We provide firm-level evidence on the real effects of shadow banking in terms of technological innovation. Firm-to-firm entrusted loans, the largest part of the shadow banking sector in China, enhance the borrowers’ innovation output. The effects are more prominent when the borrowers are subject to severer financial constraints, information asymmetry, and takeover exposures. A plausible underlying channel is capital reallocations from less productive but easy-financed lender firms to more innovative but financially less-privileged borrower firms. Our paper suggests shadow banking helps correct bank credit misallocations and thus serves as a second-best market design in financing the real economy

China’s shadow banking system has experienced surprisingly high growth since the global financial crisis. We develop a model to understand this puzzling phenomenon. With local government interventions in bank loans for low-quality projects and information asymmetry between banks and regulators, a policy combination of tightening formal banking and loosening shadow banking can reduce inefficiency, because the higher funding liquidity risk of shadow banking incentivizes banks to be more disciplined about the quality of projects. We find consistent empirical evidence that when on-balance-sheet financing was constrained by regulators, banks primarily shifted high-quality projects into their controlled shadow banking system.

We study the demand for government participation in China’s venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and the private firms managing the invested capital by deploying it to high-growth entrepreneurs. Our respondents together account for nearly $1 trillion in assets under management. Each respondent evaluates synthetic profiles of potential investment partners, whose characteristics we randomize, under the real-stakes incentive that they will be introduced to real partners matching their preferences. Our main result is that the average firm dislikes investors with government ties, indicating that the benefits of political connections are small compared to the cons of having the government as an investor. We show that such dislike is not present with government-owned firms, and this dislike is highest with best-performing firms. Additional results and follow-up surveys suggest political interference in decision-making is the leading mechanism why government capital is unattractive to private firms. We feed our experimental estimates and administrative data into a simple model of two-sided search to discuss the distributional effects of government participation. Overall, our findings point to a “grabbing hand” interpretation of state-firm relationships reflecting a desire by the government to keep control over the private sector.

There is little empirical work examining contractual innovation in the context of China, which is the second largest venture capital market in the world, after the United States. Drawing upon extensive interviews, a hand-collected dataset of investment agreements and judgements made by Chinese courts on venture capital disputes, this article examines a unique contractual design that is common in the Chinese venture capital sector—the valuation adjustment mechanism (“VAM”). A VAM provides investors with a right to adjust a portfolio company’s original valuation and to get compensation by cash or equity upon the occurrence of certain future events (such as failing to meet financial or non-financial performance indicators). The prevalence of VAMs in China is potentially attributable to: (1) severe information asymmetry in the less informed market, (2) the lack of convertible preferred stock under Chinese law and excessive legal restrictions over investment tools and contractual mechanisms in venture capital financing, and (3) insufficient legal protection for investors under Chinese law. This article argues that, unlike American venture capital contracts, which are designed to encourage long-term, sustainable investor-entrepreneur relationships, VAMs are predominantly investors’ self-help mechanisms to address specific and serious investor protection issues in the transitional and less informed Chinese market. Thus, it suggests that the problems regarding investor protection motivating the use of VAMs can be better solved by law reforms such as allowing limited liability companies to issue convertible preferred stock, introducing more legal remedies for minority investors, as well as an improved regulatory environment governing venture financing.

随着企业创新越来越受到社会以及学术领域的关注，如何缓解中小企业创新信贷融资约束成为我国金融业的重点探讨方向之一。为此，本文通过剖析企业创新能力的微观影响因素以及融资特征，分析在信息不对称情况下中小企业在面临融资约束时，关系融资成为一种重要的解决途径，然而关系融资会催生信贷寻租，降低社会资源的配置效率，为此文章提出缓解中小企业创新融资的潜在路径，包括宏观层面上的强化放贷人权利保障，中观层面上健全信息环境，尤其是第三方资源，微观层面上银行从信贷技术综合运用上突破。针对中微观层面上，探讨银行信贷与风险投资在中小企业创新融资上是否有合作的空间，文章分析了风险投资对中小企业创新的作用效果以及风险投资对促进银企关系，促进信息对称方面的研究成果。最后，提出结论以及下一步的研究方向。

Prior studies have demonstrated that market timing is an important factor in determining firm investments and financing policies. We provide empirical evidence on the effects of market timing on equity-based compensation and stock dividend decisions. To avoid endogeneity, we exploit the setting of overvaluation resulting from the 2015 Chinese government’s open-market purchases of common stocks of public firms. We test whether the over-valued firms cater to managers’ and investors’ preferences of not receiving over-valued shares. Consistent with this catering hypotheses, we find that firms purchased by the government are less likely to issue equity-based compensation and stock dividends after government’s stock market intervention relative to other firms whose shares were not purchased by the government. These results are more pronounced when the over-valuation is likely driven by retail investors.

