本文基于权力制约与冲突的视角，探究CEO和董事长的权力差距对公司绩效波 动的影响。我们采用中国上市公司任职网络中CEO和董事长的“接近中心度”来衡量他们各自的权力，发现公司绩效波动与CEO和董事长之间的权力差距呈U型关系。首先，当CEO或董事长中一方的权力过大时，两者之间因缺乏有效的制约会导致公司绩效出现大的波动；其次，当CEO和董事长的权力充分接近时，双方既有可能因有效制约而提升公司绩效，也有可能会由于高层内斗而损害公司绩效。本文进一步用CEO和董事长的离任率及公司违规行为验证了权力制约与冲突的逻辑机制。

Audits are a standard mechanism for reducing corruption in government investments. The quality of audits themselves, however, may be affected by relationships between auditor and target. We study whether provincial chief auditors in China show greater leniency in evaluating prefecture governments in their hometowns. In city-fixed-effect specifications – in which the role of shared background is identified from auditor turnover – we show that hometown auditors find 38 percent less in questionable monies. This hometown effect is similar throughout the auditor’s tenure, and is diminished for audits ordered by the provincial Organizations Department as a result of the departure of top city officials. We argue that our findings are most readily explained by leniency toward local officials rather than an endogenous response to concerns of better enforcement by hometown auditors. We complement these city-level findings with firm-level analyses of earnings manipulation by state-owned enterprises via real activity manipulation (a standard measure from the accounting literature), which we show is higher under hometown auditors.

We use China's recent anti-corruption campaign as a natural experiment to examine the (market expected) equilibrium consequences of (anti-)corruption. We argue that the announcement of inspections of provincial governments by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on May 17, 2013 represents a significant departure of past norms of anti-corruption campaigns, and thus serves a rare empirical opportunity to examine the equilibrium effects of anti-corruption campaigns for firms. We first present a conceptual framework to illustrate the channels through which anti-corruption actions can influence firms. Using an event study approach and May 17, 2013 as the event date, we find that, overall, the stock market responded positively to the announcement of strong anti-corruption actions. The announcement returns are significantly lower for luxury-goods producers, and SOES, large firms, or politically connected firms earn lower returns than private, small, or non-connected firms. We also find that existing local institutions play a crucial role in determining the announcement returns across firms. Moreover, a long-term difference-in-differences analysis shows that higher returns during the event window are associated with more subsequent entries of new firms and faster expansions of existing firms. Finally, we also provide direct evidence consistent with the endogenous grits effect.

In Chinese culture, digit 8 (4) is taken as lucky (unlucky). We find that the numerological superstition has a profound impact across China’s stock, bond, foreign exchange and commodities markets, affecting asset prices in both the primary and secondary markets. The superstition effect, i.e., the probability of asset price ending with a lucky (unlucky) digit far exceeds (falls short of) what would be expected by chance, is prevalent. The effect is driven by investors’ reliance on superstition as an anchor to face uncertainty in asset pricing and the overoptimism of unsophisticated investors. While the superstition effect does not lead to systemic mispricing for assets traded by sophisticated investors, it implies overpricing for assets involving more unsophisticated investors.

We evaluate how prior mutual fund working experience affects private fund managers' performance. Using a novel Chinese private fund database from 2012 to 2016, we document significantly lower excess returns and higher left-tail risks for private fund managers with prior mutual fund working experience. Such effect is concentrated in switched managers with lower performance ranks in mutual funds. Additionally, the underperformance is attributable to reduced research support, change in investment styles, and deteriorated market timing skills, while incentive schemes help alleviate such underperformance. Our findings demonstrate the key role of industry-specific human capital in the asset management industry.

