Periods of market crisis are often accompanied by heightened fear and information overload, which can induce information avoidance behaviors such as the ostrich effect. While prior research has documented investors’ tendency to avoid unfavorable information, little is known about how different information sources—and trust in those sources—jointly shape such behavior under extreme uncertainty. Drawing on Granular Interaction Thinking Theory (GITT) and employing Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics, this study examines how investors’ regular securities-related information sources is associated with the ostrich effect during the 2022 market downturn in China, and how these associations are conditioned by trust. Using survey data from 1,451 Chinese individual stock investors, we model investors’ recalled frequency of temporarily disengaging from stock investing as an indicator of information avoidance. The results show that regularly consulting professional sources, financial newspapers, and online forums is associated with information avoidance, whereas reliance on personal relationships and company disclosures is not. Importantly, trust moderates these relationships in distinct ways. Higher trust in professional sources is associated with reduced information avoidance, while higher trust in financial newspapers and online forums amplifies avoidance behavior. Among all sources, the interaction between trust and information referral is strongest for financial newspapers. These findings suggest that trust does not uniformly mitigate fear-driven avoidance. Instead, when combined with high-entropy information sources, trust can exacerbate cognitive and emotional strain, increasing investors’ propensity to disengage. By highlighting the joint roles of informational entropy and trust, this study advances behavioral finance research and offers practical insights for investors, policymakers, and regulators seeking to improve decision-making resilience during periods of market crisis.

The governmental governance environment significantly influences real corporate investment. Based on the data of listed A-share enterprises from 2010-2020,we adopt a heterogeneous timing difference-in-differences method to examine the impact of Open government data (OGD) on real corporate investment by leveraging the launch of OGD platforms. It is found that OGD significantly promotes real corporate investment. This conclusion remains robust after a series of tests for robustness and endogeneity, including parallel trend, placebo, heterogeneity treatment effect, and replacing variable. The analysis of the impact mechanism reveals that OGD influences real corporate investment by reducing enterprise uncertainty and alleviating financing constraint. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that OGD exerts a more pronounced investment promotion effect on non-state-owned enterprises, without political affiliations, regions characterized by intense government intervention, and areas exhibiting low social trust. This study contributes both conceptual insights for advancing the real economy with higher quality and practical recommendations to support the modernization of national governance structures and administrative effectiveness.

This paper examines the role of institutional investors in shaping pricing dynamics within China’s nascent infrastructure Real Estate Investment Trust market. Introduced in 2021, China’s REITs have rapidly gained policy and market attention as a tool for financing large-scale infrastructure projects through equity-based securitisation. Unlike mature REIT markets, China’s infrastructure REITs are characterised by a high concentration of institutional ownership dominated by state-owned financial institutions. Using panel data on first 9 REITs from May 2021 to April 2024, we find that institutional ownership significantly boosts the premium to net asset value. This effect operates primarily through two channels: reduced market liquidity and increased idiosyncratic return volatility, likely reflecting institutions’ trading activity and informational advantages. The findings highlight how institutional capital serves as a confidence signal in China’s emerging REITs ecosystem. The study contributes to the global REITs literature by offering insights from an emerging market context and provides policy recommendations to guide China’s REITs market development toward greater transparency, diversity, and long-term resilience.

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.

This study examines how firm-specific characteristics and monetary tightening influence the composition and dynamics of trade credit received by Chinese listed firms. Using panel data, the analysis distinguishes among three sources of trade credit: related parties, non-related parties, and controlling shareholders. The findings reveal a clear asymmetry in firms’ financing responses to monetary tightening: while trade credit from non-related parties declines, credit from related parties—especially controlling shareholders—increases. This underscores the strategic role of intra-group financing in buffering firms against external financial shocks during periods of constrained liquidity. Moreover, firm-specific factors such as size, profitability, market power, and ownership have differing effects depending on the source of trade credit. These effects are most pronounced when the credit is extended from controlling shareholders, reflecting the influence of intra-group trust and reduced information asymmetries. The results also highlight a substitute relationship between bank credit and trade credit, which weakens when trade credit is sourced from related parties and disappears entirely in the case of controlling shareholders. By shedding light on the distinct mechanisms of intra-group trade credit in China’s underdeveloped financial system, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of corporate financing strategies of Chinese firms.

This paper examines the impact of social distrust on household saving in China using a microsample from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). We find that social distrust leads to an increase in savings within households, in which households not living alone, with higher levels of education and urban households are more affected. We also find that social distrust affects household savings through raising risk expectations, reducing credit availability and amplifying risk spillovers from real estate markets.

Trust can be obtained by firm location (endowed trust) or behaviors (earned trust). We are interested in whether firms located in trusted regions are more likely to protect stakeholders’ benefits as a strategy to earn trust. Based on a sample of Chinese firms, we find a significant and positive correlation between regional endowed trust and local firms’ environmental and social commitment. We suggest that endowed trust has two effects: 1) shaping local firms’ legal cognition and thus decreasing misconducts; and 2) providing resources and thus mitigating financial constraints, both of which encourage firms to protect the environment and society. Moreover, the positive effect of high endowed trust is weakened when corporate governance or local legal environment is strong.

This study explores how the application of democratic rule in land reform decision-making determines villagers’ political trust towards different levels of the government in China. Based on analyses of a two-period household survey data we find that in China’s most recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform, the use of democratic rule improves villagers’ trust for town and county cadres, whereas the impact on trust towards village cadres is only significant for the democracy involving all the villagers or households in a village. This pattern of trust is partly explained by our findings that the democratic process helped decrease the unresolved inter-village forestland disputes whilst there seems no such impact on the within-village land disputes. Heterogeneity analyses show that democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for villagers with lower income, and those without affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or to the village committee.

Using a large sample of US individuals, we show that individuals with higher levels of trust have lower likelihoods of default in household debt and higher net worth. The effect is driven by trust values inherited from cultural and family backgrounds more than by trust beliefs about others. We demonstrate a causal impact of trust on financial outcomes by extracting the component of trust correlated with early-life ex- periences. The effect of trust is more pronounced among females, those with lower education, lower income, lower financial literacy, and higher debt-to-income ratio. Further evidence suggests that enhancing individuals’ trust, to the right amount, can improve household financial well-being.

Corporate misconduct poses significant risks to financial markets, undermining investor confidence and economic stability. This study investigates the influence of World Heritage culture, with its social, historical, and symbolic values, on reducing corporate misconduct. Using firm-level data from China, with its rich cultural heritage and ancient civilization, we find a significant negative association between the number of World Heritage sites near a company and corporate misconduct. This suggests that a richer World Heritage culture fosters an informal institutional environment that mitigates corporate misconduct. This effect is robust across 100 km, 200 km, and 300 km thresholds and remains significant when using a binary misconduct indicator. The results also show that World Heritage culture enhances corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social capital, which in turn reduces corporate misconduct. Additionally, the impact of World Heritage culture is more pronounced in firms located in high social trust areas, those with high institutional investor supervision, and those farther from regulatory authorities. These findings advance academic knowledge and offer practical implications for policymakers and investors.