Two competing hypotheses, value enhancing and value discounting, state that implementing socially responsible corporate policies can have positive or negative effects on firm value. This paper tests how a specific type of social responsibility–corporate equality–affects firm value. Corporate...

Two competing hypotheses, value enhancing and value discounting, state that implementing socially responsible corporate policies can have positive or negative effects on firm value. This paper tests how a specific type of social responsibility–corporate equality–affects firm value. Corporate...

Existing studies in finance have documented the comovement of stock returns of companies headquartered in the same location. The interpretation is that local investors have a “local bias” due to an information advantage on local companies. This paper argues that localized agglomeration...

Do high expenditures incurred in running the government benefit or hurt firms? Using Chinese data between 1999 and 2006, we find that higher administrative expenditures in provincial governments are associated with lower firm value, lower stock and financial performance, and lower labor...

This paper exploits a natural experiment (the Wenchuan Earthquake in China) to study the effects of investor sentiment on stock returns. We find that during the 12months following the earthquake, stock returns are significantly lower for firms headquartered nearer the epicenter than for firms...

We evaluate the environmental and economic effects of Beijing’s driving restrictions. Based on daily data from multiple monitoring stations, air pollution falls 19% during every-other-day and 8% during one-day-per-week restrictions. Based on hourly viewership data, the number of...

We demonstrate a striking but previously unnoticed relationship between city size and the black-white wage gap, with the gap increasing by 2.5% for every million-person increase in urban population. We then look within cities and document that wages of blacks rise less with agglomeration in the...

Based on the parallel growth implications of the four urban growth theories (endogenous growth theory, random growth theory, hybrid growth theory, and locational fundamentals theory), this paper uses the Chinese city size data from 1984-2006 and time series econometric techniques to test for...

Local governments often charge developers impact fees to finance local public goods. This has been practiced in Chinese cities for more than two decades; however, no empirical studies have tested the effect of impact fees on real estate prices. Using a panel data set for 35 large- and...