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.

This study aims to examine the causal effect of carbon regulatory risk on corporate bond yield spreads in emerging markets through empirical analysis. Exploiting China's commitment to peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 as an exogenous shock to an unexpected increase in carbon regulatory risk, we perform a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) strategy. We find that exposure to carbon regulatory risk leads to an increase in bond yield spreads for carbon-intensive firms located in regions with stricter regulatory enforcement. This positive relationship is more pronounced for firms with financing constraints, belonging to more competitive industries, and located in regions with a high marketization process. We further identify that higher earnings uncertainty and increased investor attention serve as two mechanisms by which carbon regulatory risk influences the yield spreads of corporate bonds. Moreover, the spread decomposition reveals that the rise in bond yield spreads after an increase in carbon regulatory risk is primarily driven by the rise in default risk rather than the rise in liquidity risk. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of considering carbon regulatory risk exposure in financial markets, especially in developing economies like China.

This paper investigates the causal impact of pre-trade transparency on the market liquidity of an over-the-counter-style market by leveraging a natural experiment in China’s interbank corporate bond market. We find that turnover, market liquidity, and aggregate bond returns significantly declined when the regulators unexpectedly suspended real-time quote dissemination in March 2023. Consistent with our expectation, these effects were mainly focused on interbank bonds, not exchange bonds, and bonds with lower credit ratings and longer maturities. This study contributes novel evidence to the transparency literature and provides insights for policymakers in emerging markets weighing the trade-offs between data governance and market efficiency.

The Central Environmental Protection Inspector (CEPI) is a critical regulatory measure in China aimed at improving ecological quality. From a compliance cost perspective, we examine the impact of the CEPI on corporate environmental governance. The findings reveal an asymmetry in the CEPI's influence: it significantly promotes environmental governance efforts on the non-production side of enterprises, while having no substantial effect on the production side. Additionally, government environmental subsidies do not provide a resource incentive in the process of the CEPI influencing corporate environmental governance. However, local environmental governance pressure mitigates this asymmetry, leading the CEPI to significantly enhance environmental governance on both the production and non-production sides. Further analysis shows that under the synergistic effect of local environmental governance pressure, the CEPI encourages state-owned enterprises to focus on environmental governance on the production side, while non-state-owned enterprises tend to focus on the non-production side. Moreover, political connections reduce the positive impact of the CEPI on production costs under local environmental governance pressure. Finally, the CEPI also significantly encourages enterprises to expand their production scale. These findings offer valuable insights for refining the CEPI system to better promote corporate environmental governance.

To address the challenges posed by renewable energy integration in power systems, China is advancing the development of Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS). However, the rapid growth of PHS installations, coupled with strict regulations and a high reliance on capacity compensation, has led to increasing financial burdens on other utilities. One solution is to reallocate the capacity compensation through market-based approaches to implement the “beneficiary-pays” principle. To achieve this goal, an operational policy named ’partial-regulated dispatch’ is proposed in this study. The analysis of this policy encompasses two crucial dimensions: the dispatch mechanism and business models. The dispatch mechanism evaluates PHS’s capacity contribution to grid stability, while the business models focus on enhancing PHS profitability to reduce dependency on capacity compensation while ensuring long-term economic sustainability. Furthermore, the flexibility of PHS is introduced as a criterion for assessing system security contributions, considering both individual unit vibration characteristics and multi-unit commitment strategies. The case study shows that through partial-regulated dispatch, PHS can reduce its reliance on capacity compensation by nearly 50% while ensuring its regulation service via flexibility compensation. This policy effectively balances economic viability with system support capabilities. Moreover, flexibility compensation provides PHS operators with a risk mitigation strategy in the complex power market environment. Under an appropriate operational strategy and policy incentives, the flexibility can be enhanced by nearly 30% in a fully marketized scenario, contributing to both system stability and operational efficiency.

The high-penetration integration of renewable energy requires huge demand for reliable capacity resources, and the coal-fired units are the main providers of the reliable capacity in China. This study proposes a future-oriented approach to facilitate coal-fired power’ transition through capacity market development. Focusing on China’s power market reform context, we propose a two-stage capacity market mechanism integrating annual capacity auctions and monthly capacity bidding, and design the procedural and transactional framework for coal-fired power participation. We further outline three market strategies including energy market trading, centralized capacity market trading, and renewable energy alliance leasing. Environmental costs are incorporated to construct revenue models and derive boundary conditions for coal-fired units’ decision-making. Research results reveal that current capacity prices fail to cover costs, requiring substantial market-driven price increases to achieve profitability. While stable capacity revenue can reduce medium-to-long-term and spot market prices, fostering competition between coal-fired power and renewable energy resources. However, coal-fired power remains highly sensitive to price volatility, demanding robust resilience to fluctuations. Carbon prices significantly influence capacity prices, yet excessive free carbon quota allocations weaken carbon price transmission effects, necessitating optimized quota ratios to enhance market responsiveness. Finally, policy implications are proposed according to the research results.

