Using land transaction data in China, we investigate whether and how political connections penetrate through headquarter-subsidiary relationships. The results show that even though the headquarters of politically connected listed firms pay comparable land prices as other firms, their subsidiaries pay 12.1-13.2% less. The price discount, driven by corruption, is exacerbated when the land is for commercial or residential use and is disposed of through informationally opaque supply methods. The anti-corruption campaign has successfully mitigated such price distortions. Our findings also show that better legal protection and private sector development are crucial for fair markets.

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader – President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan – in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in partiality. We find that Chiang’s nationalist regime conducted political favoritism broadly toward political immigrants via cronyism (allocating public sector positions) and also differentially toward specific subgroups of political immigrants via wage discrimination (offering higher wages to these subgroups within the public sector). Favoritism led to a 7.2 percent immigrant wage premium, which accounted for nearly three quarters of the immigrant-native wage gap at the time. This in turn propelled overall income inequality by 4.5 percent. Moreover, political favoritism breeds political polarization in the long run by pulling apart the political views of immigrants and natives. Compared with natives, immigrants who were exposed to favoritism tend to adopt political positions that are aligned with the nationalist party today: they are more likely to support unification with China, and are more inclined to trust the mainland Chinese government and its citizens. Exposed immigrant (native) swing voters are also more (less) likely to vote for the nationalist party today.

We provide the first systematic analysis of the stock return lead-lag effect among firms connected through shared analyst coverage in China’s A-share markets. We measure the shared analysts-weighted average returns of connected firms (CF) and show that CF return is a significant positive predictor of future returns of the focal firms in the following one to 12 months. The CF-based long-short portfolio earns an abnormal return of 10% to 12% per year. The effect is robust to controls for the industry and geographic momentum effects. Further evidence shows that the CF momentum spillover effect is stronger when the focal firm shares more analysts with connected firms, is covered by more non-star analysts or analysts with lower levels of education, or is held by more stress-resistant institutional investors. Our findings contribute to the cross-asset momentum literature by documenting a new, strong, and long-lasting momentum spillover effect in the Chinese stock markets.

This paper selects Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2011 to 2020 as a research sample and analyzes the impact of economic policy uncertainty on business performance. We find that economic policy uncertainty is detrimental to the improvement of business performance; service transformation can significantly offset the adverse effect of economic policy uncertainty on business performance, and this positive effect will increase with the depth of service transformation, Furthermore, embedded service transformation is more effective than mixed service transformation in weaking the adverse effects of economic policy uncertainty on business performance. The results of the heterogeneity test show that the negative relationship between economic policy uncertainty and firm business performance, as well as the positive effect of servitization transformation, is more noticeable in non-state-owned enterprises and low sale growth firms. The results are robust after various specifications of variables, possible endogeneity issues, and more control variables are considered.

This paper examines the impact of the carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) on directed technological change in the context of Chinese pilot schemes. We focus on firms’ heterogeneity in driving innovation and explore policy variations across pilots. Using a matched difference-in-differences design with a zero-inflated Poisson model, we find that the low-carbon innovation is driven by firms at the intensive margin. On average, a firm files 0.16 additional low-carbon patents annually at the intensive margin. In addition, when looking across pilots, the effect on low-carbon innovation is significant in two pilots, Beijing and Shanghai. We further find that, when looking at firms with different productivity levels measured by output per worker, the pilot ETS encourages low-carbon innovation at the intensive margin but reduces entry into low-carbon innovation at the extensive margin for the more productive firms. Our results suggest that innovation inertia matters, and future policies should encourage smaller firms covered by ETS to start innovation in low-carbon technologies.

3333

3333

111111

China has now entered the pilot phase of the digital currency electronic payment, and the impact of the digital currency electronic payment on China's bank credit system is unknown. This paper analyzes the long-run equilibrium and short-run variation relationship between digital currency electronic payment and narrow money multiplier based on the long-run cointegration equation and short-run VECM using data from the first quarter of 2014 to the second quarter of 2022 for the scale of digital currency electronic payment usage and narrow money multiplier variables. It is found that the introduction of digital currency electronic payment will expand the narrow money multiplier by reducing the cash leakage rate and the excess reserve ratio, thus enhancing the credit creation capacity of China's banks; among the determinants of the narrow money multiplier, the proportion of factors that the central bank can control increases, and the central bank's monetary regulation capacity is enhanced. Finally, this paper proposes that the central bank should improve the technical construction of the central bank's digital currency, strengthen the cooperation with various participants, and enhance the supervision of merchant banks.

自从2018年《公司法》中关于股份回购进行了专项修订，我国资本市场中开启了股份回购的热潮，股份回购逐渐成为上市公司资本运作的重要方式。本文以2006年至2021年我国上市公司中进行股份回购的公司为样本，研究股份回购对非效率投资的影响，结果发现股份回购可以抑制非效率投资，主要通过降低委托代理成本来抑制投资过度，以及通过缓解融资约束来减少投资不足。当产权性质为国有企业或管理层权力较大，会抑制股份回购对非效率投资的积极影响，而当市场化程度较高时，则会加强股份回购对非效率投资的积极影响。研究结论为企业提高投资效率与完善法规建设有重要参考意义。