To what extent did independent directors help firms’ recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper, we answer this question by investigating whether independent directors contribute to Chinese listed firms’ operation income growth during the first and second quarters of the year 2020....

Using a unique hand collected dataset and applying an institutional theoretical framework, we examine how mutual fund ownership influences environmental spending by Chinese listed companies between 2011 and 2018. We report mutual fund investment is associated with significantly increased...

Superstition is prevalent in rural areas, yet very few studies examine whether it affects rural households’ economic decisions. In this paper, we investigate the impact of “zodiac year” superstition on Chinese rural households’ life insurance spending. We find a statistically significant...

This study investigates the impact of state subsidies on corporate environmental spending of Chinese listed firms between 2011 and 2018, using a hand-collected data from corporate annual and environmental responsibility reports. We find a positive relationship between state subsidies and...

This paper examines how Chinese policy banks responded to China's Belt Road Initiative (BRI) using transaction-level international syndicated loan data. Employing a difference-in-differences (DID) estimation, we show that Chinese policy banks increased aggregate lending (number of loans and loan...

This paper examines the COVID-19 impact on Chinese farmers’ peer-to-peer (P2P) borrowings using transaction-level data. Our difference-in-differences estimation results suggest that farmers from the most pandemic-affected region, Hubei province, substantially reduced their P2P loans by 13%...

This paper studies whether and how corporate venture capital (CVC) spurs changes in firm scope. Using two sets of firm scope metrics, a text-based emerging business measure and Compustat segment measures, I document that CVC investments are strongly associated with subsequent firm scope changes...

We study the impact of climate-related patent approvals on financial markets. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of patent examiners as an exogenous shock in patent approvals to seek for causal interpretations. We find that innovative firms with lucky draws in the patent examiner lottery...