We examine an important yet understudied form of reputational sanction in China, namely public criticisms imposed on culpable firms by the Chinese stock exchanges from 2013 to 2018. We find significantly negative cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement date, and they were affected by several factors, including financing propensity, governance mechanism, and equity nature. However, the market reaction is significantly negative only for firms relying on external financing and non-state enterprises, and importantly, becomes insignificant in cases where the firm had self-exposed misconduct before the official announcement of public criticism. Further, we examine other effects of public criticism, finding that public criticism does not improve firms’ long-term values, nor produce strong deterrence to change their behaviour. Overall, the evidence of the effects of public criticism on culpable firms is mixed, suggesting that reputational sanction is a weak, if not ineffective, instrument of market regulation in China.

We study the demand for government participation in China’s venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and the private firms managing the invested capital by deploying it to high-growth entrepreneurs. Our respondents together account for nearly $1 trillion in assets under management. Each respondent evaluates synthetic profiles of potential investment partners, whose characteristics we randomize, under the real-stakes incentive that they will be introduced to real partners matching their preferences. Our main result is that the average firm dislikes investors with government ties, indicating that the benefits of political connections are small compared to the cons of having the government as an investor. We show that such dislike is not present with government-owned firms, and this dislike is highest with best-performing firms. Additional results and follow-up surveys suggest political interference in decision-making is the leading mechanism why government capital is unattractive to private firms. We feed our experimental estimates and administrative data into a simple model of two-sided search to discuss the distributional effects of government participation. Overall, our findings point to a “grabbing hand” interpretation of state-firm relationships reflecting a desire by the government to keep control over the private sector.

There is little empirical work examining contractual innovation in the context of China, which is the second largest venture capital market in the world, after the United States. Drawing upon extensive interviews, a hand-collected dataset of investment agreements and judgements made by Chinese courts on venture capital disputes, this article examines a unique contractual design that is common in the Chinese venture capital sector—the valuation adjustment mechanism (“VAM”). A VAM provides investors with a right to adjust a portfolio company’s original valuation and to get compensation by cash or equity upon the occurrence of certain future events (such as failing to meet financial or non-financial performance indicators). The prevalence of VAMs in China is potentially attributable to: (1) severe information asymmetry in the less informed market, (2) the lack of convertible preferred stock under Chinese law and excessive legal restrictions over investment tools and contractual mechanisms in venture capital financing, and (3) insufficient legal protection for investors under Chinese law. This article argues that, unlike American venture capital contracts, which are designed to encourage long-term, sustainable investor-entrepreneur relationships, VAMs are predominantly investors’ self-help mechanisms to address specific and serious investor protection issues in the transitional and less informed Chinese market. Thus, it suggests that the problems regarding investor protection motivating the use of VAMs can be better solved by law reforms such as allowing limited liability companies to issue convertible preferred stock, introducing more legal remedies for minority investors, as well as an improved regulatory environment governing venture financing.

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.

Audits are a standard mechanism for reducing corruption in government investments. The quality of audits themselves, however, may be affected by relationships between auditor and target. We study whether provincial chief auditors in China show greater leniency in evaluating prefecture governments in their hometowns. In city-fixed-effect specifications – in which the role of shared background is identified from auditor turnover – we show that hometown auditors find 38 percent less in questionable monies. This hometown effect is similar throughout the auditor’s tenure, and is diminished for audits ordered by the provincial Organizations Department as a result of the departure of top city officials. We argue that our findings are most readily explained by leniency toward local officials rather than an endogenous response to concerns of better enforcement by hometown auditors. We complement these city-level findings with firm-level analyses of earnings manipulation by state-owned enterprises via real activity manipulation (a standard measure from the accounting literature), which we show is higher under hometown auditors.

Shadow banking in China constitutes a dual-track interest rate reform that adds a new market track beside the controlled formal banking track. Shadow banking leads to Kaldor-Hicks improvement if the gains from financing the underfunded private enterprise (PE) and reducing bank capital idleness caused by ultrahigh reserve requirements outweigh the losses from shadow banking risk. Pareto improvement is feasible as the state-owned enterprise (SOE), a potential reform loser, participates in shadow banking to transfer credit to the more productive PE. Full interest rate liberalization, which removes formal banking controls after the dual-track reform, does not warrant additional profit gain if bank credit misallocation favoring the SOE and SOE's low productivity persist.

We investigate banks' issuance choices of wealth management products (WMPs), which are both interest rate deregulation vehicles and shadow deposits without explicit government insurance. Support for an inverted-U shape between market share and WMP issuance is found in national market. State-owned banks are reluctant to issue WMPs due to their monopoly power, very small banks do not have the capacity to issue while small and medium banks issue WMPs intensively as a regulatory arbitrage. Moreover, the geographic deregulation in 2009 stimulates the bank competition in the local market, incumbent banks take advantage of WMPs to fight off the new entering banks.

In this paper, I build a continuous-time macro-finance model in which firms can access both bond credit and bank credit. The model captures the simple idea that the presence of bond financing increases the price elasticity of demand for bank loans. I find that the optimal capital adequacy ratio is quantitatively sensitive to the presence of bond financing and that models would overstate the banking sector's recovery rate if they omit bond financing. Furthermore, the model highlights that an economy's optimal capital requirement highly depends on the efficiency of its bankruptcy procedure and the risk profile of its real sector.

China frequently suffers from weather related natural disasters and is a source of wide-spread systemic risk throughout large swaths of China. During these periods farmers crops are at risk and for a largely poor population few can afford the turmoil to livelihoods that goes along with drought. Throughout the developing world there is serious interest in index-based weather insurance for agriculture, and in China the China Insurance Regulatory Commission is investigating the insurability of weather related risk. Beyond that little formal research has appeared on either the demand, use or design of index insurance in China. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of farmers’ willingness to pay for drought insurance. Based on a survey of over 890 farm households in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces the results show that while there is significant demand, price may be an issue. Our results show that the majority of farm households would transition from a no-demand state to a demand state as prices fall. This suggests that in order to gain wide gain adoption there may be a need for governmental intervention.

We examine the effects of the world’s first comply-or-explain dividend regulation in China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange, which requires firms to either pay at least 30% of profits as dividends or explain the use of funds. We find that many firms increased their payout ratio to comply, by increasing dividends or decreasing earnings. Firms with high profitability, state ownership, and fewer agency conflicts were more likely to comply. However, complying firms subsequently issued more debt and had a decline in accounting performance and firm valuation. The evidence suggests that the comply-or-explain regulation increased firms’ dividends at substantial costs.