This paper examines whether subjective macroeconomic expectations predict equity risk premia in China. Using professional macro forecasts from the Wind database over 2011- 2023, we construct a composite macroeconomic expectation index via PLS. We find that the index significantly and positively predicts future equity premia both in-sample and out-ofsample, implying a countercyclical equity premium. The predictive power is robust to a wide range of macro-financial controls and delivers economically meaningful gains in portfolio allocation. Further analysis shows that controlling for forecast errors does not attenuate predictability, and the subjective index largely subsumes the information in realized macro variables, suggesting that it captures forward-looking macroeconomic conditions rather than belief bias. Cross-sectional and long-horizon results reinforce this interpretation.

The Full Guaranteed Purchase System began to replace the subsidy system as the core policy for promoting renewable energy integration, designating grid companies as the sole entity responsible for the physical integration of renewable energy. Meanwhile, the Tradable Green Certificates system provides environmental benefits for renewable power generators through market mechanisms. Therefore, exploring the strategic choices of various entities under the dual policy interventions, and uncovering the mechanisms for realizing electricity energy value and green value under different integration models, is of great significance for advancing China’s renewable energy integration. Based on China’s actual conditions, this study integrates the features of both policies and constructs a three-party evolutionary game model involving government, power generators, and grid enterprises to simulate their interactions and identify key factors influencing strategic choices. The results show that active government regulation effectively encourages positive strategies from both generators and grid companies, and that active power integration by grid companies further promotes green power generation. A “stepwise complementary” relationship exists among reputation gains, reputation losses, and regulatory costs: higher reputation gains can offset decision-making resistance arising from increased regulatory costs. Green power generation costs and innovation costs have significant negative effects on strategic choices, while the guaranteed purchase price has a significant positive effect on generators’ active strategies. The penalty parameter plays a key positive role in grid companies’ active strategies, and the guaranteed purchase price significantly influences their active integration behavior. This paper provides recommendations for motivating all entities actively participate in the consumption process.

Digitalization is widely promoted as a means to enhance faculty development, yet in resource-constrained regions like Northwest China, structural inequalities persist. This qualitative case study examines how national policy, institutional capacity, and faculty agency interact to shape digital support in higher education. Drawing on institutional records and interviews with faculty from two universities, the study reveals stark disparities in funding, infrastructure, and training strategies. Research-intensive institutions benefit from policy-backed resources and expert-led programs, while regional universities rely on low-cost lectures and collaborations. Faculty report limited autonomy, disciplinary biases, and insufficient support for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this regional context, these findings challenge assumptions of resource neutrality and technological determinism in digital education policy. The study proposes a governance-oriented framework that emphasizes institutional responsibility, faculty empowerment, and context-sensitive digital strategies. It offers insights for policymakers and institutions seeking to advance equitable and sustainable faculty development in digitally transforming higher education systems.

High-quality development of water conservancy (HDWC) is of critical value for safeguarding the stability of production systems, livelihoods, and ecosystems. As the digital revolution intersects with China’s “dual carbon” targets, development of water conservancy must transition from traditional engineering approaches to data-driven ecological models. Drawing on institutional logic theory and employing dynamic qualitative comparative analysis across 30 Chinese provinces, this study examines how digital ecology facilitates the HDWC. The findings reveal that none of digital government, digital infrastructure, digital economy, digital capability, or digital society constitutes a necessary condition for the HDWC. Instead, it is the result of the combined effects of multiple institutional logics. Five configurations leading to HDWC are identified and categorized into four types: government-market-driven model, government-market-society-driven model, market-society-driven model, and government-society-driven model. The consistency of the configurations significantly increased during the study period. Furthermore, their distribution showed substantial regional differences. There are two configurations that inhibit the HDWC, namely the government-market-absence type and the market-society-absence type. Digital society emerges as a critical factor. This research uncovers multiple pathways through which digital ecology can empower HDWC, providing valuable insights for optimizing regional digital environments.

Firm survival, as a key indicator of regional economic resilience, has gained increasing attention in the context of global economic uncertainty and the deep adjustments in industrial structures. In the Pearl River Delta (PRD), a core region of China’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, the characteristics of firm life cycles are crucial for understanding spatial development inequalities and institutional effects in emerging economies. This study focuses on firms in the PRD, using full life-cycle data from registration, operation, to deregistration. An XGBoost regression model is employed, incorporating the SHAP explanation algorithm, to systematically analyze the main factors influencing firm survival. The results show that: (1) Firm establishment time is the primary factor influencing survival, with significant “survival threshold” and “growth leap” effects—mature firms exhibit a distinct survival advantage; (2) Among spatial structure variables, moderate industry specialization and diversity enhance firm survival rates, while excessive concentration and diversification show diminishing or negative returns, reflecting an “ecological threshold” effect; (3) External shocks have a significant suppressive impact on startups, while policy support and capital size show limited explanatory power; (4) The ownership structure, especially state-holding, has a positive moderating effect on firm survival in specific contexts, indicating that private enterprises’ flexibility and adaptability can compensate for institutional gaps. This study offers insights into the spatial heterogeneity of firm survival mechanisms, providing quantitative evidence for regional economic policy adjustments and firm resilience-building. Recommendations include promoting differentiated policies, optimizing industrial ecological spatial layouts, and piloting systems to enhance survival resilience, especially for mixed-ownership firms.

