Site visits allow visitors to physically inspect productive resources and interact with onsite employees and executives face-to-face. We posit that, by allowing visitors to acquire investmentrelated information and monitor the management team, site visits offer disciplinary benefits for corporate investments. Using mandatory disclosures of site visits in China, we find that corporate investments become more responsive to growth opportunities as the intensity of site visits increases, consistent with the notion that site visits yield disciplinary benefits. We also find that the positive association between site visits and investment efficiency is more pronounced when visitors can glean more investment-related information and when they have stronger incentives and greater power to monitor managers. This positive association is also stronger among firms with more severe agency problems and higher asset tangibility. The overall evidence supports the notion that site visits serve as a unique venue for institutional investors and financial analysts to acquire valuable information and serve a monitoring function, which generates disciplinary benefits for corporate investments.

Using staggered exogenous shocks to mandatory CSR disclosure, we examine the effect of mandatory CSR disclosure on employment growth. We find that CSR reporting firms have a higher employment growth following the mandate than non-CSR reporting firms. With respect to potential channels, we document that mandatory CSR disclosure promotes employment growth by improving firms’ CSR performance on employee welfare. In cross-sectional tests, we find that the employment effect is more pronounced for state-owned enterprises, firms in hazardous industries and firms in high-tech industries. We also find that cities most impacted by the mandate exhibit higher aggregate employment growth. While mandatory CSR disclosure promotes employment growth of mandated firms, it has a crowding out effect on employment growth of non-mandated local peer firms. Our paper offers novel evidence on the impact of mandatory CSR disclosure on labor resource allocation.

Firms in China increase green innovation following a mandate that requires them to regularly disclose their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Further analyses show that the CSR disclosure mandate leads to higher media coverage of disclosing firms' environmental issues, and the increase mainly comes from negative environmental news. By contrast, voluntary CSR disclosure does not affect corporate green innovation, and it increases positive but not negative environmental media coverage. These findings suggest that (1) it is the mandatory feature of the mandate, not the act of disclosure, that matters most for the positive effect on corporate green innovation; and (2) the negative media coverage induced by mandatory CSR disclosure plays a disciplinary role and promotes green innovation, while the positive media coverage induced by voluntary CSR disclosure does not.

We study the potential negative externalities of mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure. Our analysis exploits a unique regulatory change in China that requires a subset of firms to report their contributions to poverty alleviation—on top of reporting general ESG issues—using a difference-in-differences design. We find that treated firms significantly increase their anti-poverty spending, but also increase their pollution, after the regulatory change came into force. The negative environmental externality is more concentrated in firms that are more financially constrained, as well as firms that are facing fiercer market competition. We further show that this effect is driven by a firm’s incentive to strategically cater to politicians’ agenda in order to obtain preferential treatment. These findings suggest that mandating ESG disclosure in selected areas may induce firms to trade off different ESG goals by prioritizing more conspicuous ESG issues at the cost of trivializing other, longer-term, issues.

Retail investors are rising in prominence but have historically been granted little direct access to question corporate management relative to professionals like sell-side analysts and institutional investors. Because retail investors are relatively less sophisticated and can require hand-holding, we examine whether information asymmetry among investors decreases when firms answer questions from the retail investor base. We exploit ’s investor interactive platforms (IIPs), which were designed to facilitate retail investor access to management. IIPs allow questions to be anonymously and publicly posted, but answers can only pertain to previously disclosed information and there is no explicit penalty for low-quality answers. We find that IIP answers reduce bid-ask spreads, with stronger answer effects when managers respond quickly, provide direct answers, and interact with IIP users who focus on the firm. These information asymmetry reduction benefits are substantially attenuated, and in some cases non-existent, for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), who have less incentive to publicly engage with retail investors. Finally, our findings reveal that on average the marginal effects of answers are smaller than for posted questions, suggesting that while firms benefit from answering questions to lower investor integration costs, IIP activity that lowers awareness and acquisition costs is also important.