Utilizing data from the East Money stock forum, one of China's most influential financial portals, this study examines how online discussions among individual investors influence managerial learning from stock prices to make investment decisions. We find that higher discussion intensity is associated with lower investment-q sensitivity, indicating that investors' online discussions impede managerial learning from prices. This effect operates through a decline in information asymmetry and the probability of informed trading. Furthermore, the negative impact is more pronounced when managers exhibit stronger incentives to learn from market signals. Overall, our findings support a crowding-out mechanism: online discussions crowd out the private information gathering of informed traders, thereby reducing the informativeness of prices for real investment decisions.

Purpose-This study explores how inconsistency in environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings affects the information environment of publicly traded companies in emerging markets. Design/methodology/approach-Drawing on data from six ESG rating agencies covering listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 2022, we construct measures of pairwise ESG rating divergence and average them across 15 unique rater pairs. We then employ a battery of econometric methods to examine how inconsistencies in ESG ratings affect stock return synchronicity in the Chinese capital market. Findings-Our findings indicate that greater ESG rating divergence correlates with increased stock return synchronicity, suggesting a decline in the dissemination of firm-specific information. Supporting evidence for this relationship includes reduced private information flow, heightened opportunistic executive sales and decreased stock turnover for firms associated with higher ESG rating divergence. Our analysis suggests that such divergence hinders informed trading by institutional investors and the effect is more pronounced for firms with lower transparency, such as those with fewer analysts, limited investor oversight and sparse ESG disclosure, as well as for firms in non-polluting industries. These findings emphasize that ESG rating divergence exacerbates uncertainty about firms' future performance, discourages informed trading and ultimately restricts the integration of firm-specific information into stock prices. Originality/value-This study adds to the literature on ESG ratings and market efficiency by highlighting the importance of standardizing rating methodologies and improving corporate disclosure to counteract the adverse impacts of rating divergence.

Firms’ export and import participation are positively correlated, a pattern known as two-way complementarity. In this paper, we refine its concept, develop empirical measures, identify its micro-foundations, and explore associated welfare implications. In a general equilibrium trade model with heterogeneous firms, we show that twoway complementarity emerges endogenously from the way trade costs align firms’ joint import and export decisions. We then derive an ACR-style gains-from-trade formula that incorporates this channel. Two-way complementarity amplifies aggregate trade elasticities, leading to smaller inferred welfare gains from a given decline in domestic trade shares after a trade reform. Using Chinese micro data, we document empirical support for the model predictions and find that failing to account for the complementarity overstates China’s gains from WTO accession by around 40%.

This paper examines the effects of China's 2016 coal capacity reduction policy on firms, local labor markets, and crime. We find that the policy substantially reduced the asset size and employment of coal firms in treated cities while simultaneously increasing their profitability and lowering debt. Policy-induced layoffs generated adverse spillovers in local labor markets, reducing residents' incomes, worsening public perceptions of job opportunities, and increasing divorce rates. These labor market effects were most pronounced among older and less-educated individuals. Employment also shifted away from the mining sector toward wholesale and retail trade and real estate-related industries. In addition, the policy led to an increase in crime, driven primarily by property offenses committed by individual offenders, while violent crime remained largely unchanged. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the increase in coal firms' profits exceeded the fiscal resources required for worker resettlement.

Despite strong GDP growth and a favourable demographic profile, India faces an impending jobs crisis. A large share of the workforce remains employed in lowproductivity agriculture, while many new labour market entrants are absorbed into the persistently large informal sector. By contrast, China's rapid ascent was driven by manufacturing-led, export-oriented industrialisation, underpinned by large inflows of foreign direct investment and sustained technology transfer. India's manufacturing base remains modest in contrast. The bulk of well-paid, formal employment continues to be concentrated in the high-skill services sector. This paper contrasts the development trajectories of these two economies and identifies several underutilised jobs-growth levers in India: manufacturing, goods exports, manufacturing-oriented foreign direct investment and innovation. All of these remain underdeveloped, yet together they offer a pathway to more labour-absorbing, durable growth. Leveraging them effectively would be central to achieving India's 'Viksit Bharat 2047' ambition of attaining high-income status. The scale of India's challenge to employ eight to ten million labour-market entrants per year implies that job creation must become an explicit policy priority. This calls for greater trade openness, particularly with Asia and Europe, to integrate India into Asia-centric global supply chains as an alternative to China. Labour market reform is equally critical, making the effective implementation of the new labour codes essential. Strengthening innovation ecosystems and realigning education and skills policies to support industrialisation are also key. Without these structural shifts, India's current pattern of jobless growth risks transforming its demographic dividend into a long-term liability.