What are the benefits to a firm of having investors with gambling preference as shareholders? Motivated by studies showing that gambling investors prefer lottery-like stocks and require lower expected returns to take risk, we hypothesize that firms with positively-skewed assets can use stock splits to attract investors with gambling preference to share risk and to lower cost of equity. Indeed, analyzing a sample of Chinese firms that split their stocks through stock dividends and using proprietary trading data to measure retail investors’ gambling preference, we find that, on average, shareholders increase by 54% and retail gambling investors increase by 119% following stock dividends. Furthermore, while firms become more risk-taking, their cost of equity declines substantially, largely due to the increased retail gambling investors’ pricing influence. Thus, stock splits are effective for improving risk-sharing efficiency, and gambling investors contribute to lowering the cost of capital.

This paper documents a stock-dividend premium of around 10% when controlling for optimistic earnings growth and liquidity improvement. We propose an alternative explanation for the effect of stock dividends from the perspective of investor recognition. First, we find that stock-dividend premiums are positively related to an increase in investor base, particularly for firms with a small investor base. Second, an increase in investor base is due to individual investors, as they, especially those with a stronger propensity to gamble, are net buyers around the announcement of stock dividends, while institutional investors behave in the opposite manner. Finally, we show that after paying stock dividends, firms experience significant increases in speculative features, which are caused by clientele shifts toward individual investors as opposed to the undertaking of riskier projects by managers. As a whole, our results also indicate that an increase in investor base could be related to investors’ gambling preferences.

本文利用主板、中小板市场退市风险警示制度与新三板市场转让风险警示制度的差异，考察风险警示制度对主板与中小板公司盈余管理行为的影响。研究发现，新三板公司存在避免亏损的盈余管理行为，而主板与中小板公司为了逃避退市风险警示制度的监管，进行了高频率的盈余管理。结果表明，退市风险警示制度中的净利润条款加剧了主板与中小板公司的盈余管理行为。

发展直接融资是化解实体经济融资难融资贵的最有效办法，14亿人口大国的直接融资要想做大和可持续，必须让有风险识别能力的机构做风险投资，创造条件让那些没有风险识别能力的普通群众去做不需要识别风险的业务。因为大多数普通群众没有多少风险识别能力，实践一再证明，让他们都搞互联网金融、炒股，以此将居民存款转换为企业长期投资，不但化解不了融资难融资贵，反而会带来问题。改革开放40年，我国培养出了很多有竞争力的优质大企业，完全可以用科学合理的方法将它们识别出来，建立优质企业债券池，容许稳健诚信经营的优质大企业绕开金融机构在优质企业债券池里直接对居民按章发债。居民通过银行储蓄账户直接限额购买，利息按天支付，将居民活期存款转化为对优质企业的直接投资。此举解决了近些年金融市场参与者角色系统性错位问题，风险可控，可降低优质企业的融资成本提高居民收入。 很多央企，如中石化中石油中移动、华能国际、四大行等；经营模式可持续，稳健、诚信而优质，是党执政的经济基础。可是它们却只能向海内外金融机构借贷，融资成本高昂。单单中石油中石化贷款余额近两万亿，每年资金利息成本上千亿。如果国家建立优质企业债券池，将现有稳健诚信经营的优质大企业借贷余额的一半左右，用居民活期存款置换下来，单单中石油中石化每年可降低利息成本400亿以上，而居民每1万亿活期存款利息收入将由现在的35亿增加到2-3百亿。此举对国家、企业和居民都有好处；当然金融机构利润将下降，金融从业人员的收入也将或多或少下降。