In China's labor market, there is a phenomenon that enterprises choose whether to provide "social insurance and housing fund" to laborers autonomously. This paper use micro-data from two leading Internet recruitment platforms and empirically finds that in a labor market with double-side information asymmetry, "social insurance and housing fund" is not only a cost but also a signal. Providing workers with "social insurance and housing fund" can both send a signal of stable operation to the labor market and identify high-quality workers for enterprises. With an instrument variable of local average social security payment rate, this paper excludes the endogenous effect of labor supply on wages while the signaling effect above is still significant. In addition, "housing fund" has a stronger signaling effect than "social insurance", and the strength of the two signaling effects is affected by the scale of the enterprises and the level of local payment rates. This paper also introduces a theoretical framework of two micro-mechanisms — signaling and screening — into the analysis. In terms of policies, this paper proposes to strengthen the information disclosure and the propagation of social security payment, and further reduce the financial burden of enterprises.

The Property Rights Theory states that clearly defined ownership is the premise of efficiency, while ambiguous property rights result in great externalities. We use the establishment of local SASACs as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate how unifying the supervision rights and responsibilities internalizes externalities and enhances SOEs’ innovation. The primary results show that the total innovation outputs and high-quality innovation outputs of SOEs governed by local SASACs (i.e., treatment group) improve after creating SASACs. The mechanism analyses show that both the pyramids level and risk-bearing level of local SOEs increase. In cross-sectional tests, we unravel that the innovation improvement effect is subject to the following five factors, including SASACs’ independence, local government quality, industry competition, SOEs managers’ motivation for promotion, and whether the SOE is in high-tech industry. Our paper provides empirical evidence for evaluating the innovation effect of the establishment of local SASACs with a quasi-natural experiment when the public ownership of SOEs does not change. Chun

We examine whether family firms differ from nonfamily firms in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting practice. Using a sample of Chinese firms, we find that, compared to nonfamily firms, family firms are more likely to have a system in place that guides the establishment and development of their CSR activities. Family firms are also more likely to adopt the GRI guidelines, and they disclose significantly more information about their CSR practice. The findings are consistent with the notion that family firms are more long-term oriented, and as a result, they are more concerned about firm reputation and use CSR disclosure as a means to establish and maintain a good reputation and to legitimize their behavior. We further find that the positive relation between family firms and CSR disclosure exists mainly in those firms with relative high state ownership, which helps mitigate government expropriation risk. Our research contributes to the limited literature on the relation between family firms and CSR practice. We also contribute to the literature on the impact of government expropriation risk and its interaction with firm ownership structure on firm behavior.

In this paper, we construct a content analysis structure to explore whether corporate governance information in voluntary disclosures can predict management expenses in the next term. Employing the site visit information disclosure of firms listed on the Chinese A-share market from 2012 to 2021, we find that corporate governance information disclosure is motivated by ownership concentration,and that corporate governance information can predict management expenses and comprises incremental information, indicating that the content analysis we construct is valuable and the disclosure of corporate governance information can mitigate the agency problems.There is a difference between state-owned listed firms and nonstate-owned listed firms.

The foreign capital flight amid pandemic outbreaks can result in propagation effects in the equity market. With a daily shareholding dataset, this paper investigates the trading behavior of foreign mutual funds in China when it was the epicenter of COVID-19 outbreaks and the subsequent period with global spreads. Using fixed effects and panel structural VAR models, we confirm propagation effects caused by the capital flight of foreign mutual funds. Substantial heterogeneities across foreign funds affiliated and unaffiliated with commercial banks have been uncovered, though they are both found to withdraw from risky stocks as an indication of a "flight to quality." Without implicit guarantees, unaffiliated foreign mutual funds liquidated immediately and more when the pandemic hit China. The resulting price shocks led to further deleverage by bank-affiliated foreign funds on their pre-pandemic risk exposure stocks. Our results shed new light on the behavioral theory of stock market trading featuring fund and stock exposure channels.

