This paper constructs a measure of firm level tariff exposure and examines how import and export tariff shocks affect the corporate bond financing activities of Chinese listed firms. The results show that import tariffs imposed by the China side systematically raise the financing costs and reduce the issuance amounts of the affected firms, while unexpectedly the export tariffs imposed by the US side have very limited effects. Further evidence based on the responses of credit ratings and secondary market trading confirm that firms exposed to import tariff shocks suffer from a contraction of funds supply. Moreover, firms with higher external finance dependence, lower asset tangibility, more operation volatilities, or less government affiliations are more adversely affected. Meanwhile, the green bonds exhibit greater resilience during trade conflicts. Overall, this study highlights the central role of import tariffs in shaping the financing capacities of the Chinese firms in the bond markets. Our paper shows that how trade conflicts are transmitted to financial market, which might be a source of fluctuations for the financial market and the aggregate economy.
Medical crowdfunding has emerged as a critical financing channel for medical expenses, especially among populations with inadequate health insurance coverage. However, a substantial number of campaigns fail to meet their fundraising targets, partly attributable to credibility concerns stemming from information asymmetry. Drawing on a unique dataset from a major online medical crowdfunding platform in China, this study examines how specific narrative strategies embedded in relational testimonies influence fundraising outcomes. We find that three credibility enhancing narrative strategies, including identity construction, situation supplement, and encouragement or blessing, are positively associated with the total funds raised. Credibility-enhancing strategies are especially effective in attracting large donations (>30 yuan) from donors with closer social ties to the patient, whereas direct appeals are critical for soliciting small donations (≤30 yuan) from more socially distant donors. Notably, situation supplement strategy exerts a particularly strong effect among rural patients. To address endogeneity and establish causality, we employ a difference-in-differences design that tracks donation patterns around the posting of the first testimony. We define a testimony as “persuasive” if it combines a direct appeal with at least one credibility-enhancing strategy and find that persuasive testimonies lead to a significant and persistent increase of approximately 14% in small donations within the hour following their posting, relative to non-persuasive testimonies. The persuasive effect tends to strengthen with the social distance between the testifier and the patient, operates consistently across different posting times, and is not driven by the patient's inherent social capital. Our findings highlight relational testimonies as a socially constructed mechanism for mitigating credibility deficits, offering implications for understanding how vulnerable populations mobilize financial support to cope with catastrophic health expenditures.
This paper provides causal evidence on how intangible cultural capital creates modern economic value through tourism. We focus on China's Tang and Song (T&S) literature (618–1279 CE), which is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Chinese classical culture and a key part of the national literary canon, and use newly compiled data on the spatial distribution of T&S literary works linked to city-level tourism outcomes from 2002 to 2019. By instrumenting local literary richness with the historical presence of famous academies and the number of pre-Tang poets, we estimate an elasticity of about 0.2 between T&S literary works and domestic tourism outcomes, indicating a substantial positive contribution of T&S literature to China's modern tourism economy. We further document that this effect is mainly driven by a demand-side force: T&S works included in the Chinese language textbooks create widely shared cultural references that increase destination salience and boost tourism demand for their cities of origin. Moreover, two complementary supply-side channels support this effect: cities with higher T&S literary output later accumulated more cultural resources and developed a richer array of tourism products. These results highlight that intangible literary canons, once standardized and disseminated through formal education, serve as a scalable demand-side asset that generates lasting, place-specific tourism benefits even more than a thousand years after their creation.
This paper exploits China's agricultural land mortgage reform as a quasi-natural experiment to examine whether strengthening land property rights improves rural credit market performance. Using panel data from 1700 rural commercial banks across China over 2010–2018, and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform did not lead to a statistically significant expansion in the supply of agriculture-related credit, providing no evidence of a De Soto effect under the prevailing institutional conditions. We attribute this null finding to the limited mortgageability of agricultural land management rights: neither household-contracted nor transferred management rights satisfies the core criteria of eligible collateral. These findings suggest that the realization of a De Soto effect depends critically on the surrounding institutional and market environment and requires carefully designed complementary policies.
