This paper develops a delegation-based framework to explain how institutional design shapes pricing incentives under risk. Using China’s 2016 IPO reform—which abolished pre-funding requirements and transferred payment obligations from investors to underwriters—as a natural experiment, we show that introducing subscription-payment risk (SPR) renders underwriter’s partial residual claimants with respect to unpaid allocations. Building on Baron’s (1982) delegation model, we argue that the reform amplifies information asymmetry and induces underwriters to adopt more conservative pricing strategies to manage perceived payment risk. Empirically, IPOs exposed to SPR exhibit greater underpricing and lower offer prices, particularly when investor bids reflect stronger valuation pessimism. The effect tends to be less pronounced for reputable underwriters and when foreign institutional investors participate. Overall, the evidence demonstrates how risk redistribution and institutional frictions jointly shape underwriter behavior and pricing efficiency in primary equity markets.

Using a large sample of 2,077 U.S. firms from 2003 to 2021, this study examines how carbon emissions influence corporate tax avoidance strategies. We document a negative and causal relationship between carbon emissions and tax avoidance, identified through a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach that exploits the adoption of state-level low-carbon targets as an exogenous policy shock. Our evidence indicates that this relationship is primarily driven by reputational concerns, even after accounting for firms’ profitability, corporate social responsibility activities, and sensitivity to environmental regulatory risks. Stakeholders—including customers, executives, institutional investors, and lenders—increasingly view environmental harm as a reputational liability. In response, high-emission firms adopt more conservative tax strategies to signal accountability and mitigate stakeholder scrutiny. These findings highlight the strategic use of tax compliance by firms to manage reputational risk arising from environmental performance.

This study investigates the impact of China’s 2016 universal two-child policy on mutual fund managers’ performance. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we find that female managers of childbearing age exhibit stronger post-policy performance in fund returns and abnormal returns relative to the control group. The gains reflect strategic responses to intensified gender discrimination, as the policy increases maternity expectations, reduces hiring opportunities, and intensifies investor scrutiny. Affected female managers adopt more aggressive strategies to signal dedication. Effects are stronger for actively managed funds and less experienced managers. Fertility-related policy shocks amplify labor market discrimination and induce performance-enhancing responses from affected women.

This paper examines how unionization at customer firms reshape labor strategies upstream. Using Chinese suppliers to U.S. customers and a regression discontinuity design, we show that customer unionization prompts suppliers to substitute away from formal employment: surplus labor falls, overtime and average wages decline, and labor outsourcing rises. Suppliers also reorient sales from the U.S. toward China's domestic market. These adjustments reduce costs and boost profits for up to two years, but gains reverse thereafter as these measures prove unsustainable. These results support the uncertainty channel of unionization, showing that suppliers adapt flexible employment in response to unionization-induced uncertainty.

This paper investigates the dual role of government involvement in Chinese firms, acting as both a "helping hand" and a "grabbing hand", with a focus on state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We examine how political turnover influences related party transactions (RPTs), which may serve to prop up distressed firms or facilitate tunnelling at the expense of minority shareholders. We find that political turnover is associated with a significant decline in RPTs, a causal relationship supported by multiple analyses addressing endogeneity concerns. Further evidence suggests that SOEs reduce tunnelling when local governments face fiscal constraints and curb propping activities when firms are at risk of delisting or losing rights to issue new shares. The reduction in RPTs is more pronounced in firms with high initial RPTs, weak governance, or exposure to local corruption, and is amplified when new provincial leaders are outsiders. These findings suggest that political turnover acts as an external governance mechanism, disrupting entrenched rentseeking practices and reshaping firm-level resource allocation.

For various reasons, carbon-intensive firms in emerging markets are constrained to pursue cross-border acquisitions. This paper examines domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as a carbon-offsetting strategy among carbon-intensive firms in China. We find that high carbon-emitting firms are more likely to engage in domestic M&As. Stricter environmental regulations amplify this effect. Additionally, these firms display higher risk profiles, characterized by elevated betas, idiosyncratic risks, cashflow volatility, and accounting return volatility due to the substantial transition risks associated with pollution control expenses. These firms opt for M&A activities to mitigate these risks, acquiring low-pollution or green innovation-focused targets. M&A announcements result in higher returns performance than low-carbon risk acquirers, indicating the value-enhancing impact of decarbonizing M&As. State-owned enterprises, financially stable firms, and those with stronger corporate governance tend to engage in M&A deals to address carbon risk.

