The voluminous strategy research on the determinants of corporate scope is often premised on a well-established property rights regime, which contrasts with the weak property rights protection that still characterizes most countries today. We address this gap by applying property rights theory to theorize and empirically examine how the strengthening of the property rights regime affects corporate scope. Our analysis exploits the enactment of a property law that enhanced the formal protection of private properties in China as a quasi-experiment. We show that with a strengthened property rights regime, the horizontal relatedness among private firms’ businesses increases, but their vertical relatedness decreases, compared with state-owned firms. Further, these effects are less prominent for politically connected firms that are afforded informal protection of property rights. Our findings shed new light on the property rights regime as a critical determinant of firms’ horizontal and vertical scope.

We examine communication of political connections in corporate China, and show that politically inclined positive words—words in connotation of political sentiment—serve as a distinct and effective signaling device for corporate political connections. Using a large sample of corporate news, we find that news’ political sentiment, instead of orthodox political measures such as occurrences of political nouns and political entities, reflects executives’ political connections for private enterprises, and is related to rent-seeking benefits in government subsidy, tax refund, financing constraints and political risk. Our results demonstrate that political sentiment is an effective way to decode subtle corporate political connections in modern China’s “Mind Politics” environment that infiltrates into private corporations.

This work models the spillover of liquidity and volatility and their joint dynamics in the Chinese stock market. Methodologically, we implement a copula-based vector multiplicative error model for sectors. Utilizing intraday data from 2014 to 2022, our empirical analysis reveals strong interdependence between liquidity and volatility at the sectoral level. Moreover, different sectors dominate the transmission of liquidity and volatility shocks at different times. In normal times, sector volatilities transmit shocks notably (though not always dominantly), while in turbulent times, illiquidity is the key channel through which shocks spread. We also pay special attention to how two catastrophic events impacted the Chinese stock market: the 2015/16 stock market crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our ffndings are useful for policymakers monitoring and making policy at the sectoral level, as well as for institutional and private investors making investment decisions.

Investor sentiment has a crucial impact on stock market pricing. Based on prospect theory and partial least squares, we innovatively construct an investor sentiment indicator and verify the validity of the indicator. Compared with other sentiment indices, our investor sentiment index is more effective in in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting. At the same time, from a cross-sectional perspective, both the portfolio analysis and the Fama-Macbeth regression show that the partial least squares results are a better indicator of returns than other indices. The driving force of the sentiment index we construct comes from investors’ perceptions of forecast cash ffow, discount rate, and volatility.

China’s household wealth is growing rapidly and has become significant worldwide. While the government played an important role in economic growth and wealth accumulation, few research has explained why and how government expenditure redistributes household wealth in China. This study uses China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) household survey (2010-2018) and prefecture-level data to estimate the impact of government expenditure on household wealth, especially the value of housing asset. We find that the capitalization of government expenditure contributes an important part to housing value appreciation, which accounts for more than 50% of household wealth. Furthermore, the impact mechanism of government expenditure on households’ wealth has a substantial redistributive effect. Government expenditures greatly advance the net worth of households who own their houses, especially for households that own two or more houses, but contribute much less to those comprising rental tenants.

Based on the formation and evolution of systemic risk, this study proposes high and low volatility spillover networks and explores the characteristics of the evolution of systemic risk in Chinese financial market, and identifies the source of risk accumulation and risk outbreak, as well as the corresponding contagion mechanisms. Moreover, a new multiscale decomposition method (MVMD) is used to decompose high and low volatility into different time frequency components (short-term and long-term), and the corresponding network is constructed. Upon comparing topological characteristics on each layer from system and individual levels, our results reveal that high and low volatility spillover networks have different network characteristics and evolution behaviors. At the individual level, bond market is always the largest risk net-receivers in the high and low volatility networks, while the futures market and the currency market are respectively risk net-emitters in the high and low volatility networks. Additionally, compared with high volatility network, the low volatility network has greater predictive ability for financial risk. Finally, frequency analysis demonstrates that high-low volatility networks have different spillover intensity and network structure at different time frequencies. The above findings are beneficial for policy makers and investors to formulate appropriate strategies in different evolution of systemic risk and time frequency.

This paper measures the “greenium” in China’s stock markets with data during 2011-2020. We find that the green stocks outperform the brown ones in China and public climate concern brings the greenium. Based on the phenomenon, with panel regression, we furtherly figure out that the firms’ stock returns are positively correlated with their ESG rating, and public climate concern strengthens the relationship, which suggests that China’s stock investors behavioral bias contributes to greenium.

This study investigates the relationship between directors’ foreign experience and corporate environmental disclosure in Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2017. The research shows that directors with foreign experience have a positive and significant impact on corporate environmental disclosure. This effect is more pronounced in nonstate-owned enterprises, where directors have greater influence over managerial decisions. Additionally, the study suggests that in industries with high energy consumption, high pollution, or overcapacity, the positive effect can be further enhanced by having at least three directors with foreign experience or foreign experience members in the audit committee. The impact of experiential diversity on environmental disclosure is greater than that of board gender and independence diversity. The findings suggest that policymakers and firms prioritize the recruitment of directors with diverse experiences to improve their environmental disclosure practices.

From an industry perspective, this paper applies the quantile regression to investigate the impact of investor sentiment (IS) and China’s/U.S. geopolitical risks (GPR) on Chinese stock market volatility. Considering the structural break of the stock market for theperiod2003/02-2021/10, we find that the impact of geopolitical risk on stock market volatility is highly heterogeneous, and its significance mostly appears in the upper and lower tails. At the market level, China’s and U.S. GPR/IS and their interaction effects have no significant impact on China’s stock market volatility. However, there has an asymmetric dependence between China’s and U.S. GPR/IS and stock market volatility, and the dependence structure is changing. At the industry level, the current and lagging effects of China’s and U.S. GPR on industry stock market volatility are heterogeneous. Second, for most industries, China’s and U.S. GPR/IS can exacerbate industry stock market volatility both in bullish and bearish markets. In addition, China’s and U.S.GPR/IS and their interaction effects are heterogeneous and asymmetric, and the effects changes with the break point. Finally, compared with China’s GPR, the U.S. GPR has a larger impact on the industry stock market. The interactive effects of the U.S. GPR and IS can influence more industry stock market volatility.

随着股权分置改革的基本落地，上市公司股份权责日渐规范，围绕公司股份所出现的权益融资、股权质押等操作日渐频繁，因而股权质押的相关理论研究的意义也愈加重大。本文在借鉴前人研究的基础上，采用理论分析和实证研究相结合的方法，结合行为金融学中过度自信的相关理论，通过大股东增持后的业绩改善情况衡量过度自信，研究过度自信倾向对大股东股权质押决策的影响。本文研究发现，过度自信对于股权质押的选择、股权质押的频率和累计股权质押比率均有正向影响，而过度自信的程度越高，也会越倾向于股权质押，并且质押比率会越高。通过对股权质押样本的平仓风险进行研究，发现大股东的过度自信程度越高，股权质押中的平仓风险会越大。