This paper investigates whether and how independent director-affiliated corporate donations affect stock price crash risk in China. We find a significant positive relationship between affiliated donations and future crash risk. The relationship is more significant for firms with weak internal governance and limited external monitoring, when affiliated directors serve on the audit committee, and in non-state-owned enterprises. Overall, our findings suggest that the social ties built through affiliated donations undermine rather than enhance director monitoring, and that agency theory has more explanatory power than resource dependence theory for understanding the impact of affiliated donations on stock price crash risk.

This article examines the link between foreign institutional holdings and firms’ efficiency in labor investment in the setting of Chinese markets. We find that foreign institutional investors enhance firms’ labor investment outcomes primarily through mitigating asymmetric information and by strengthening internal governance. Specifically, the influence of foreign institutional investors on a firm’s labor investment efficiency is stronger when the firm faces greater labor adjustment frictions. This effect is more evident when foreign institutional investors are originated from countries or areas with stronger cultural connections to China, stronger governance quality, common law traditions, or stronger bargaining power in the firms’ governance. Our paper contributes to the literature in that it documents the monitoring role of foreign institutional investors from the perspective of firms’ labor investment decisions, and adds to the literature on the drivers of firms’ labor investment choices.

Cultural tightness measures the extent to which individuals behave according to the broader values shared by other members in society. While cultural tightness has been studied extensively in the context of individuals’ behavior and (cross) country-level outcomes, much less is known about the explanatory power it holds in the setting of organizational structures. Motivated by the ambiguous relationship between cultural tightness and population-level gender equality documented by prior literature, we investigate whether cultural tightness helps explain board gender diversity levels in China. Rooting our hypotheses in institutional theory and the contextual governmental reforms of China, we leverage a large sample of Chinese A-share listed firms and document that firms located in culturally tight provinces have higher levels of board gender diversity. Further analyses reveal that cultural tightness in China partially offsets the impact of more traditional Confucian values, and the relationship becomes more pronounced in settings where firms can realize higher legitimacy gains from adopting women on their boards. Finally, we counter potential critiques of window dressing, by demonstrating that in culturally tighter areas women are more likely to be higher educated, have more experience abroad, hold more board positions, and are less likely to be independent directors.

We interpret industry discount rates as proxies for value investment, grounded in Q theory, while capturing gambling preferences through salience theory. Integrating these perspectives, we propose a novel asset pricing model (ST-ICAPM) that unifies value investment and salience factors, evaluating its pricing efficacy across Chinese industries from 2004 to 2023. Empirical results show that investment factors tend to negatively predict future returns, while growth factors command risk premia. However, profitability factors exhibit limited explanatory power. Investor expectations are primarily driven by profit growth, emphasizing the need to enhance profit stability for a value-oriented market. Salience intensity, especially when measured via eigenvector centrality within industry networks, serves as a strong negative predictor of returns, emphasizing the importance of conceptual connections over purely economic linkages in shaping investor behavior. Robust tests confirm that the ST-ICAPM outperforms benchmark models (FF3, CARHART4, FF5, ICAPM, and STCAPM) in terms of pricing power. Our findings emphasize the need to promote value investing and restrain gambling behavior as essential strategies to cultivate a resilient capital market in China.

The increasing institutional participation and deepening integration of physical trading and financial operations in commodity markets have elevated the interconnectedness of energy futures and equity markets to prominence in both scholarly discourse and industry analysis. Employing the Nelson-Siegel framework and Fama-French factor model, this study examines the dynamic relationships between energy futures holding cost variations and equity returns across coal and oil sectors. Our analysis yields three principal findings: First, the Fama-French three-factor model exhibits robust explanatory power in China's energy sector equity market, revealing significant statistical relationships between holding cost curve parameters—level, slope, and curvature—and industry excess returns. Second, holding cost variations manifest substantial heterogeneity in their impact on stock returns across coal and oil sectors. Third, carrying cost components demonstrate dominance over shock transmission effects in explaining industry stock return volatility, indicating complex, asymmetric interaction mechanisms between futures and equity markets. Drawing from these empirical results, we advance targeted policy prescriptions addressing futures market architecture and financial stability.