Based on the perspective of human capital and technology R & D regulation, this paper adopts the unexpected output super efficiency SBM model to calculate the ecological efficiency of digital enterprises in 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2019, analyzes its spatial correlation, and empirically explores the driving factors of the ecological efficiency of Chinese digital enterprises under the role of environmental regulation. The results show that during the research period, the overall level of ecological efficiency of digital enterprises in China can be divided into three stages: gentle stage (2010-2014), trough stage (2014-2017) and fluctuation stage (2017-2019), and the eastern region > the central region > the western region; The ecological efficiency of China's digital enterprises as a whole shows a ladder like evolution law of decreasing from southeast to northwest, with significant spatial agglomeration and "block" characteristics; Environmental regulation has a lag effect on the ecological efficiency of digital enterprises, and the lag period inhibits the improvement of the ecological efficiency of digital enterprises; The level of human capital and the level of scientific and technological research and development have significant threshold characteristics. When the level of human capital is used as a threshold variable, the impact of environmental regulation on the ecological efficiency of digital enterprises is "U" shaped. When the level of scientific and technological research and development exceeds a certain threshold, environmental regulation has a negative impact on the ecological efficiency of digital enterprises.

Based on three key principles, "equity, openness, and sharing," this paper assesses the relationship, and the internal mechanism driving the relationship, between urban inclusiveness and resident entrepreneurship. This includes constructing an urban inclusiveness index, and analyzing data from the 2018 China General Social Survey (CGSS). The key results indicate that multi-perspective urban inclusiveness has a significant positive effect on resident entrepreneurship. The mechanism analysis shows that urban inclusiveness can improve the probability of residents being entrepreneurial, by improving risk attitude, promoting class mobility, and expanding social networks. A heterogeneity analysis shows that urban inclusiveness has a significant impact on the entrepreneurial choice of local residents, and low-class and high-class residents; urban inclusiveness has no significant impact on the entrepreneurial choice of transient residents and middle-class residents. In addition, urban inclusiveness plays a more significant role in promoting residents’ choice of survival entrepreneurship, compared with opportunistic entrepreneurship. The research conclusions have important policy implications for constructing inclusive cities and for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship vitality.

Green innovations are crucial in promoting environmental sustainability, especially in the long run. Environmental pollution liability insurance (EPLI) facilitates firms better dealing with pollution-related risks, encouraging firms to invest in green innovation activities. This paper studies the impact of firms’ EPLI coverage on green innovation activities using data from Chinese heavily polluting firms. Results show that EPLI increases firms’ green innovations, both in terms of quantity and quality. Further mechanisms study suggests that EPLI improves the cash flow conditions and reduces agency costs of the board, which explains the positive effect of EPLI on green innovations.

This paper examines the effects of superstitious psychology on investors’ decision making in the context of Mercury retrograde, a special astronomical phenomenon meaning “everything going wrong”. Using natural experiments in the Chinese stock market, we find a significant decline in stock prices, approximately -3.14% in the vicinity of Mercury retrogrades, with a subsequent reversal following these periods. The Mercury effect is robust after considering seasonality, the calendar effect, and well-known firm-level characteristics. Our mechanism tests are consistent with model-implied conjectures that stocks covered by higher investor attention are more influenced by superstitious psychology in the extensive and intensive channels. A superstitious hedge strategy motivated by our findings can generate an average annualized market-adjusted return of 8.73%.

This paper investigates how noise trading behavior is influenced by limited attention. As the daily price limit rules of the Chinese stock market provide a scenario for the exhibition of salient payoffs, speculators elevate prices to attract noise traders into the market. Utilizing a series of distraction events stemming from mobile games as exogenous shocks to investors’ attention, we find that the gambler-like behavior, termed as “Hitting game” is crowded out. Consistent with our attention mechanism, indicators such as trading volume decline in response to these game shocks.

