在实现“双碳”与共同富裕目标并进的背景下，环保规制的公平后果日益受到关注。本文以2013、2014与2016年分批启动的碳排放权交易试点为准自然实验，基于2000—2023年中国区县面板数据，系统评估市场型环保规制的分配效应。结果变量方面，本文使用区县夜间灯光构建的不平等指标（基尼、泰尔、阿特金森）刻画县域经济活动分布，并以县域城乡居民收入对数差距作为补充。识别策略方面，除区县与年份双向固定效应的TWFE-DID外，进一步引入适用于分批采用的更强识别方法：（1）Sun-Abraham分组事件研究用于动态效应检验并规避传统事件回归在异质处理效应下的加权偏误；（2）Callaway-Sant’Anna ATT(g,t)在“尚未受处理/从未受处理”对照组框架下估计分组—时期平均处理效应；（3）合成双重差分（SDID）同时估计单位权重与时间权重，以匹配处理前趋势并降低对严格平行趋势的依赖。研究发现：在TWFE-DID下，试点显著降低了县域夜间灯光基尼与阿特金森指数；更强识别（ATT(g,t)、SDID）在城市层面同样指向夜间灯光泰尔指数的下降，但幅度更为温和。机制检验表明，试点显著降低城市单位GDP能耗，支持“绿色转型—要素再配置—分配格局改善”的作用链条。

This paper investigates the gambling preference of Chinese investors in the convertible bond (CB) market through a natural experiment—the 2018 amendment of Article 142 of the Company Law. Utilizing CB issuance data from 2016 to 2023, we employ a cohort difference-in-difference approach and find a 4% to 7% increase in IPO premiums for high-repurchase-expectation CBs across various measures. This significant increase indicates that the legal revision reshapes investors’ expectation and adjusts their valuation of CBs. Furthermore, the event-study analysis reveals the escalating impact of legal revision, driven by the herding behavior of gambling investors.

This study was conducted to understand better how rules influence China's energy performance; this research on these policies' efficacy that facilitating the transition to sustainable energy sources is of tremendous significance, particularly in light of the severe problems climate change poses. To determine whether or not strict regulations are beneficial to China's energy transition efforts, this research makes use of a substantial amount of data about China's environmental laws and environmental transition policies. This paper thoroughly analyses the impact of strict environmental regulations on various energy transition measures. These metrics include the availability of green energy, carbon emissions, and energy efficiency. The results provide insights into how environmental restrictions have affected China's transition to a different energy source. Policymakers and stakeholders may use this information to build efficient plans to expedite the transition to a low-carbon, renewable energy system in China and abroad.

The 2008 Labor Contract Law of China stipulates that all employment relationships must be covered by a written labor contract. This regulation considerably strengthened employment protection for workers. Using a unique longitudinal dataset, the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (2012, 2014, and 2016 waves), this article estimates the impact of the formal contractualization of labor relations on workers’ labor market outcomes, social insurance participation, and job satisfaction. We find that gaining a labor contract was strongly associated with an increase in salary, a decrease in working overtime hours, and greater participation in unemployment and pension insurances. In terms of job satisfaction, workers who gained a labor contract reported being less satisfied with their workplace environment and income than they had anticipated. This finding suggests that workers had higher expectations from the benefits gained through contractualization, than what they actually derived.

Using firm-customer matched data from 2005 to 2020 in China, we examined the spillover effects and mechanisms of green innovation (GI) among supply chain partners. Results show a positive association between customers' GI and their supply firms' GI, indicating spillover effects in the supply chain. Customers' GI increase from the 25th to the 75th percentile leads to a significant 19% increase in supply firms' GI. Certain conditions amplify the spillover effect, including customers with higher bargaining power, operating in less competitive industries, and supply firms making relationship-specific investments or experiencing greater customer stability. Geographic proximity and shared ownership further enhance the spillover effect. Information-based and competition-based channels drive the spillover effect, while customers with higher GI encourage genuine GI activities by supply firms. External environmental regulations, such as the Chinese Green Credit Policy and Environmental Protection Law, strengthen the spillover effect, supporting the Porter hypothesis. This research expands understanding of spillover effects in the supply chain and contributes to the literature on GI determinants.