With market-oriented reforms in the economy, the Chinese government has promoted the development of risky financial markets, but evidence on the influence of social trust on risky financial market participation is scarce. Using three-wave longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Survey; and lagged variable, instrument variable, and fixed-effects models to address the endogeneity issues; we investigated social trust’s influence on risky financial market participation. We also estimated the effects of social trust by age, education, sex, and urban/rural resident groups. We found that social trust positively affected the probability of holding risky financial assets and their shares, however its effects were insignificant when addressing unobservable individual heterogeneity. The positive effect of social trust was greater for the youth, the highly educated, women, rural residents and high-income groups than their counterparts.

本文基于中国 1995 年至 2017 年省级面板数据，详细且深入地研究讨论了金融结构、产业结构与经济发展间的关系。研究发现，第一，中国金融结构与产业结构经历了从低级向高级的发展，在这一过程中两者始终保持高度耦合，说明中国在各时点金融结构是适合当时产业发展需要的，且金融结构与产业结构经历了由勉强协调到优质协调的演进变化过程。第二，一个地区金融结构与产业结构相互耦合匹配、彼此协同发展的协调程度越高，越有利于当地经济发展，且中国中西部地区较之东部地区，二者协调演进水平的提升能对当地经济发展带来更大的边际影响。第三，提升全要素生产率是“金融结构—产业结构”协调演进以促进经济发展的重要渠道，其中更有利于促进技术进步水平提高，其次是促进规模效率提升，进而推动经济发展。第四，当金融结构与产业结构协调适应水平较低时，金融结构提升会明显抑制经济绩效和产业升级，而当协调演进水平高于门限值时，金融结构提升则表现出对二者的有利作用。另外，金融结构提升会对金融风险管控造成一定不利影响。

How does labor risk affect corporate’s bond financing? Using the unique institutional feature of government regulations in China, we provide robust evidence that firms with a larger employment size have significantly better access to bond credit. This effect is more pronounced in times of local labor market deterioration or economic slowdown, for low-skill intensive industries, or in places with career-driven government officials. Our results are not driven by differential financial constraints or information frictions. We further show that the employment bias allocates bond credit towards under-performing large employers and the performance-enhancing benefits from bond issuance diminishes with employment size.

随着金融系统风险的不断增大，宏观审慎政策如何应对资产泡沫是一个亟待解决的重要问题。本文基于一个具有理性资产泡沫的动态一般均衡模型，重点讨论了金融风险增大情况下，资产泡沫的成因及其宏观效应。我们从理论上证明，资产泡沫一方面有利于缓解融资约束带来的流动性短缺，从而一定程度上改善了金融摩擦引致的资源错配；另一方面，资产泡沫本身又会加大整个金融系统风险，从而对宏观经济造成威胁。将刚性兑付引入基准模型后，我们发现对高风险金融资产的刚性兑付会导致流动性充裕的投资者过度投机而引起所谓的“刚性泡沫”，泡沫资产的需求和价格与刚性兑付力度呈正向关系。进一步分析表明，“刚性泡沫”在改善流动性短缺的同时，又会对实体经济造成挤出效应。因此，政府对金融市场的救助行为面临取舍，并且最优救助力度随金融系统风险的增大而降低。尤其是当金融系统风险足够大时，最优救助力度可能为负，即，最优政策干预应该打压资产泡沫的交易。以上分析表明，在高金融风险与资产泡沫并存的情况下，针对资本市场的救助政策需谨慎执行。

This article aims to provide an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of PRC Securities Law 2020 which overhauls China’s securities regulatory framework to construct more efficient and transparent capital markets with enhanced investor protection and market integrity. The law constrains regulators’ administrative powers in deciding the outcome of IPOs as well as streamline the securities offering procedure. This article pays attention to key reform initiatives proposed by PRC Securities Law 2020, such as the registration-based IPO system, the enhanced investor protection and compensation regime, the cross-border supervision, and the harsher punishments for securities frauds. It also discusses the latest enforcement cases relating to high-profile financial frauds like the Luckin Coffee scandal which resulted in Luckin Coffee being delisted from NASDAQ in 2020. The analysis in the article is accompanied by relevant US securities law in the same area to offer a comparative angle, which is of interest to practitioners, academics and policymakers in major financial centres.