivity but significantly stronger than non-SOEs. Similar performance exists among commercial class I and II SOEs and public-benefit SOEs. Further analyses suggest that firm size, age, sales growth, ownership concentration, government subsidies, and industry monopoly factors cannot explain this phenomenon. The common driver for all types of SOEs to generate stronger free cash flows than nonSOEs is their stronger expense control capability.

This paper investigates the free cash flow productivity of SOEs compared with non-SOEs and examines its possible determinants. We find that SOEs have slightly weak free cash flow productivity but significantly stronger than non-SOEs. Similar performance exists among commercial class I and II SOEs and public-benefit SOEs. Further analyses suggest that firm size, age, sales growth, ownership concentration, government subsidies, and industry monopoly factors cannot explain this phenomenon. The common driver for all types of SOEs to generate stronger free cash flows than non-SOEs is their stronger expense control capability.

In this paper, we construct a content analysis structure to explore whether corporate governance information in voluntary disclosures can predict management expenses in the next term. Employing the site visit information disclosure of firms listed on the Chinese A-share market from 2012 to 2021, we find that corporate governance information disclosure is motivated by ownership concentration,and that corporate governance information can predict management expenses and comprises incremental information, indicating that the content analysis we construct is valuable and the disclosure of corporate governance information can mitigate the agency problems.There is a difference between state-owned listed firms and nonstate-owned listed firms.

The conflict of interest between controlling and minority shareholders is an important issue in firms with concentrated ownership. We document that expropriation behavior by controlling shareholders through tunneling or self-dealing is far more severe in politically connected firms than in nonpolitically connected firms. This severity results more from the formers’ lower concern with capital market punishment than from the possibility that such firms tend to establish political connections for protection. Consistent with the view that a firm’s financing condition influences its corporate governance, we show that such severe expropriation occurs only in firms whose political connection helps them secure bank loan access.

We analyze return predictability for the Chinese stock market, including the aggregate market portfolio and the components of the aggregate market, such as portfolios sorted on industry, size, book-to-market and ownership concentration. Considering a variety of economic variables as predictors, both in-sample and out-of-sample tests highlight significant predictability in the aggregate market portfolio of the Chinese stock market and substantial differences in return predictability across components. Among industry portfolios, Finance and insurance, Real estate, and Service exhibit the most predictability, while portfolios of small-cap and low ownership concentration firms also display considerable predictability. Two key findings provide economic explanations for component predictability: (i) based on a novel out-of-sample decomposition, time-varying macroeconomic risk premiums captured by the conditional CAPM model largely account for component predictability; (ii) industry concentration and market capitalization significantly explain differences in return predictability across industries, consistent with the information-flow frictions emphasized by Hong, Torous, and Valkanov (2007).

This paper investigates the impact of ownership and ownership concentration on the performance of China’s listed firms. By recognizing the differences between ownership and ownership concentration and between total ownership concentration and tradable ownership concentration, we conduct simplex, interactive and joint analyses. We find that ownership concentration is approximately associated with higher firm performance. Ownership concentration is more powerful than any category of ownership in determining firm performance. Firm performance is better when the state is the largest of the top shareholders and/or institutions dominate ownership among the top tradable shareholders. Our results support the theory that high ownership concentration mitigates the agency problem.

This paper investigates the relationship between firm productivity and corporate governance, including ownership structure, incentive compensation and board characteristics. Using TFP approach, I find ownership concentration and total compensation both are positively related to TFP, and the state ownership and the power of the first largest holder have negative effects on TFP. Using demand labour function approach, I find some contrary results, which need to be studied further.

This paper provides a parallel investigation on the impact of board composition, board activity and ownership concentration on the performance of listed Chinese firms. We find that independent directors enhance firm performance effectively than other board factors. The frequency of shareholder meetings, rather than board meetings, is positively associated with firm value. Tradable share ownership concentration has a positive and linear relationship with firm value, while state and total share ownership concentration represent U(V) shapes. Importantly, companies with the highest levels of both total share and tradable share ownership concentration have a greater firm values than companies with the highest levels of only a single concentration.