Against the backdrop of potential irrational trading behaviours in financial markets, this study investigates the V-shaped disposition effect in the selling activities of portfolios managed by securities investment funds in China. Utilising quarterly holdings data (2018–2024) of Chinese securities investment funds, alongside daily turnover rates and closing prices of their fund-heavy stocks listed in China's A-share market, a Fama-MacBeth regression analysis is conducted. The empirical results provide robust evidence of a significant V-shaped disposition effect in these fund investments, primarily driven by speculative trading. Moreover, this effect significantly and positively predicts future stock returns of Chinese A-shares. This study enhances understanding of institutional investors' trading behaviours—particularly mutual funds in China—and their decision-making processes in financial markets.

In the realm of financial stability, accurate credit default discrimination models are crucial for policy-making and risk management. This paper introduces a robust model that enhances credit default discrimination through a sophisticated integration of a filter-wrapper feature selection strategy, instance selection, and an updated version of majority voting. We present a novel approach that combines individual and ensemble classifiers, rigorously tested on datasets from Chinese listed companies and the German credit market. The results highlight significant improvements over traditional models, offering policymakers and financial institutions a more reliable tool for assessing credit risks. The paper not only demonstrates the effectiveness of our model through extensive comparisons but also discusses its implications for regulatory practices and the potential for adoption in broader financial applications.

We propose a novel dual-screening classification framework for fund selection designed to align statistical objectives with investor goals. Testing on the Chinese mutual funds market, a Gradient Boosting model implementing our framework generates a statistically and economically significant 14.65% annual risk-adjusted alpha, substantially outperforming identical models trained under a standard regression framework. Feature importance analysis confirms that fund-level momentum and flows are the most significant predictors of performance in this market. Our findings provide a robust and practical framework for active management, demonstrating that modelling both upside potential and downside risk is critical for superior performance.

Purpose The study investigates the impact of government intervention policy of capital markets (“National Team”) on firms’ sustainable management, i.e., green mergers and acquisitions (GMAs) in China, aiming to understand how such interventions influence corporate investment activities amidst a growing focus on green transition. Design/methodology/approach The research employs a dynamic analysis of quarterly data from Chinese companies (2014 Q1 to 2022 Q4), utilizing identified strategies, such as double machine learning-DID and multiple panel data regressions to assess the effects of government intervention on GMAs, and examines potential economic channels like liquidity, market stabilization, and informativeness. Findings The study finds that increased government intervention via direct stock purchases significantly boosts both the number and amount of GMAs, with economic significance of 23% and 45%, respectively. It identifies liquidity, market stability, and informativeness efficiency as underlying economic channels for this effect. Practical implications The findings suggest that government interventions can enhance corporate investment in green sectors, guiding firms to align strategies with sustainability goals. This can inform policymakers regarding the effectiveness of direct stock purchases in fostering a green economy, especially for large emerging countries. Social implications By promoting GMAs, government interventions contribute to green innovation and energy transition, ultimately benefiting society through enhanced environmental sustainability and compliance with eco-friendly regulations. Originality/value This research uniquely documents the direct effects of government stock purchases on corporate green financial activities, particularly GMAs, in a Chinese context characterized by tight credit, thereby expanding the understanding of government intervention in emerging markets.

With the accelerating global aging population, the prevalence of cognitive impairments, particularly Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, is rising steadily, giving rise to a substantial and rapidly expanding market for memory services. This review aims to systematically examine the core development trends, driving factors, innovative service models, and challenges within the memory services market in the context of the aging economy. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the entire industry chain, spanning early screening, diagnosis, non-pharmacological interventions, long-term care, and technological support. By integrating the latest business models, policy directions, and evolving consumer demands, this article explores future development trajectories and investment potential in the memory services sector. The insights offered herein are intended to support practitioners, policymakers, and researchers engaged in this critical field by delivering an in-depth understanding of current market dynamics and emerging opportunities.