This study investigates the role of contextual cues in memory-based decision-making within high-stakes trading environments. Using trade records from a large Chinese brokerage firm, I show that an everyday contextual cue—geographic location—triggers the recall of previously traded stocks: when an investor returns to a city she has visited before, her probability of retrading stocks associated with that city rises by 2.1 percentage points under the most saturated specification (up to 12.2 percentage points under less saturated ones). The effect displays the signatures of similarity-based recall: it is diluted by intervening trading experiences, decays with the age of the memory trace, survives when the city is not the investor's home, is not explained by mechanical recency, and is present for orders submitted via both smartphones and PCs. I then examine an extreme-event cue, COVID-19 quarantine, and find a smaller and less robust effect; the interference and decay signatures are absent precisely for these strongly encoded traces, as the memory account predicts. Memory-cued transactions underperform: stocks bought upon the cue earn about 50 basis points less per week than stocks bought for other reasons on the same day. The study provides causal field evidence for memory-based theories, particularly similarity-based recall, in real-world trading.

Entry of arbitrageurs need not increase with larger mispricing. Arbitrageurs trade mispriced assets and close positions once mispricing is corrected, seeking to minimize carry cost (shadow value of trading capital). More deployed arbitrage capital shortens the wait, lowering carry costs but also payoffs. Discretionary entry is profitable only in a “Goldilocks” region, where deployed capital is neither too low nor too high: enough capital is deployed to accelerate correction, while profits remain. The region’s upper bound follows from the condition that every sequence of entrants has a last entrant who cannot rely on subsequent discretionary entry.

Less informative strategic advice can produce more informative prices. We study an informed adviser who both trades on his own account and receives compensation linked to the post-report price. Holding private information fixed, we show how promotion can restrain manipulation motivated by trading profits. At sufficiently high reputation, raising compensation enough to eliminate false bad news used to buy cheaply improves market price informativeness in every equilibrium, even though the strategic adviser’s report becomes uninformative. Under further sufficient conditions, always-favourable strategic reporting yields the most informative current prices among equilibria at every interior reputation. We also derive analytical sufficient conditions under which higher reputation lowers the adviser’s expected payoff and worsens prices within the same equilibrium. Financial influencers motivate the joint incentives: a reward for higher prices can counteract the incentive to depress prices before buying, while greater credibility need not benefit its holder.

We examine the relationship between government data opening and corporate leverage manipulation. Leveraging the staggered establishment of province-level open government data platforms in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that government data opening significantly reduces corporate leverage manipulation. This policy effect is more pronounced among firms with low capital intensity, firms with limited analyst coverage, and those located in regions with low banking competition. Mechanism analysis suggests that government data opening affects the cost-benefit tradeoff of corporate leverage manipulation by alleviating financing constraints and enhancing corporate governance, thereby mitigating leverage manipulation practices. Our research contributes to the literature on government data opening, highlighting its role in reducing leverage manipulation and offering valuable implications for mitigating significant financial risks.

This paper studies whether and how policies that promote a currency’s use in trade invoicing can also strengthen its role as an anchor currency in other economies’ exchange rate baskets. We exploit the establishment of RMB swap lines by the People’s Bank of China as a natural setting to examine this mechanism. We first estimate countries’ implicit currency baskets and the weights assigned to the RMB, and then use a staggered difference-in-differences design to assess the effect of initiating swap line agreements on the RMB’s weights in these baskets. Our results indicate that RMB weights increase by approximately 5% about nine months after a swap line is introduced and remain persistently higher thereafter. Finally, we develop a three-country DSGE model to interpret these findings, showing that by promoting RMB invoicing, swap lines reinforce the RMB’s role as an anchor currency for exchange rate stabilization.