本文通过构建多因素的基金管理能力评价体系研究了我国开放式主动管理股票型公募基金的管理有效性。研究发现：（1）公募基金在承担较低风险的情况下获取高于股票市场组合的超额收益率。（2）基于历史收益和持仓数据构建的指标能有效预测基金的未来表现。（3）通过组合这些指标构建的基金管理能力评价体系，择优基金的未来表现显著优于现有的基金评奖体系。这些结果表明，公募基金作为散户投资“机构化”的重要渠道，可以显著提高投资人的收益表现，且基金的管理能力可以被合理的评价体系事前甄别。本文为探讨机构投资者在市场中的作用提供了新的证据和视角，提出的评价体系为帮助监管机构提高公募基金市场资金流配置有效性，阻止资本市场造成的贫富差距扩大具有重要启示作用。

本文使用2007-2017年间中国上市银行季度数据，从影子银行体系资金融出方的角度，分析了影子银行与系统性风险之间的关系及其作用渠道。固定效应模型和双重差分模型的结论均显示，影子银行会加剧银行的系统性风险，影子银行规模越大，银行在当期和下两期都会对系统性风险有着更大的暴露。在风险传导机制上，影子银行通过银行个体风险承担、银行间关联度以及风险的放大机制等三大渠道对银行系统性风险产生影响。当银行个体风险越高，银行间关联度越低，以及对负向冲击暴露越大时，影子银行对银行系统性风险影响更显著。

Environmental information disclosure is an effective way for corporate to fulfill environmental protection responsibilities and encourage environmental self-inspection and management. In this paper, we utilize the environment fee to tax reform implemented in 2018 as a quasi-experiment, to investigate the impact of mandatory environmental regulation change on firm environmental information disclosure quality. Using data from listed companies in China between 2015-2020, we found that the mandatary environment regulation positively affects the monetary and non-monetary environmental information disclosure in heavy polluting industries. We also found that, firms with higher environmental subsidies and market value tend to disclose more information. The mechanism analysis shows that external governance and internal control mediate the effect of mandatory environmental regulation on environmental information disclosure quality. Compared to a growing literature on voluntary regulation, our findings provide evidence emphasizing the role of mandatory regulation of government incentives in environmental improvement.

This paper studies how centralizing environmental administration affected air pollution in China. China launched a vertical administration reform in 2016 to empower upper-level Environmental Protection Bureaus to administer lower-level bureaus vertically through personnel control. Exploiting a stacked difference-in-differences strategy and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the verticalization reform significantly reduced air pollution. The effect was stronger in places where air pollution is less likely to be affected by spillovers from other provinces or where local governments paid less attention to environmental protection before the reform. Additionally, we find that the reform significantly increased the intensity of inspection by local agencies and environmental investments by heavily polluting firms.

Climate change has become mankind’s main challenge. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from shipping are not irresponsible for this, representing 3% of the global total; an amount equal to that of Germany’s emissions. The Fourth Greenhouse Gas Study 2020 of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) predicts that the proportion of GHG emissions from shipping will rise further, as global trade continues to recover and grow, along with the economic development of India, China and Africa. China and the European Union have proposed to include shipping in their carbon emissions trading systems (ETS). As a result, the study of the relationship between the carbon finance market and the shipping industry, attempted here for the first time, is particularly important both for policymakers and shipowners. We use wavelet analysis and the spillover index methods to explore the dynamic dependence and information spillovers between the carbon finance market and shipping. We discover a long-term dependence and information linkages between the two markets, with the carbon finance market being the dominant one. Major events, such as the 2009 global financial crisis; Brexit in 2016; the 2018 China-US trade frictions; and COVID-19 are shown to strengthen the dependence of carbon finance and shipping. We find that the dependence is strongest between the EU carbon finance market and dry bulk shipping, while the link is weaker in the case of tanker shipping. Nonetheless, carbon finance and tanker shipping showed a relatively stronger dependence when OPEC refused to cut production in 2014, and when the China-US trade dispute led to the collapse of oil prices after 2018. We show that information spillovers between carbon finance and shipping are bidirectional and asymmetric. The carbon finance market is the principal transmitter of information. Our results and their interpretation provide guidance to governments on whether (and how) to include shipping in emissions trading schemes, supporting at the same time the environmental sustainability decisions of shipping companies.