Secular declines in U.S. Treasury yields are concentrated in three-day windows around FOMC announcement dates. Cumulative yield changes during these short windows explain the secular decline in yields. This factor contains essential information on excess bond returns and outperforms well-known proxies for interest rate trends in prediction regressions. We estimate a dynamic term structure model to explain these empirical facts. The model suggests that the secular declines in Treasury yields over the past three decades were primarily due to reductions in expected interest rates, mostly during the FOMC announcement windows.

厘清当前国际分工下的价值链是具有全球性特征还是更具区域性特征,这是探究当前国际分工构成以及未来分工发展等根本性贸易问题的基础,具有重要的理论意义。文章利用CEPII 双边贸易流量数据库,测算产品的平均进口距离用于衡量 1995—2014 年间价值链生产在全球性特征上的变化,并与 Eaton 和 Kortum（2002）框架下构造的理想“全球价值链”进行比较,分析评估全球化进一步发展的潜力。研究显示,1995—2014 年间“全球价值链”的发展极为有限,平均进口距离只增长了约 300 千米,距离理想的“全球价值链”下的进口距离差距很大,特别是中间品贸易的进口距离较短,说明价值链分工仍主要体现为区域性特征。在价值链呈区域性特征的背景下,各国更倾向于达成区域性的自由贸易协定以支持区域性的价值链生产,即一国价值链的区域性越强,则该 国签订的贸易协定区域性倾向就越强。该效应体现为一国中间品进口距离增加 100 千米,则该国与其贸易协定伙伴国的平均距离就增加约 389 千米。文章揭示了当前价值链分工的区域性特征,部分解释了近年来多边贸易协定推进困难的原因。

We study the role of marriage for women's intergenerational mobility during the Ming-Qing (1368-1911) period. Using status information based on the timing of marriage from family histories in Central China, already in the early 1500s it is the case that daughters from rich families attain higher status over their lifetime than daughters from poorer families. This intergenerational status persistence is partly due to marital sorting because daughters from highstatus families tend to become the wives of sons who themselves come from rich families. Quantitatively, the correlation of 0.6 between the status of biological and in-law families means that marriage accounts for more than one third of total intergenerational status transmission, while not accounting for marriage overestimates mobility by more than 20 percent. Further underscoring the importance of marriage, typically the status of the in-law family plays a larger role for intergenerational status transmission than the child's biological grandparents. Over the period 1500 to 1900, the degree of marital sorting falls, as does intergenerational persistence. Lower investments in the marriage market to find a good match for a daughter go hand in hand with the fall in the returns to son education due to the decline of China's civil service examination.

This paper proposes a novel bond return (price or yield curve) prediction methodology, unifying the classical no arbitrage pricing framework, which is ubiquitous and serves as a fundamental and theoretical building block in mathematical finance, and empirical asset (bond) pricing methodologies, e.g., Bianchi, Büchner, & Tamoni (2021) for treasury bonds and Gu, Kelly, & Xiu (2020) for equities. The methodology can be viewed as a unification of theoretical and empirical asset pricing frameworks. Our method is mathematically and theoretically rigorous, arbitrage-free and meantime enjoys the flexibility offered by the empirical asset pricing framework, i.e., a potentially rich factor structure and accurate function approximations via machine learning regression. Real market back-testing studies show that our predictions are accurate, in the sense that the formulated equally-weighted treasury bond portfolios in China exchange-based markets bear significant positive returns. The average hit rate for yield curve prediction reaches 77.71% across all tenors and the related long-only trading strategy based on the prediction results in an annualized absolute return as high as 12.35% with Calmar ratio achieving 7.31 for equally-weighted portfolios. As a by-product of our prediction framework, spot yield curves can be predicted accurately in an arbitrage-free manner.

