CEO experience and corporate financing decisions: Evidence from a natural experiment in China

Using the unique setting in China's economic transition and market reform, we investigate whether CEOs' experience regarding an economic boom affect corporate financing decisions. Economic booming, as a result of China's reform and open policy since 1978, affects individual risk preferences and decision behavior for those who grew up during the reform process. We find that Reform-and-Opening CEOs, who experience the reform and open-up era early in life, implement more aggressive capital structure policies and maintain higher leverage compared to Planned Economy CEOs. Furthermore, we determine that Reform-and-Opening CEOs tend to conduct debt issuance more frequently to cover financing needs as they can better deal with the liquidity risk of debt financing and confront the pressures arising from frequent monitoring by the debt markets. Using the stagewise regression, we find a cumulative effect of early growth experience. We also use the common trend test and placebo tests to deal with the concern that Reform-and-Opening CEOs pursue significantly more aggressive financial policies relevant to the systematic differences. Additional tests rule out the possibility that our results are driven by industry competition, state ownership, and educational ideology.     

Tax enforcement and corporate employment: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China

This study investigates how tax enforcement affects corporate employment in China. We utilize the merger of the State Tax Bureau and Local Tax Bureaus as a quasi-natural experiment and adopt a difference-in-differences framework to identify causality. The results show that tougher tax enforcement has a significant and negative effect on corporate employment and that this effect is more pronounced for firms with higher labor intensity, greater financial constraints, more severe labor market frictions, a lower initial tax rate, lower tax transfer ability, and greater credit market imperfections. Further, the mechanism tests demonstrate that tougher tax enforcement leads to increases in the effective income tax rate, cash holdings, and the cash flow sensitivity of real investment but decreases in accounts receivable and dividend payments. These results are consistent with the liquidity constraints channel. In addition, we exclude several alternative explanations and conduct a series of robustness checks. Overall, our findings indicate that corporate tax enforcement has large effects on the local labor demand, which provides some useful insights for local governments to stabilize employment during the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Economic and environmental outcomes of economic transition: Evidence from a quasi-experiment in China

China is actively seeking an economic transition to achieve high-quality development, which means economic growth and environment improvement. This paper evaluates the economic and environmental effects of a pilot zone for transformation of growth engine (TGE) policy in Shandong province, China. We collected the monthly data of 73 prefecture-level cities in five provinces of central and eastern China from 2015 to 2020, then used the boundary discontinuity difference-in-differences (BD-DID) for identification. The results show that this pilot policy has effectively improved environmental quality while achieving economic growth, but the core zones did not perform well in environmental improvement. Analysis of the mechanism shows that innovation, infrastructure and pollution control are important channels of the TGE policy in improving the economy and environment.     

Intensive judicial oversight and corporate green innovations: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China

The deterioration of pollution problem has increased environmental disputes. However, little is known about the relationship between intensive judicial oversight and corporate green innovations. Regarding the establishment of environmental courts in China as an almost ideal quasi-natural experiment, this paper identifies the impact and mechanism of environmental courts on corporate green innovations. We find that: (1) environmental courts have a significant positive impact on green innovations. However, by employing instrument variable (IV) strategy to alleviate the endogenous issues, we find environmental courts mainly promote the quantity of green innovations; (2) the positive effect on green innovations is more salient for firms in the industry with high pollution intensity, state-owned enterprises, and firms in regions with stricter mass supervision; (3) environmental courts can improve the efficiency of dealing with environmental disputes and alleviate the collaboration between government and firms. Therefore, it could promote corporate green innovations with the increasing pressure for pollution abatement; (4) environmental courts could cause additional costs to firms, such as crowding out non-green innovations and decreasing corporate TFP in the short term. Meanwhile, the establishment of environmental courts could also achieve specific social welfare effects, which is conducive to improving local environmental quality. This paper provides implications for judicial oversight of regulators on environmental protection.     

