Innovation is crucial for long-term corporate value and competitive advantage; however, it can misalign the interests of managers and investors. Balancing managers’ short- and long-term goals is a pivotal challenge in promoting innovation incentives. Therefore, this study examines innovative incentives for managers of publicly traded firms to address the issue of agency problems. The study focuses on economic value-added (EVA) reform implemented by China’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which encourages EVA-driven R&D investments as the primary management metric. The policy effectively motivates key corporate managers by reducing capital costs and stimulating increased innovation. Following this policy’s implementation, notable innovation disparities exist between state-owned enterprises and firms not subject to the reform. Furthermore, innovation incentives significantly affect overconfident company managers, yielding positive effects on innovation.

We examine how social networks shaped by high-speed rail connections influence investor attention and market reactions to earnings announcements in China. Firms in high-centrality cities exhibit stronger immediate and subsequent responses in investor attention, stock price, and trading volume to earnings news. Further analysis shows that earnings-induced local attention predicts future attention spillovers to intercity investors, amplifying both price and volume reactions after announcements. Overall, these findings indicate that high-speed rail networks foster investor social networks that facilitate the dissemination of firm news and help explain predictable patterns in investor behavior and market pricing.

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.

To better understand the government’s role in corporate social responsibility (CSR), we use the relocation of local governments in China as an exogenous shock to examine how geographic distance from the government affects corporate charitable donations. The Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis indicates that firms reduce charitable donations when local governments move closer. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises and for firms located in cities with lower fiscal pressure. The results remain consistent to a series of robustness tests, including alternative sample specifications, different measures of donations, and various estimation methods. We do not observe a corresponding increase in donations when governments move farther away. Additional analysis indicates that when the government relocates closer, firms may reallocate resources away from traditional charitable donations toward CSR activities that involve more active engagement.

With the digital transformation of the capitalist economy, some contemporary scholars have put forward the Techno-Feudalism narrative of the digital economy. This narrative emphasizes that digital platform enterprises, as emerging market entities in the digital economy, have many practices that are highly similar to those of feudal lords. For example, digital platform enterprises plundering user data is similar to feudal lords plundering land; digital platform enterprises collecting digital rent is similar to feudal lords collecting land rent; digital platform enterprises controlling users and workers is similar to feudal lords controlling slaves. However, this narrative has many theoretical fallacies. Marx's theory of surplus value shows that the above phenomena are essentially still the contemporary form of capital seizing surplus value through technological innovation. The techno-feudalism narrative ignores the internal logic of capital using technological iteration to reconstruct the exploitation mechanism and falls into a superficial misjudgment. In contrast, the Chinese governance practice of digital economy breaks the monopoly of platforms on data elements through the innovation of the separation of three rights of data property rights; promotes fair competition and optimal allocation of resources in the digital economy by strengthening anti-monopoly supervision and promoting the construction of digital infrastructure; proves that the socialist system can break the capital proliferation cycle and achieve "people-centered" development by building a labor rights protection system to promote the creation and sharing of value and transcending the techno-feudalism phenomenon of the digital economy.

We study tail-risk contagion in Belt and Road (BRI) stock markets by conditioning on shocks from China and global commodities. We construct time-varying contagion indices from conditional higher co-moments (CoHCM) estimated within a DCC-GARCH model with generalized hyperbolic innovations, and apply them to daily data for 32 BRI markets. The higher-moment index isolates two channels: a China-driven financial-institutional channel and a WTI-driven commodity-real-economy channel, whereas a covariance benchmark fails to recover this separation. Furthermore, the system-GMM estimates link the China-conditional channel to institutional quality and financial depth, and the WTI-conditional channel to real activity. In out-of-sample portfolio tests, the WTI-conditional signal improves risk-adjusted performance relative to equally weighted and mean-variance benchmarks, while the China-conditional signal does not. Tail-based measurement thus sharpens identification of contagion paths and yields information that is economically relevant for risk management in interconnected emerging markets.

Background: How to cope with the rapid growth of LTC (long-term care) needs for the old people without activities of daily living (ADL), which is also a serious hazard caused by public health emergencies such as COVID-2019 and SARS (2003), has become an urgent task in China, Germany, Japan, and other aging countries. As a response, the LTCI (longterm care insurance) system has been executed among European countries and piloted in 15 cities of China in 2016. Subsequently, the influence and dilemma of LTCI system have become a hot academic topic in the past 20 years.Methods: The review was carried out to reveal the effects of the LTCI system on different economic entities by reviewing relevantliterature published from January 2008 to September 2019. The quality of 25 quantitative and 24 qualitative articles was evaluated using the JBI and CASP critical evaluation checklist, respectively. Results: The review systematically examines the effects of the LTCI system on different microeconomic entities such as caretakers or their families and macroeconomic entities such as government spending. The results show that the LTCI system has a great impact on social welfare. For example, LTCI has a positive effect on the health and life quality of the disabled elderly. However, the role of LTCI in alleviating the financial burden on families with the disabled elderly may be limited. Conclusion: Implementation of LTCI system not only in reducing the physical and mental health problems of health care recipients and providers, and the economic burden of their families, but also promote the development of health care service industry and further improvement of the health care system. However, the dilemma and sustainable development of the LTCI system is the government needs to focus on in the future due to the sustainability of its funding sources.

We examine the effects of issuing green bond on green premium and green signal transmission by matching green bonds with ordinary bonds. We find that the credit spread of green bonds is significantly lower than that of ordinary bonds, especially for those green bonds with lower information disclosure complexity. Besides, issuing green bonds cannot receive a positive response from the stock market, but can significantly reduce issuer’s loan costs and provide more financial subsidies for high polluting issuers. Furthermore, by obtaining discounted loans and financial subsidies, issuing green bonds can increase issuer’s R&D intensity and reduce their carbon emissions. These findings indicate that issuing green bonds can reduce financing costs and convey green signals to market stakeholders with less investment experience.

We construct a new geospatial measure using high-resolution river vector data from National Geomatics Center of China (NGCC) to study how urban riparian exposure shapes local government debt financing costs. Our base-line results show that cities with higher riparian exposures have significantly lower credit spreads, with a one-standard-deviation increase in riparian exposure reducing credit spreads by approximately 12 basis points. By comparing cities crossed by natural rivers with those intersected by artificial canals, we disentangle the dual role of riparian zones as sources of natural capital benefits (e.g., enhanced transportation capacity) versus climate risks (e.g., flood vulnerability). We find that climate change has amplified the impact of natural disasters, such as floods and droughts, particularly in riparian zones, thus weakening the cost-reducing effect of riparian exposure on bond financing. In contrast, improved water infrastructure and flood-control facilities strengthen the cost-reduction effect. Our findings contribute to the literature on natural capital and government financing, offering valuable implications for public finance and risk management.

The frequent occurrence of extreme weather events not only poses serious challenges to global economic growth and financial stability but also affects firms negatively across multiple dimensions. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2006-2016, this study aims to explore the effect of climate risk on firm export sophistication. The findings show that climate risk inhibits firm export sophistication, with the results varying depending on firm and industry types. Specifically, climate risk (i) inhibits export sophistication for firms with low government subsidies more than for firms with high government subsidies; (ii) restraints export sophistication for firms in high-tech industries rather than for low-and medium-tech industries; and (iii) reduces export sophistication for firms in low-marketization regions more than for firms in high-marketization regions. In addition, channel analysis shows that climate risk inhibits firm export sophistication by increasing financial constraints and reducing human capital.