Prior literature documents that in developed economies, tighter environmental standards may induce higher firm innovations. In contrast, using China's firm-level CO2 emissions data, this paper finds that firms with higher CO2 emissions are associated with lower corporate innovation. A 1% increase in carbon emissions reduces research and development (R&D) expenditures by about 4.3% to 6.3%, having controlled for endogeneity concerns. While technical and commercial uncertainty of innovation can deter high carbon-emitting firms from investing in R&D, we find that high carbon-emitting firms are financially constrained when faced with exorbitant pollution-related expenses. Instead, such firms acquire firms with green assets and purchase low-polluting target assets to mitigate environmental pollution. The results are more pronounced in firms with poor corporate governance, resource-constrained non-SOEs, and highly polluting firms. Our results remain robust for different measures of R&D expenditures, green R&D and different components of carbon emissions.

Studies have shown that foreign investors hedge risks stemming from economic and political uncertainty in the home country through outward investment. This paper studies how foreign investors' home country risk affects their overseas investment and the host country firms' corporate cash holdings. We find that relative foreign EPU, defined as the difference between foreign investors' home country EPU and the host country of investment EPU, negatively impacts the host country firms' cash holdings through their influences on managerial decision-making. This negative relationship arises from firms' precautionary and transaction motives as foreign investors perceive lower corporate risk and better investment opportunities in the host country firms. Good corporate governance is also instrumental in yielding this negative relationship. The reduction in cash holdings due to high relative foreign EPU is more pronounced if foreign investors' home country legal environment is weaker, the two countries are further apart, and there is little trade partnership between them.

This paper shows that a standard deviation increase in carbon emissions by listed firms in China increases the odds of M&A (a green asset acquisition) by over 33% (over 81%) to achieve a green transition. However, firms decrease their R&D investment which tends to be fraught with technical and commercial uncertainty and have a low success rate.

Using hand-collected ownership data from a large sample of Chinese listed firms, we examine the link between foreign strategic ownership and firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR). We find that foreign strategic ownership is significantly associated with greater CSR performance. The restrictions of shares are the main motivation behind foreign strategic investors (FSIs) increasing firms' CSR engagement. The influence of foreign ownership on CSR is driven by strategic in-vestors with non-tradable shares, but not by Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) with tradable shares. FSIs with longer restriction horizons and in firms with stronger political con-nections are found to have more pronounced effects on CSR. We also find FSIs' home country characteristics, including the legal system, cultural background, geographic distance, trade relationship, and economic policy uncertainty, are significant factors in explaining their in-centives to increase firm CSR in China. From the perspective of corporate governance, we find that the impacts of FSIs on firms' CSR performance is more pronounced when shareholder power is stronger and executive power is weaker in the firm. Difference-in-differences tests and tests based on instrumental variables provide confirming evidence. Overall, our findings suggest that restricted ownership, political connections, and foreign investors' home country characteristics provide incentives for FSIs to pay more attention to firms' long-term reputation and thus enhance CSR engagement.

In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical study on the relationship between block ownership and information asymmetry based on the split-share structure of Chinese corporate ownership. Unlike prior studies, we find that a blockholder with a propensity to trade can reduce information asymmetry. This information asymmetry reduction does not take place through increased information aggregation by tradable blockholders. Rather, credible exit threats by tradable blockholders help reduce information asymmetry through instilling discipline in management and enhancing transparency in information disclosures. We further show that the cost of exit threats by tradable blockholders can explain the different findings from prior studies. These results remain robust to the possible confounding effect of tradable block ownership as shown by the difference-in-differences analysis of the split-share structure reform, which serves as an exogenous shock to tradable block shares.