While observational studies have long suggested a positive correlation between social relationships and online transactions, surprisingly little research demonstrates a causal link. Effects identified in observational data generally conflate the Information effect, which bears the counterfactual causal interpretation, with the Homophily/environment effect. Against this background, this study conducted a pioneering a randomized field experiment design to isolate the Information effect of friendship disclosure from confounding homophily factors. We exploit a rare opportunity to conduct a field experiment on a large Chinese online second-hand platform, in which we manipulate buyer and seller’s awareness of their preexisting friendship ties. We provide the first empirical evidence that the effect of revealing friendship information between transaction parties turns out to be insignificant. We demonstrate that reliance on observational estimates of the “total effect” of friendship significantly overstates the benefits of providing friendship information in online marketplaces. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of social commerce and highlight the potential fallacy of relying on observational data in business studies.

The high-penetration integration of renewable energy requires huge demand for reliable capacity resources, and the coal-fired units are the main providers of the reliable capacity in China. This study proposes a future-oriented approach to facilitate coal-fired power’ transition through capacity market development. Focusing on China’s power market reform context, we propose a two-stage capacity market mechanism integrating annual capacity auctions and monthly capacity bidding, and design the procedural and transactional framework for coal-fired power participation. We further outline three market strategies including energy market trading, centralized capacity market trading, and renewable energy alliance leasing. Environmental costs are incorporated to construct revenue models and derive boundary conditions for coal-fired units’ decision-making. Research results reveal that current capacity prices fail to cover costs, requiring substantial market-driven price increases to achieve profitability. While stable capacity revenue can reduce medium-to-long-term and spot market prices, fostering competition between coal-fired power and renewable energy resources. However, coal-fired power remains highly sensitive to price volatility, demanding robust resilience to fluctuations. Carbon prices significantly influence capacity prices, yet excessive free carbon quota allocations weaken carbon price transmission effects, necessitating optimized quota ratios to enhance market responsiveness. Finally, policy implications are proposed according to the research results.

This study identifies a significant settlement effect in China’s equity options market, where price decline and pre-settlement return momentum exists on the settlement Friday (T+2) due to a temporal misalignment between option expiration (T) and the T+1 trading rule for the underlying asset. We attribute this phenomenon to three distinct behavioral channels: closing pressure from put option unwinding, momentum-generating predatory trading by futures-spot arbitrageurs exploiting liquidity fragility, and an announcement effect that attenuates the anomaly by adjusting spot speculators' expectations. Robust empirical analysis identifies predatory trading as the primary driver of the settlement effect.These findings offer critical insights for market microstructure theory and the design of physically-delivered derivatives.

Climate change presents a global threat, prompting nations to adopt low-carbon development pathways to mitigate its potential impacts. However, current research lacks a comprehensive framework capable of integrating multiple variables and providing dynamic optimization capabilities. This article focuses on designing pathways for developing a low-carbon economy to tackle climate challenges. Specifically, we construct a low-carbon economy model that incorporates economic, environmental, social, energy, and policy factors to analyze the drivers of economic growth and carbon emissions. We utilize economic model predictive control and tracking model predictive control to optimize development pathways aligned with various low-carbon targets, creating and validating a comprehensive framework for low-carbon policy design using historical data from China. This study highlights significant advantages in analyzing low-carbon pathways through advanced techniques like hierarchical regression and model predictive control, providing a robust framework that enhances our understanding of causal relationships within the LCE system, captures system feedback, dynamically optimizes pathways, and accommodates diverse policies within a comprehensive low-carbon economy system.

The co-holding of mutually interdependent pairs of heterogeneous blocks can provide firms with stable financial support. The interdependence of heterogeneous blockholders’ investment decision has become an important frontier in the financial literature on large shareholders. In this paper, we study the interdependence of heterogeneous blocks in China. We find significant positive interdependence among blockholders of the same type. In heterogeneous block pairs, the financial–private pair shows positive interdependence. The findings are in contrast to those observed in the US. Under the mixed-ownership reform in China, our findings suggest the potential for cooperation among multiple blocks of the same type rather than between heterogeneous strategic partners.