开放度和环境重视度对污染的影响:基于中国地级城市的分析

近年来的研究表明,经济发展中的人均收入指标和环境污染指标之间存在着倒U型曲线关系,又被称为环境库兹涅茨曲线(EKC),即早期收入增加带来环境污染的增加,直到收入达到一定高度,环境污染达到峰值并且此后与收入呈反向影响关系。尽管如此,在早期的研究文献中笼统的将人均收入作为主要的影响因素,因而忽略了很多现实中可能出现的影响。本文基于传统EKC,结合经过截距调整的复合EKC模型,使用中国2002年至2009年279个城市数据,研究开放度和环境重视度对污染程度的影响。我们发现,开放度和环境重视度都对环境的质量和经济发展之间的关系产生重要的影响,但是在不同的地区,发展水平不同的基础上,各个影响因素的程度不一样。本文的研究意味着,为了在经济发展与环境污染之间寻求平衡点,可以从开放度和环境重视度入手,因地制宜,制定区域的可持续发展战略。     

Environmental regulation and outward foreign direct investment: Evidence from China

This paper explores the impact of environmental regulation (ER) on outward foreign direct investment (FDI) flows in China. During the period from 2013 to 2015, all Chinese cities were required to join a nationwide automatic air quality monitoring network in batches, and this policy exogenously raised local environmental regulation. This unique policy implemented full coverage through a staggered adoption, which motivates this paper to apply an event study approach to identify the treatment effect of stringent environmental regulation. Based on a city-year level capital outflows dataset constructed from the fDi Markets database, we obtain three main findings: (1) environmental regulation significantly stimulates outward FDI flows; (2) this promoting effect centers on polluting industries; and (3) these ER-induced FDI outflows are mainly directed toward countries with weaker environmental protection and with a closer geographic and cultural distance to the home country. These results together provide a snapshot confirming the classical “pollution haven hypothesis”.     

Effects of cost sharing on the demand for physician services in Japan: Evidence from a natural experiment

In this paper, we investigate the effects of cost sharing on the demand for physician services in Japan by using a natural experiment, namely, the increase in the coinsurance rate for household heads in 1997. Our primary finding from the two-year data, which includes the transitory effects of the reform, is that the effects of the reform on the frequency of physician visits were negative and statistically significant, and that the effects of the reform on expenditures per visit were also negative. Based on these results, the arc elasticity of demand for physician services is ?0.055. When we exclude the transitory period using the three-year data, the effects of the reform on the frequency of physician visits turn to be positive. It seems that the patients marginally curtailed the number of physician visits immediately after the reform; however, this effect was not sustained in the six months after the reform. We conclude that Japanese patients are not very price sensitive within the 10–20 percent range of coinsurance rate. Another important finding in our study is that the decrease in expenditure per visit retained even after the transitory period. This result suggests that the existence of a possible moral hazard in the treatment intensity although the decision-making process on the treatment intensity needs to be examined more carefully.     

环境污染治理与经济增长:模型与中国的经验研究

通过建立一个人力资本内生增长模型,将环境及环境污染治理引入内生增长框架下进行分析,其中重点探讨了在达到均衡增长路径过程中经济增长、环境污染与环境污染治理的关系,同时考察了维持可持续发展需要具备的条件。在此基础上,运用中国的数据对理论模型的一些结果进行了计量检验。结果表明,清洁要素以及技术的使用是可持续发展的关键,中国对环境污染一直以来缺乏足够的重视,目前仍然需要加大环境污染治理力度,提高环境污染治理的效率,地方政府的行为在其中会起到重要作用。     

环保督察与企业信息披露——来自上市公司的证据

对于经济活动监管的效能取决于监管者能否获得充分的信息。文章研究中央政府的环保督察如何影响企业的负面信息披露。借鉴公司金融领域经典文献,文章利用股价数据构造了上市公司的负面信息披露指标。利用双重差分分析,研究发现受到环保督察影响省份的上市公司相对于未受督察影响的公司显著减少了信息披露,而公司财务指标则不受环保督察的显著影响。与地方政府具有政治联系的公司在督察期间更加显著地减少了信息披露。上述结果表明,环保部门、地方政府、企业和金融市场监管者之间的联动机制是决定监管政策有效性的一个重要维度。     

