Institutional dynamics and access to non-farm employment in rural China, 1950–1996

This article examines non-farm employment in the context of Chinese rural institutional change, based on evidence from discrete-time logistic models for event history analysis using the Life History and Social Change survey. We find the transition to non-farm sector rose rapidly during the Great Leap Forward and market reform, while the Cultural Revolution saw it reach the lowest ebb. While male advantage prevailed exclusively during the Cultural Revolution and early marketization, education possessed a stable positive effect in all historical periods. Although the returns to different kinds of political capital vary along with institutional dynamics, intergenerational reproduction was greatly reduced after the Cultural Revolution.     

Chief Audit Executive as Supervisory Board Member and Executive Compensation Contracts

This paper studies a unique phenomenon in China's corporate governance—that chief audit executives (CAEs) sit on supervisory boards (CAE duality)—and examines its effects on executive compensation contracts. Using a sample of listed firms between 2010 and 2018, we find a significant positive relation between CAE duality and pay-for-performance sensitivity, which suggests that the dual position helps integrate monitoring resources and reduces agency costs. This positive relation is more pronounced when companies face a stricter monitoring environment and in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) than in SOEs. In addition, we find that the recent reforms on compensation strengthen the role of CAE duality in SOEs. Further analysis identifies the reliability of performance information (i.e., earnings quality) and reduced executive self-interested behaviours (i.e., perquisite consumption) as the influencing mechanisms that increase the demand for performance-based compensation and thus improve pay-for-performance sensitivity.     

环境规制、融资约束与企业污染减排——来自排污费标准调整的证据

“十四五”规划提出建设人与自然和谐共生的现代化,这要求持续推进污染减排促进经济绿色低碳转型,实现环境与经济协同发展。基于2007年起排污费提高的政策冲击和2004-2013年工业企业污染数据,本文使用倍差法考察排污费提高的污染减排效果以及融资约束对政策效应的影响。研究发现排污费提高后,污染排放水平显著下降,但产出也受到较大冲击;企业减排方式存在明显差异,大型企业主要通过降低污染强度的方式来降低污染排放,而中小型企业则主要采取降低生产规模的方式来降低污染排放;进一步基于环境投融资角度对企业减排行为的分析揭示,融资约束影响中小企业污染减排,加剧排污费提高对产出的影响。因此,提高绿色金融的环境投融资供给能力是促进经济绿色转型的重要途径。     

Do technology spillovers affect the corporate information environment?

Technology spillovers across firms affect corporate innovation, productivity, and value, according to prior research, so information about technology spillovers should matter to investors. We argue that technology spillovers increase the complexity and uncertainty of value relevant information about the firm, which makes information processing more costly, discourages it, and thereby increases information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. We find that not only does information asymmetry increase, but so does avoidance by sophisticated market participants, uncertainty, and insider trading. We also find that investors do not misestimate short-term earnings, but they underestimate long-term earnings, consistent with the higher future stock returns that we also find.     

Detecting stock market manipulation via machine learning: Evidence from China Securities Regulatory Commission punishment cases

In this paper, we apply machine-learning techniques to construct detecting models of stock market manipulation. By combining manually collected China Securities Regulatory Commission punishment cases from 2014 to 2016 with financial information of listed companies, we construct a training set and a test set to compare the detecting ability of support vector machine (SVM) and logistic model. Considering imbalanced data, we further incorporate Borderline Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (Borderline SMOTE) to oversample minority class and then find that Borderline SMOTE–SVM performs better than SVM and benchmark model in detecting manipulation. To enhance detecting performance of the models, we innovatively introduce market sentiment indicators which are extracted from analyst rating reports, financial news, and Guba comments into our indicators set. The results indicate that the new indicators generate significant marginal increment to the model accuracy.     

基金业绩如何影响风格漂移和经理离职?——理论与经验分析

本文通过一个两期模型,刻画了基金业绩如何通过影响市场信念,进而影响基金风格漂移和基金公司的解雇行为。若上期基金业绩很好,基金经理就会在乐观的自我能力预期下,完全按照自己的判断选择基金投资风格;若上期业绩一般,基金经理会因为调整成本而不太愿意切换投资风格;而若上期业绩很差导致自我能力预期悲观,基金经理就宁愿模仿上期绩优基金的投资风格。综合起来,基金风格漂移将随上期基金业绩呈现出显著的U型关系。进一步,因为业绩很差的基金经理会采取模仿策略,因此在市场风格发生切换时更有可能发生基金经理解雇事件。此外,本文基于中国开放式基金的季度数据,检验了风格漂移与滞后一期基金业绩之间的关系,经验证据稳健地支持了理论分析的各种结论。     

Rumors in the sky: Corporate rumors and stock price synchronicity

Using hand-collected rumor clarification announcements from Chinese listed firms to identify corporate rumors, we find that rumored firms have lower stock price synchronicity (R²) than do firms without rumors. Channel analyses reveal that rumors reduce stock price synchronicity through elevating investor sentiment rather than stimulating informed trading. Additionally, the negative association between corporate rumors and stock price synchronicity is more evident among firms with more individual investors and higher information opacity. Moreover, corporate rumors are associated with higher analyst forecast errors and forecast dispersion. Overall, our evidence suggests that corporate rumors reduce stock price synchronicity by increasing investor irrationality.     

The dark side of innovation: How new SKUs affect brand choice in the presence of consumer uncertainty and learning

New product activity is critical for sustained success of consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. However, the impact of new SKUs on the perceived quality, quality uncertainty and subsequent choice of the brand as a whole is, as of yet, not well understood. The authors study how new additions to the brand line shape consumers’ quality perceptions, and how this – next to the mere line length effect – influences their choice of brands over time. They do so in the setting of an emerging market (China), where new product activity is particularly pervasive. Using a unique scanner panel dataset of Chinese households over the period 2011–2014, they estimate a Bayesian learning model that accommodates varying quality, on two CPG categories, and for two types of new-product additions (new sensory SKUs vs. new non-sensory SKUs). They show that while adding new SKUs may lift the brand’s perceived quality level, it also makes consumers more uncertain about the quality of the brand – dampening their brand choice. This holds especially for light customers – an important part of the brand clientele. Managerial implications are discussed.