Under the guidance of the dual-carbon target, the development of the carbon financial system is of great significance to compensate for the gap between green and low-carbon investment. Considering the current state of the development of carbon financial system, China has initially formed a carbon financial system, including participants, carbon financial products and macro and micro operation structures, but the system is still in the initial development stage. Given the current restrictions on the development of carbon finance, it can be seen that there are still problems such as unreasonable economic structure, insufficient market construction, single product category, low utilization rate and urgent construction of relevant judicial guarantee system. Therefore, the system should be improved at the economic level and the legal level. The economic level includes adjusting the layout of economic development structure, strengthening the construction of market infrastructure, encouraging the diversification of carbon financial products and strengthening publicity and education promotion strategies. The legal level includes improving the top-level design, formulating judicial interpretation to promote carbon financial trading, promoting commercial law amendment, and promoting the linkage mechanism between specialized environmental justice and carbon finance and other safeguard measures. Finally, improving the carbon finance system is required to promote and protect the orderly development of carbon finance. To promote the reform of the pattern of economic development, the concept of ecological and environmental protection in the financial sector needs to be implemented to form an overall pattern of pollution reduction, carbon reduction and synergistic efficiency improvement.

This study examines the relationship between industry litigation risk and corporate misconduct using China's A-share listed companies’ data from 2007 to 2022. The findings indicate a significant and negative association, where companies in industries with higher median litigation amounts relative to their assets exhibit reduced incidents of misconduct. This suggests that businesses in high-risk litigation sectors may adopt more cautious practices to mitigate legal challenges and protect their reputations. The robustness of these findings is confirmed through a variety of tests, including a quasi-experimental setting of the chief judges rotation implemented in 2008. Furthermore, the study finds that external monitors including financial analysts’ site visits and local law firms moderate the negative relationship between litigation risk and misconduct. We further show that legal enforcement and moral capital are the two channels through which industry litigation risk impacts corporate misconduct. Our findings underscore the role of litigation risk in shaping peer firms' behavior.

This paper investigates how transparency in lawsuit information affects capital allocation and aggregate industrial production. Greater transparency enhances the availability of information about firms' fundamentals, which can influence resource distribution. We exploit regional variations in courts' compliance with mandated judicial document disclosures in China, implemented since 2014, as a natural experiment. For firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), a 10-percentage-point increase in legal transparency results in a 4.4% increase in physical capital and a 7.9% reduction in MRPK, relative to firms with lower MRPK. Additionally, regions with higher transparency experience a rise in aggregate output. Further analysis differentiating firms by ownership type, public listing status, and industry-level contract intensity enhances the robustness of our findings.

In this paper, we use a unique dataset of the List of Dishonest Judgment Debtors to explore the impact on the social credit environment of the increasing housing prices in China. We find that housing price has a negative impact on the local credit environment. Dominance analysis suggests that housing price contributes to the model R-squared (R2) by an overwhelming majority, suppressing any other economic or social factors in explaining the deteriorating credit environment. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the rule of law and moral standards mitigate the negative influence of high housing prices, while income inequality exacerbates the influence.

While the popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has brought signiffcant proffts, legal practitioners have been exposed to unanswered legal concerns behind the frenzy of NFT transactions. Generally, such concerns include those related to the applicability of copyright to NFTs, the legal relationship between an NFT and the tokenized work, and the copyrights associated with the NFT in transactions. TTe Hangzhou Internet Court released the ffrst NFT-related copyright case, setting a course for the subsequent judicial and business practice of IP-related NFTs nationally and internationally. With these general considerations in mind, the paper brieffy introduces what non-fungible tokens are and how they relate to copyright law. Speciffcally, by interpreting the ffrst NFT-related copyright decision in detail, the paper addresses the legal status of NFT and NFT transactions from the perspective of Chinese Copyright Law, with particular focus on the liability of online platforms and the applicability of the exhaustion doctrine.