Financial performance and corporate governance in microfinance: Evidence from Asia

Good corporate governance is considered a building block of success for microfinance institutions (MFIs) as it is presumed to help them in achieving their social and financial goals. This paper analyzes the corporate governance and financial performance relationship for MFIs in Asia. We make use of a panel dataset involving 173 MFIs in 18 Asian countries for the period 2007–2011. We construct a corporate governance index based on seven measures pertaining to board size and composition, CEO characteristics, and ownership type. We then estimate the two-way relationship between this index and each of five different financial performance indicators. To address the likely simultaneity between corporate governance and financial performance, we adopt a two-stage least squares estimation approach with instrumental variables. Our results confirm the endogenous nature of corporate governance and financial performance. We conclude that profitability and sustainability of MFIs improve with good governance practices and conversely that more profitable and sustainable MFIs have better governance systems.     

Local land supply and fiscal incentives for R&D: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China

Whereas numerous studies have evaluated the effects of public research and development (R&D) support programs and R&D tax incentives on private R&D, little is known about local governments' fiscal incentives for R&D. In this study, we build a conceptual framework to clarify the critical role of local land supply in relation to fiscal expenditure on R&D. We treat the establishment of China's nine Land Supervision Bureaus in 2006 as a quasi-natural experiment, and run a difference-in-differences regression to identify causality. The results show that local governments allocate more fiscal expenditure to R&D in response to land-use supervision, which monitors illegal land granting behaviors, and this effect is stronger in cities where leaders have higher political career incentives and cities with greater fiscal decentralization. Moreover, we find that land-use supervision increases the probability and scale of firms' access to government subsidies for R&D; thus, enhancing regional innovation capacity. Our findings document that China's land resource is a curse for its innovation-driven growth as it impedes local governments' fiscal incentives for R&D.     

A simultaneous estimation of Environmental Kuznets Curve: Evidence from China

This paper uses Chinese provincial data from 1993 to 2002 to examine the existence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) relationship between per capita income and per capita pollutant emission. Acknowledging the theoretical framework that economic growth and pollution are jointly determined, this paper starts from formulating a simultaneous equations model (SEM) to investigate the relationship between income and pollutant emission. A Hausman test is applied for income exogeneity and a two-stage least squares (2SLS) method is used to estimate the SEM. There are three main differences found between single polynomial equation estimators commonly used in EKC literatures and simultaneous equationa estimators. Since these differences tend to cause different policy implications, therefore, this paper suggests that the simultaneity between income and pollution should be considered before regressing the model in future EKC studies. In addition, this paper also investigates the determinants of income and government pollution abatement expense. Negative impact of pollution on income, and positive effects of physical and labor on income are found in income equation. Whilst positive effects of pollutant emissions, physical capital and the secondary industry share on pollution abatement expenses are also found in abatement equation.     

Permissible collateral and access to finance: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

By allowing large classes of movable assets to be used as collateral, the Property Law reform transformed the secured transactions in China. Difference-in-differences tests show firms operating with ex-ante more movable assets expand access to bank credit and prolong debt maturity. However, the reform does not seem to improve the efficiency of credit allocation, as debt capacity of ex-ante low quality firms expands the most following the reform. Credit expansion also does not lead to better firm performance. These findings are not driven by confounding factors such as improvements in creditor and property rights protection. Our results also cannot be explained by other important reforms which were introduced around the same time as the introduction of the Property Law. These include anti-tunneling and split-share reforms and amendments to the corporate tax structure in China. We conduct explicit robustness tests for these other reforms and hence contribute to the empirical literature on the reform process in China with new findings.     

