Existing studies disagree over the basic determinants of capital structure in Chinese firms. We identify profitability, industry leverage, asset growth, tangibility, firm size, state control, and the largest shareholding as reliable core factors explaining book leverage. Compared with evidence...

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) launched the Campaign for Strengthening Corporate Governance of Public Companies in 2007. As part of this pilot program, public firms were required to report to CSRC whether their boards had established audit committees and whether these audit...

We provide insights into how the market processes going concern audit opinions based on the trading of some well-documented sophisticated investors—short sellers. We find that abnormal short selling increases significantly upon impending going concern disclosures. While prior literature...

Exploiting a screen display feature whereby the order of stock display is determined by the stock listing codes, we lever a novel identification strategy and study the impact of attention spillover on stock prices and turnover. We find that stocks with neighbors on the display that experience...

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....

Estimation of the covariance matrix of asset returns is crucial to portfolio construction. As suggested by economic theories, the correlation structure among assets differs between emerging markets and developed countries. It is therefore imperative to make rigorous statistical inference on...

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 paper presents updated estimates of potential output growth for the global economy through 2022. Global potential output growth is expected to decline sharply in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and recover partially by the end of the projection horizon of the October 2020 Monetary...