This paper investigates the effects of serial acquisitions on labor cost stickiness. We show that serial acquisitions can significantly increase the labor cost stickiness through increasing managerial optimism, agency costs and labor adjustment difficulty, and the labor cost stickiness further damages corporate value. The baseline findings are weaker in firms with better internal control and higher institutional ownership. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on serial acquisitions and cost stickiness, provides a new perspective for the value-destroying effect of serial acquisitions in a typical emerging market.

We investigate the impact of public climate concerns on corporate ESG performance and find a negative association between the two variables. Our mechanistic analysis suggests that public climate concern increases firm risk, which explains the negative effect of ESG performance. This negative effect is exacerbated by inefficient corporate investments and mitigated by increased local social trust. Furthermore, the negative relationship between climate attention and ESG performance is more pronounced for companies with weak CEO hometown identify, high resource acquisition costs, non-heavy polluting industries and in the colder northern regions of China. The findings highlight the need to address the challenging impact of climate attention on corporate sustainable performance by enhancing regional social trust and CEOs' sense of belonging.

This paper investigates the impact of Covid-19 outbreak on households’ preferences for subway proximity, using housing transaction data from eight major cities with the highest metro commuting volumes. Contrary to what we expect from remote working which has been popular since Covid-19 outbreak, we find no evidence of a smaller housing price premium for subway proximity after the outbreak, based on a difference-in-difference empirical strategy.

This study investigates how digital transformation can affect ESG performance within China’s unique environment. Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2022, this paper reveals digital transformation can positively affect ESG performance. Within the mechanism, customer concentration plays a medicating effect and organizational structure stability plays a positive moderating effect. Besides, the effect of digital transformation on ESG performance is more pronounced in Chinese western enterprises, non-heavy polluting industries and large-size enterprises. To our knowledge, this paper is one of the pioneering studies that examines the relationship between digital transformation and ESG performance from the perspective of supply chain management.

Using data from Chinese A-share listed companies for the period 2007–2022,we investigates the impact of financialization on the long-term use of short-term debt (LUSD). Our findings reveal that increased financialization leads to a stronger issue of LUSD. Financialization squeezes long-term investments and equity financing levels of firms, thereby leading to LUSD. Moreover, the rise in financing costs and the degree of financing constraints intensify the effects of financialization on LUSD. The smaller the scale of the enterprise, the shorter its operating period, the higher its operational risk, the greater the promoting effect of financialization on LUSD.

As China’s shadow banking sector expands, the impact of listed companies’ involvement in financial stability and the real economy accumulates increasing attention. Despite being a crucial channel for non-financial firms to participate in shadow banking, the literature has given limited consideration to the acquisition of wealth management products (WMPs). Using data from Chinese listed firms between 2007 and 2020, we analyze how excessive equity financing affects companies’ WMP acquisitions. Our findings indicate that over-financing significantly boosts WMP purchases among these firms, particularly in cases of private ownership, raised environmental uncertainty, and strict financing constraints.

This study investigates the effect of a large-scale Internet upgrade program in China on the consumption of rural households. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, we find that the Internet upgrade at the village level significantly increases rural households’ expenditures on total, online, and ofline consumption. Moreover, high-educated and young households, as well as those living in difficult-to-access villages exhibit a larger boost in total consumption. The mechanism analysis rules out income as the possible channel but highlights the role of online information exchange. ln particular, the variations in the increase in online time among households align with the heterogeneous responses in total consumption.

This study examines how short-sale constraints affect investors’ information acquisition and thereby shape stock price efficiency. By exploiting two settings that relax short-sale constraints in the US and China, respectively, we find that the removal of short-sale constraints increases investors’ information acquisition in both markets, but the effect is more prompt in China. Investors acquire value-relevant information, especially bad news, and improve their short-selling decisions in both markets. Lastly, information acquisition induced by the removal of short-sale constraints improves price efficiency. Our evidence shows that a reduction in trading frictions promotes information acquisition and improves price efficiency.

This study examines how foreign equity participation affect risk-taking of commercial banks using Chinese bank-level data from 2012-2020. Our analysis is based on strategic alliance theory and principal-agent theory, and we find that banks with foreign equity participation exhibit a significantly lower risk-taking compared to those without foreign equity participation, and this finding is shown to be consistent in a series of robustness tests. Additional analysis shows that equity checks and balances reinforce this negative relationship. Furthermore, we document that the incidence of such effects is more pronounced for Chinese banks which are smaller and less based on income diversification. Our results suggest that the proportion of foreign equity participation should be moderately increased to form equity checks and balances.

This article applies natural language processing (NLP) to extract and quan- tify textual information to predict stock performance. Leveraging an exten- sive dataset of Chinese analyst reports and employing a customized BERT deep learning model for Chinese text, this study categorizes the sentiment of the reports as positive, neutral, or negative. The findings underscore the predictive capacity of this sentiment indicator for stock volatility, excess re- turns, and trading volume. Specifically, analyst reports with strong positive sentiment will increase excess return and intraday volatility, and vice versa, reports with strong negative sentiment also increase volatility and trading volume, but decrease future excess return. The magnitude of this effect is greater for positive sentiment reports than for negative sentiment reports. This article contributes to the empirical literature exploring sentiment anal- ysis and the response of the stock market to news on the Chinese stock market.