China's anti-corruption campaign and firm productivity: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

We investigate the causal effects of the anti-corruption campaign on firm-level total factor productivity (TFP) in China. We employ a difference-in-differences estimation to show the following results. (1) The anti-corruption campaign substantially improves TFP by 1.7%. (2) Our findings are particularly pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, in firms without political connections, and in regions with weak legal environment. (3) We find that the anti-corruption campaign increases the sensitivity of firm investment to investment opportunities and generates more patents, which reveals the importance of investment efficiency channel and innovation channel. This study provides clear policy implication to regulators by identifying firm-level evidence for rent-seeking theory.     

Perceived relative income,fairness, and the role of government: Evidence from a randomized survey experiment in China

Previous studies have shown that Chinese citizens generally are optimistic about their economic opportunities and tolerant of the high levels of inequality in their society. This paper conducts a random survey experiment to examine whether the established views on fairness and inequality change after the respondents receive the general information on wealth concentration or the customized information on their household income ranking. We find that both types of information lead respondents to view society as less fair than they had initially believed. The information on the wealth concentration also increases public concern about social inequality. Nevertheless, neither information offered to the respondents make them think that government should play a more significant role in reducing inequality. This lack of demand for government intervention may be partially explained by a lower level of trust in the local government induced by the two information treatments.     

The complicit role of local government authorities in corporate bribery: Evidence from a tax collection reform in China

In January 2002, China decided to centralize corporate income tax collection, shifting the collection authority from the local tax bureaus (LTBs) to the state tax bureaus (STBs), for all firms established after December 31, 2001. We exploit this exogenous shock to identify a new cause for corporate bribery, namely, the complicit role of local government authorities. We find that firms whose income taxes are still collected by LTBs after the reform bribe more than similar firms whose taxes are collected by STBs. Such effects are more pronounced for firms located in provinces where government intervention is more prevalent and where judicial system is less independent. Moreover, we find that firms whose taxes are collected by LTBs enjoy lower tax burdens and receive greater tax-related subsidies, especially when they bribe more. Overall, our results highlight the reciprocation between local government authorities and firms in determining corporate bribery.     

Economic growth,local industrial development and inter-regional spillovers from foreign direct investment: Evidence from China

In many countries inward foreign direct investment (FDI) typically concentrates in a few regions. However, there is little empirical evidence on whether spatially concentrated FDI boosts economic growth in other regions within the same country. We use a dataset that covers 96% of Chinese cities from 1996 to 2004 and find that “inter-regional spillovers” from FDI concentrated in China's coastal cities have a positive and significant effect on the growth of inland cities. In addition, an inland city's industrial development affects its absorptive capacity to gain such inter-regional spillovers from coastal FDI.     

Buy now,pay later as liquidity insurance: Evidence from an early experiment in China

This study explores the liquidity insurance role of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). As a complementary study to Bian et al. (2023), we provide institutional background and mechanism analysis of BNPL's consumption-boosting effects. Since a significant consumption boosting effect exists even for individuals who did not draw on the BNPL credit line, we argue that BNPL provides liquidity insurance by releasing preexisting precautionary liquidity reserves into consumption. We also explore several robustness checks and heterogeneity analyses.     

Evaluating public participation impact on environmental protection and ecological efficiency in China: Evidence from PITI disclosure

The industrial pollution caused by China's unprecedent economic expansion seriously imperils public health, giving rise to public's high demand for better environmental quality. The paper employs the difference-in-differences (DID) methodology to conduct a quasi-natural experiment based on the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) to evaluate the public participation impact on pollution emissions reduction and environment technology efficiency. The results show that PITI information disclosure has a positive influence on pollution emissions reduction, however, some existing literatures may overstate the effect of public participation on environment improvement in China, the empirical results show that government administrative measures still play essential role at current stage. The paper also finds that the influence of public participation exists in eastern China rather than in central and western China. In addition, the results of using environment technology efficiency as outcome variable show insignificant effect, but eastern China has positive environment technology efficiency, suggesting that economic development may increase enterprise technological input, hence achieving mutually beneficial achievements of economy and ecological efficiency.