Prefabricated buildings(PBs) have significant advantages in improving construction efficiency, saving resources, and reducing environmental pollution. They have become an important direction for transforming and upgrading the global construction industry. However, the high construction costs have severely restricted their large-scale adoption. To systematically explore the key influencing factors and the mechanism of the construction cost of PBs, this study uses the method of combining interpretative structural model (ISM) and structural equation model (SEM), identifies the main influencing factors by synthesizing literature and data analysis, analyze hierarchical relationships between these factors via ISM, and quantifies the influence intensity and mechanism of the construction cost by SEM method. The results show that the driving factors of the construction cost of PBs can be divided into several levels. The core factors, such as the assembly rate, the production scale of prefabricated components, the integration of design management, the technical level of designers, and the specialization of prefabricated components in the factory, play a crucial role in cost optimization. In conclusion, this study deeply reveals the impact mechanism of the construction cost of PBs, offers practical guidance for reducing construction costs and optimizing resource allocation, and provides a scientific basis for government policy-making and enterprise strategic decision-making.

随着我国人口老龄化程度持续加深，银发经济已成为推动社会经济发展与产业结构升级的重要战略领域。在物质生活基本保障得到满足的前提下，老年人的精神文化需求日益旺盛，推动了一个涵盖文旅、教育、娱乐、数字内容等多维度的新兴消费市场迅猛发展。然而，该市场在快速扩张的同时，也暴露出供给结构失衡、产品质量参差、消费者权益保障机制不健全以及数字鸿沟加深等多重风险。本文立足于风险管理理论框架，综合运用文献分析、案例研究与逻辑推演等方法，系统性地识别并剖析了当前我国老年人精神文化消费市场面临的主要风险，包括市场供给端的同质化与低质化风险、消费信息不对称引发的决策风险、权益受损后的救济渠道不畅风险、技术快速迭代下的适应与安全风险，以及社会支持网络薄弱带来的可持续性风险。研究发现，这些风险的形成是政策制度、市场机制、社会文化及个体因素共同作用的结果。基于此，本文借鉴国内外先进经验，尝试构建一个多层次、系统化的风险管理策略体系：在政策层面，倡导制定专项发展规划与行业标准；在市场层面，激励产品创新与构建信用评价机制；在技术层面，推动适老化改造与强化数据安全；在社会层面，完善社区支持网络与培育专业社会组织；在个体与家庭层面，着力提升老年群体的数字素养与风险防范意识。本研究旨在为引导银发经济健康发展、切实保障老年消费者合法权益、提升其精神文化生活品质提供理论参考与实践路径。

This study identifies a significant settlement effect in China’s equity options market, where price decline and pre-settlement return momentum exists on the settlement Friday (T+2) due to a temporal misalignment between option expiration (T) and the T+1 trading rule for the underlying asset. We attribute this phenomenon to three distinct behavioral channels: closing pressure from put option unwinding, momentum-generating predatory trading by futures-spot arbitrageurs exploiting liquidity fragility, and an announcement effect that attenuates the anomaly by adjusting spot speculators' expectations. Robust empirical analysis identifies predatory trading as the primary driver of the settlement effect.These findings offer critical insights for market microstructure theory and the design of physically-delivered derivatives.

随着中国企业并购活动在推动产业升级和资源优化中的规模不断扩大，并购的复杂性和合规要求随之提升，企业在并购过程中面临的合规与诉讼风险也逐渐增加。作为一种有效的风险管理工具，董事高管责任保险在有效缓解并购风险及增强决策科学性方面发挥着关键作用，这对企业的长期战略发展至关重要。基于此，本文选取2012-2022年沪深A股上市企业作为主并方完成的并购事件为样本，实证分析了投保董事高管责任保险对企业长期并购绩效的影响。研究结果表明，企业投保董事高管责任保险能够显著提升长期并购财务表现，在经过一系列稳健性检验后，这一结论依然成立。调节效应分析发现，良好的公司治理能够增强董事高管责任保险的正向作用，而当管理层过度自信时，投保董事高管责任保险可能放大激进决策的负面效应。机制分析进一步显示，董事高管责任保险通过提升信息透明度、优化公司治理以及缓解融资约束，改善了并购整合效果。异质性分析表明，董事高管责任保险在国有企业、关联并购和高风险并购中的作用更加显著。