We examine how political connections impact the process of going public. Specifically, we test how political connections impact the pricing of newly offered shares, the magnitude of underpricing, and the fixed cost of going public. Based on experiences of the new public firms in the Chinese...

Using a novel proxy of investors' speculative demand constructed from online search interest in "concept stocks", we examine how speculative demand affects the returns and trading volume of Chinese stock indices. We find that returns and trading volume increase with the contemporaneous...

This study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock...

Using a novel proxy of investors' speculative demand constructed from online search interest in “concept stocks”, we examine how speculative demand affects the returns and trading volume of Chinese stock indices. We find that returns and trading volume increase with the contemporaneous...

We study how firms' ownership structure affects the cost of debt using evidence from Chinese corporate bond market. Our result shows state, institutional, and foreign ownership all help to reduce firms' cost of debt. The effect of state ownership is more pronounced if the issuer is headquartered...

This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996-2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversification, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on...