Drifting in the direction of earnings surprises for a prolonged period is a decades-puzzling financial anomaly, i.e., the “post-earnings-announcement drift” (PEAD). This paper provided a new simple measure of earnings surprise called ORJ. Based on ORJ, not only is the medium effect of investors’ attention on the relationship between earnings surprises and PEAD analyzed, but a tractable and profitable investing strategy is provided. Through comprehensive empirical analysis of the Chinese stock market, we found that i) both earnings surprises and investor attention can increase the degree of PEAD; ii) “good” (bad) earnings surprises strengthen (weaken) the degree of drift by attracting (decreasing) investor attention; it is asymmetric that the positive effects of “good” earnings surprises are stronger than that of “bad” earnings surprises on PEAD; and iii) the strategy obtains an average 6.78% return per quarter in excess of the market and only longs dozens of stocks . iv) Typical pricing factors such as the Fama-French three factors, illiquidity and company characteristics have little explanatory power for the returns of the strategy. This paper strongly shows the importance of monitoring overnight returns of earnings announcements to digging the unexpected information, reveals one mechanism of earnings surprises on PEAD and demonstrates the potential profitability of PEAD in the Chinese market.

This study focuses on the unexplored informational role of labour dividend in the municipal corporate bond (MCB) market given China’s distinctive institutional origins. We aggregate the annual employments of public firms to the prefecture-city level and find that the firms’ employments aggregated are positively associated with contemporaneous scale of the MCB, whereas negatively associated with the issuing rate of the MCB. In the further analyses, we find that this information externality is conditional on the attributes of the employment characteristics (i.e., education, functional departments, and ownership nature). Mechanism analyses indicate that information accessibility, processing, dissemination, and efficacy are important channels through which the aggregate labour intensity is mobilized. And such information externality is reinforced after an institutional change enhancing the authenticity of employment information. This paper echoes previous studies of the macro value of aggregate accounting information and enriches the literature in labour and finance by highlighting that the labour dividend still exists and triggers MCB issuance in China.

Despite the lack of electoral accountability, China has built an expanding welfare system that is set to include most citizens. Why does China defy the conventional prediction of an exclusive autocratic welfare state? This paper looks at the critical time when China first established its social security system in the 1990s and argues that the state adopts a “demand-driven strategy” where the redistribution effort varies with the expected collective action of economic losers. Analyzing an original granular county-level dataset of China’s laid-off workers and social security taxation, the paper finds that a group of newly-emerged economic losers, precipitated by state policy, drives the local states’ efforts to redistribute. In particular, the number of laid-off state-owned enterprise workers explains 46% of the variations in social security collection among non-state-owned enterprises. Instrumental variable estimation, with legacy state-owned enterprises established in historical contingencies as the instrument for laid-off workers, shows consistent results. Further analysis on mechanisms demonstrates that layoffs lead to an increase in SOE protests, which in turn foster greater redistribution.

This paper examines analysts’ catering behavior to current investor demand proxied by the unbalanced stock market reactions towards optimistic forecasts and nonoptimistic forecasts (optimism premium). Using data on earnings forecasts issued by Chinese sell-side analysts during the period 2014-2018, we find that optimism premium significantly increases analysts’ tendency to issue optimistic forecasts, in other words, analysts do cater to investor demand. Implications for theory and practices are discussed.

This paper studies the impact of political dynamics on corporate environmental investments. Employing data collected manually on the turnover of municipal government officials in China as a proxy for political dynamics from 2007 to 2020, we find that these dynamics drive an uptick in corporate green investments, aligning with the principles of resource dependency theory. The influence of political dynamics on green investments becomes more pronounced when companies grapple with external economic and political uncertainties. Additionally, this effect is most pronounced among energy sector companies and non-state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Despite the observed surge in green investment activity due to political dynamics, we reveal a tendency towards over-investment in green initiatives, subsequently diminishing overall firm investment efficiency under current political conditions. This study advances knowledge regarding how political dynamics influence enterprises' sustainability practices and provides valuable insights for businesses navigating the implications of their pursuit of environmentally responsible development.