From 2013 onwards, the Chinese central government has subjected the largest state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to ‘disciplinary inspections’ to weed out and punish graft and other corruption. While this policy has been somewhat successful in punishing corruption—over 160 top SOE officials have been indicted—we show that the principal economic impact of these inspections has been to significantly cut investment by targeted firms, leading to a major decline in profitability, innovation and Tobin’s Q. Expenditures on R&D, entertainment, and travel also decline dramatically. The most obvious explanation is that the fear induced in SOE managers, who have limited risk-promoting equity holdings or incentive compensation and few external employment options, deterred them from taking risky but value-enhancing investments post-audit.

As the problem of global climate change becomes more severe, countries have proposed the goals of carbon capping and carbon neutrality. Green finance is an essential capacity support for achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, and it can guide and stimulate social capital to invest in low-carbon industries and initiatives via marketbased mechanisms. Based on the panel data of Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2006 to 2020, this paper empirically examines the impact of green finance on carbon emission efficiency using a two-way fixed-effects model, conducts a regional heterogeneity analysis, and examines the threshold effect of economic development level and the mediating role of regional innovation. The results indicate that, first, green finance contributes significantly to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency, and second, the level of regional economic development has a double threshold effect on the contribution of green finance to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency. Third, regional innovation is an important green finance channel for influencing carbon emission efficacy. The sensitivity of carbon emission efficiency to the green finance index demonstrates an inverted U-shaped trend. Fifth, the importance of green finance sub-dimensions in relation to carbon emission efficacy is as follows: green support, green credit, green insurance, green investment, green equity, green bond, and green fund. These findings provide theoretical support for green finance's role in promoting co-carbon efficiency and are valuable for policy formulation.

The macroeconomic risk associated with climate change potentially results in a risk premium on asset prices. Using a sample of 11,468 Chinese quasi-municipal bonds from 2014-2021 in 267 cities, this research investigates the impact of climate risk on the credit spreads of quasi-municipal bonds. We employ principal component analysis (PCA) to construct a climate risk index and find that climate risk significantly increases credit spreads by increasing the local government fiscal gap and debt burden. The effect of climate risk is more remarkable for bonds that have shorter maturity and lower corporate ratings, issued by smaller city investment companies and corporations located in regions with stronger environmental regulation, stronger climate risk perception, and better green financial development. A significant relationship is also observed in the eastern regions but not the western regions. This study broadens the scope of quasi-municipal bond credit spread determinants from traditional financial to climate indicators.

There is increasing attention on information transfers along supply chain partners for firm (extreme) events. This growing literature finds spillover effects following certain types of firm events. Using data from credit rating actions of Chineselisted firms over the period between March 2007 and May 2020, we examine the spillover effects of supply chains by focusing on the market reactions of event firms to the action announcements. We find strong evidence of spillover effects driven by the market reactions of event firms, which are enhanced through information diffusion channels as supply chain partners receive more investor attention. Moreover, the effects are stronger when event firms’ market reactions are negative, event firms are nonstated-owned, the industry concentration of event firms is higher, or the suppliercustomer business relationship is closer. Overall, these findings highlight the role of investor attention in addition to network characteristics in supply chain spillovers.

This study examines the impact of social insurance contributions on corporate environmental investments. Adopting a quasi-natural experimental design based on the implementation of 2011 Social Insurance Law in China, we employ a difference-in-differences model and find that the increase in social insurance contributions prompts firms to increase their environmental investment. This effect is more pronounced for firms that exhibit higher labor intensity, and are located in regions with stricter environmental regulations, as well as those with politically connected CEOs. Our research provides valuable insights into the factors that influence firms’ environmental investment from the perspective of firm-government interaction.

This study examines how information friction shapes housing market outcomes in Beijing, China. Leveraging administrative micro-level housing resale transactions, we employ a boundary discontinuity design and difference-in-differences model to explore the consequences of prohibiting school-district-quality information disclosure in online listings. Our results show that the prohibition leads to a 2.55% reduction in transaction prices and a 22.99% increase in seller's time on the market for houses corresponding to key primary schools. The extended time on the market is primarily attributed to the heightened challenges that potential buyers face in finding their ideal dwellings.