We examine the association between CEO birthplace proximity and financial misconduct. We find that CEOs managing firms near their birthplaces (home CEOs) are associated with less financial misconduct compared to other CEOs. This association is not attributable to differences in corporate governance. The relationship strengthens in areas with a strong local investment presence and greater religious commitment as well as among CEOs with longer tenures in their home state. Our findings are robust to addressing potential selection and omitted variable biases as well as to conducting multiple robustness tests, including analyses of involuntary CEO changes and headquarters relocations. We also find a similar association for CFOs, with firms employing home CFOs exhibiting less financial misconduct.

We examine the relation between home CEOs and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our analysis shows home CEOs are associated with higher CSR engagement and increased firm value. These firms exhibit higher asset turnover, lower cost of equity, improved productivity, sales, and profit margins. Home CEOs focus more on community, environmental, and employee-related CSR, and are linked to reduced carbon emissions. This relationship is stronger in firms with higher local business concentration and investor monitoring. Firms led by home CEOs earn higher returns during recent crises. Our results suggest the value increase is not primarily due to agency effects and remain robust to endogeneity concerns. The study indicates a CEO's community connection may influence CSR effectiveness, suggesting that mere CSR engagement may not suffice to boost trust and value. These results highlight the potential importance of local ties in corporate leadership and CSR strategy.

Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2020, we explore the impact of common institutional owners on M&A activities. Our results strongly support the "synergy governance" view, according to which common institutional owners perform more actively and effectively in monitoring against bad M&As and improving M&A quality, especially for investors who have closer peer linkages, greater industry power, and longer-term holdings. The mechanism test finds that in firms with poorer information environment, vaguer industry information and lower governance level, common institutional owners have a more significant inhibitory effect on bad M&As, confirming that they do have information advantages and supervisory advantages. Overall, our research explores the positive side of common institutional investors.

Promoting sustainable development in resource-based regions is an essential issue among policymakers. Yet little is known about the effect of sustainable development strategies on income inequality. Leveraging the implementation of the National Sustainable Development Plan for Resource-Based Cities (2013–2020) (SDP) as a quasi-natural experiment, we adopt a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to investigate the impact of a sustainable development policy on income inequality. This paper finds that the SDP can reduce income inequality by 8.3 percentage points in resource-based cities on average, which is statistically and economically significant. The mediation effect model shows that reducing natural resource dependence is one potential and vital mechanism. Also, we find that the reduction effect of the SDP on income inequality is more pronounced in central and western regions, in growing-type and mature-type resource-based cities, and in energy-based and mineral-based cities. This paper provides valuable policy implications for developing countries to reduce income inequality and promote sustainable development.

Regional cooperation is increasingly adopted by Chinese multiple governments as a panacea to crack the ineffcient urban land use that is induced by jurisdiction-based land management. Nevertheless, scant literature has examined how regional cooperation in economic, social and institutional spheres affects urban sprawl. Thus, this study develops a conceptual framework to unveil the nature, contents, and relationships between regional cooperation and urban sprawl. Empirically, we use social network analysis, landscape metrics, and panel data regressions to investigate the impacts of regional cooperation on urban sprawl in the GBA (Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area), China from 2010 to 2018. We have found that cooperation on economic and social affairs is prominent in few cities, e.g., Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and cooperation on institutional affairs remains generally weak. Most cities in the GBA show an increasing compactness of urban development from 2010 to 2018. Furthermore, cooperation on economic and social affairs can constrain urban sprawl. This finding is attributed to joint industrial land development and co-building of infrastructures. Also, collaborated social infrastructures and events prevent urban sprawl through distributing in the city proper and enhancing mobility of labors and capitals. However, it is not the case for cooperation on institutional affairs. Institutional fragmentation in China’s regional planning has undermined the impacts of cooperation on institutional affairs, which is manifested by the failure of spatial planning.

We examine the effect of CEO personal reputational capital on financial misconduct. We find thathome CEOs (defined as those who manage firms located within 100 miles of their birthplaces) areassociated with significantly less misconduct than firms with non-home CEOs. However, homeCEOs also appear to rationally calculate the effect of corporate events on personal reputation.When their firms are financially distressed, home CEOs do not act differently from non-homeCEOs in the levels of firm misconduct at their firms, perhaps because the catastrophic reputationaldamage of bankruptcy is higher than the reputational costs of engaging in financial misconduct.

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Using a sample of Chinese A-share firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 1998 to 2012, we investigate the impact of accounting firm mergers on financial reporting comparability. We find that financial reporting comparability is significantly increased after mergers. Furthermore, post-merger integration has a positive effect on this relationship; that is, the association between auditor firm merger and financial reporting comparability is stronger when the auditor firm merger has a higher degree of integration. This paper provides empirical evidence supporting the “bigger and more competitive” policy promoted by the Chinese government in the auditing industry.