This paper exploits the introduction of the liquidity provision scheme (LPS) in NASDAQ Stockholm (NOMX) to assess how the implementation of LPS affects market liquidity and the trading behaviors of high-frequency market makers. Unlike the traditional designated market makers (DMM) that target the liquidity supply of small and less traded stocks, LPS is implemented for large-caps and liquid stocks. LPS requires participants to submit buy and sell orders at the European best bid and offer quotes with a size larger than 50,000 Swedish Krona on each trade side. LPS delivers liquidity improvements by reducing order processing costs in the large-cap and cross-listed stocks in the NOMX and Chi-X markets, with no evidence of market liquidity migration from Chi-X to NOMX. As market makers registered with LPS are likely high-frequency traders, LPS stabilizes market liquidity as market makers' decisions to supply or demand liquidity become less sensitive to market conditions like the spread and order imbalance.

We use the implementation of “Green Credit Guidelines” as a quasi-natural experiment to examine its impact on high-pollution firms’ stock crash risk. By applying a Difference-in-Difference (DiD) model to a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2016, we document that high-pollution firms’ stock crash risk increase significantly after the passage of the policy. Channels to explain the association are investigated. Since high-pollution firms are less likely to receive the “green credits”, their financial constraints increase. It motivates these firms to hoard more firm-specific negative information and as a result, high-pollution firms are covered with fewer analysts, attract less media attention, and are more likely to be shorted after the policy. The increased information asymmetry between the corporations and the investors lead to a higher level of crash risk. In addition, we show that the impact of the policy is more pronounced for high-pollution firms which are state-owned enterprises, located in areas with better legal and market environment, or in the eastern provinces. Further, our study suggests that high-pollution firms should follow the government’s initiative and transfer themselves into more environmental-friendly enterprises. By doing that, these firms could stabilize their stock prices and thus decrease the stock crash risk.

Using a large sample of Chinese listed firms, we examine the link between state ownership and firms' stock price crash risk. We find that state ownership is significantly associated with lower crash risk. Channels to explain the association are investigated. We do not find an increase in information diffusion in firms with higher state ownership. However, we find that an implicit government guarantee through state ownership plays a vital role in reducing firms' crash risk. State-owned firms with higher bailout guarantees are found to have lower crash risk. The embedded implicit government guarantee changes investors' perception, and crowds out short sellers and informed traders from the market. Difference-in-differences tests and tests based on instrumental variables provide confirming evidence of a causal link. Overall, our findings suggest that the presence of state ownership can reduce crash risk through implicit government guarantees, however, at the cost of lower market efficiency.

本文试图从有限注意力理论出发,解释我国A股盈余公告后的市场异象.研究发现:首先,市场在有行情时盈余公告后漂移现象比市场无行情时更强.即使笔者选择不同的事件窗口,或者使用业绩快报作为事件日,或者控制其他相关变量(例如周五效应、公司市值、分析报告数量),该现象依然在统计意义上显著.其次,机构投资者持股对盈余公告后漂移现象有显著影响,具体体现为在机构投资者持股比例高的情况下,盈余公告后漂移现象更不明显,受市场行情的影响也更小.最后,在有市场行情时公告前个股部分信息泄露所带来的超额回报也明显减弱.研究结果扩展了现有文献的研究成果,进一步证明了由于注意力有限,投资者们对于整体市场信息的关注程度会高于个股,从而造成对个股盈余公告后漂移程度的影响.

选取沪深A股全部上市公司2008—2017年的数据为样本,通过回归分析实证检验了高管学术经历与公司价值之间的关系.研究结果显示,高管学术经历与公司价值之间具有显著的正相关关系.在采用倾向得分匹配法、控制公司固定效应以及采用工具变量方法进行分析后,这一结论仍然显著成立.然后进一步研究了高管学术经历提升公司价值的作用机制.从资本结构和推动创新两个渠道切入,研究发现,高管学术经历能够提升债务融资水平,优化公司资本结构,从而提升公司价值;同时,高管学术经历能够推动公司创新,利用创新作用提升公司价值.

选取2008—2017年中国A股上市公司的数据,从女性董事占比与独立性的视角出发,分析董事会中女性董事对大股东掏空行为的影响,以及这种影响在不同所有制公司中的差异.结果发现:女性董事与女性独立董事对上市公司大股东掏空具有抑制作用,且在国有企业中这种作用比在非国有企业中更显著.注重公司董事会中的男女比例,完善激励机制与用人制度,加强监管力度,才能强化大股东、管理层和中小股东的利益关系,切实改善公司治理.