Using the staggered intercity but within-province deregulation of local banks in China as exogenous variations, we evaluate the effect of banking integration across geographical segmentation on capital misallocation. Based on an administrative data set comprehensively covering Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that for firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), the integration increases physical capital by 19.3%, and reduces MRPK by 33.1% relative to low MRPK ffrms. Our findings are more pronounced for non-statedowned firms and firms with higher exposure to integrated banks. Integration also significantly increases the responsiveness of firms’ investments to deposit shock on other cities within the same province.

We study the mandated introduction of a supervised auction for the primary bond market in China. The regulatory intervention significantly reduced the cost of debt for Chinese issuers. Most of the benefits flowed from reduced agency conflict between underwriters and issuers. Using unique bidder-level data from a lead underwriter, we develop replicable tools and techniques to identify collusive bidding behavior resulting in artificial (and economically costly) increases in bond yields. Such evidence can benefit global regulators, issuers, and investors currently using unsupervised auction mechanisms, for example, in securities issuance, construction projects, and procurement.

Exploiting the unexpected Central Environmental Inspections (CEI) in China as a quasinaturalexperiment, we find that public firms in polluting industries experience significant gains in both profitability and market valuation after the regulatory shock, relative to firms in nonpolluting industries. The outperformance of public firms can be explained by the retreat of their private competitors, many shut down due to poor environmental performance. Because firms seeking public listing are required to meet high environmental standards, CEI significantly strengthen public firms’ competitive position, leading to increased sales growth and market share. Moreover, the outperformance is more pronounced for firms with more eco-friendly technologies, consistent with strict environmental regulations increasing the marginal benefit of these technologies. We provide novel evidence of the bright side of environmental regulation by highlighting the importance of industry dynamics.

This paper employs a difference-in-differences approach to study whether a Chinese audit firm improves its competencies through organizational learning after one of its audit teams has a client cross-listed in the US. Among a group of companies that are listed only in China, we define those audited by firms that have cross-listed clients as the treatment group, and companies audited by other firms as the control group. We find an improvement in audit quality for the treatment group after their audit firms have cross-listed client experience in the US. A large-scale survey of auditors corroborates these findings and sheds light on specific actions undertaken by audit firms to facilitate learning. Both the empirical and survey results highlight the benefits of auditing crosslisted clients in the US and its positive externality on improving the audit quality of non-US-listed companies.

近年来,我国义务教育阶段的家庭课外教育投资竞争激烈问题不断凸显。“双减”政策正是对上述现象的及时纠偏。为了进一步科学有效落实“双减”政策,增强教育获得感,厘清家庭课外教育投资的影响因素及其作用机制必不可少。家庭在课外教育投资中除了遵循经济学传统的“成本—收益”权衡框架外,特定的环境变化以及临近群体的表现对于家庭教育决策也存在重要的影响。基于此,文章运用中国教育追踪调查（CEPS）2013—2014 学年数据,以子女就读毕业班所产生的升学压力作为外生冲击,实证发现：与非毕业班的学生相比,毕业班内部存在的同群效应不仅扩大了由升学压力带来的特定家庭课外教育现金支出增加的幅度,并且提高了子女课外学习投入时间的增加幅度。在进行一系列稳健性检验以及利用工具变量缓解模型内生性后,上述结论不变。异质性分析发现：在城市户口、父母期望子女入读本科、子女成绩欠佳以及父母督促子女学习的家庭中,同群效应的效果显著。拓展性研究发现：家庭课外教育现金支出增加对于提高子女就读毕业班时的学科绝对分数具有积极效果,但未能显著提升其相对排名,这是家庭课外教育投资“内卷化”的深刻体现。文章基于子女面临升学压力的现实,对班级同群效应机制的考察为解释课外教育竞争日益激烈的社会现象提供了新的视角。

专业化分工是企业成长的重要基础和一国经济增长的根本源泉,同时也是新形势下提高供给质量和供给效率的重要途径。深入探究国内市场专业化分工的内在机理,对于增强国内大循环内生动力至关重要。文章以“创建社会信用体系建设示范城市”政策作为社会信用环境的代理变量,借助双重差分法,实证考察了社会信用环境改善对企业专业化分工的影响。研究发现,社会信用环境改善显著促进了企业专业化分工,这主要是通过降低企业面临的外部交易成本而实现。异质性分析发现,当内部管控成本较高时,社会信用环境改善对企业专业化分工的促进作用有所减弱；而在非国有企业、制造业以及法治环境较好的地区,社会信用环境改善的专业化分工效应更为明显。进一步分析表明,社会信用环境改善对企业专业化分工的推动作用促进了企业全要素生产率的增长。文章揭示了社会信用环境对企业行为的影响,不仅为理解企业分工提供了一种新的视角,也丰富了信用经济学领域的相关研究。

As the world’s two largest economies, China and the US are currently experiencing political and economic friction. This conflict brings high uncertainty to financial markets. Assessing risk spillover effects in a sector level will help us to characterize international risk contagions. We construct a multilayer network to examine tail risk spillovers between China and the US and find that (1) the value of total connectedness rises amidst tensions but declines during reconciliations; (2) interlayer spillovers mainly manifest as extreme pulses instead of steady outflows, which implies a significant increase in the frequency and magnitude of interlayer spillovers requires vigilant monitoring; and (3) compared with the in-strength, the out-strength is more concentrated, which represents that some sectors may play the role of major interlayer transmitter in tail risk spillovers. Monitoring interlayer spillovers helps policymakers and investors respond to emerging systemic threats.

Using the data of Chinese listed firms from 2003-2020, this study applies a System GMM estimation approach to document that high local government ecological concerns increase a firm’s stock price crash risk. This finding remains consistent after addressing endogeneity issues and undergoing robustness checks. This study also reveals that the implementation of the new environmental protection law in 2015 mitigates the relationship between local government ecological concerns and stock price crash risk. Further analyses indicate that stricter environmental regulation and high subsidies, as well as enhanced corporate social responsibility and governance, can effectively alleviate the adverse effect of local government ecological concerns on stock price crash risk. In addition, we note that the influence of local government ecological concerns on stock price crash risk is more significant in the eastern region, heavily polluting industries, and non-SOEs. Lastly, the research identifies two potential channels through which local government ecological concerns can impact stock price crash risk by reducing the quality of information disclosure and intensifying investor disagreement.

Climate change shocks pose a threat to the stability of the financial system. This study examines the influence of climate risks on systemic risk in the Chinese market by utilizing extreme risk spillover network. Moreover, we construct climate risk indices for physical risks (abnormal temperature), and transition risks (Climate Policy Uncertainty). We demonstrate a significant increase in systemic risk due to climate risks, which can be attributed, in part, to investor sentiment. Furthermore, institutional investors can mitigate the adverse impact of climate risks. Our findings suggest that policymakers and investors need to exercise greater vigilance in addressing climaterelated adverse effects.

In this paper, we present an entropy-based approach to measure the asymmetry of stock returns. By applying this approach, we use the Bootstrap method that our asymmetry measure exhibits a significantly enhanced ability to detect asymmetry compared to skewness. Moreover, our empirical findings reveal that stocks characterized by higher upside asymmetries, as determined by our innovative entropy measure, exhibit lower average returns across a crosssection of stocks. This supports the conclusions drawn by Han et al. (2018). In contrast, when employing the three-moment skewness measure, the relationship between asymmetry and stock returns remains inconclusive within the Chinese market.