We examine whether corporate bond issuance spreads reflect firms’ disclosed data-driven decision-making practices and whether this association varies with the local digital financial environment. Using Chinese bond data from 2011 to 2022 and a textual proxy for big-data-driven decision-making (BDD), we find that the BDD–spread association becomes more negative as local digital financial inclusion increases. This conditional association is economically meaningful and persists across alternative measures and specifications. The time-sequenced evidence is consistent with an information-based interpretation: higher BDD disclosure is associated with lower absolute accruals in the following year, while lower absolute accruals are associated with narrower issuance spreads in the subsequent year. Subsample point estimates are more negative for asset-light issuers and for firms with lower peer BDD, smaller boards, or non-Big-4 auditors. The results suggest that the pricing relevance of disclosed data practices depends on the environment in which creditors evaluate them.
This study examines how corporate insiders exploit irrational investor sentiment through R&D catering and subsequently engage in opportunistic selling. Using a panel of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2024, this study finds that sentiment-driven R&D catering is significantly associated with greater opportunistic insider selling, and the results remain robust to a battery of robustness and endogeneity checks. The effect is more pronounced in high-tech industries, firms with fewer investor site visits, and firms without QFII ownership. Mechanism analyses suggest that R&D catering is associated with stronger stock price overvaluation and higher idiosyncratic risk. The effect is also stronger among firms with lower patent grant rates, consistent with the relation being strongest when observable innovation outputs are less verifiable. In contrast, R&D catering is not significantly associated with insider purchases, suggesting that the documented pattern is concentrated on the sell side. Finally, the economic consequence analysis shows that opportunistic insider selling in sentiment-driven R&D settings is associated with higher stock price crash risk.
Using Chinese commercial banks as the sample and drawing on panel data from both listed and unlisted banks, this paper systematically examines the mechanism through which financial technology (FinTech) influences bank systemic risk from 2007 to 2023. The results indicate that the development of FinTech significantly reduces systemic risk in the banking sector. Moreover, business diversification serves as an important mediating channel. Further analysis reveals that macroprudential policies strengthen the risk-mitigating impact of FinTech on bank systemic risk, with stronger statistical evidence for price-based policies. Heterogeneity tests show that the risk-mitigating effect of FinTech is stronger among banks with greater homogeneity in their asset and liability structures. Among FinTech's functional dimensions, payment and settlement and resource allocation show the strongest risk-mitigating effects.
