Economics & Politics最新文献

This paper examines if politicians react to events they cannot control to avoid political blame and if voters hold politicians accountable for functions beyond their office. I focus on the response of mayors and voters to a farmland tax implemented by the Italian central government. I investigate how the municipalities affected by the new policy adjust to it and study if the election odds of the incumbent mayor's party in towns subject to the tax are affected. Mayors increase spending in municipalities where the tax is implemented. Average spending grows by 1.38 euro (about a 1% increase) and it is financed by increased borrowing which expands by 0.64 euro per capita, on average. Voters do not seem to punish the local incumbent for a policy decided by the national government. Two factors may have contributed to offsetting the electoral impact. The first is greater spending in those municipalities where the incumbent is on the ballot. The second is a media account of the policy which was factual and not biased against the local incumbent. Overall, these findings suggest politicians react to policies that are fully out of their hands, potentially to avoid electoral punishment.

Anticorruption is a prevalent global phenomenon and has yielded many good results. This study empirically tests the real effect of China's anticorruption on corporate acquisition premiums and explores its mechanisms. We find that after the exposure of and crackdown on corrupt provincial officials, firms without political connections had lower mergers and acquisitions (M&A) premiums than those with political connections. Cross-sectional test results show that when firms are private or in areas with high marketization, the anticorruption event has a greater impact on their acquisition premiums. The channel test demonstrates that anticorruption reduces the value of political connections and improves the negotiation advantages of nonpolitically connected firms, enabling them to pay lower M&A premiums. Our findings indicate that anticorruption can create a considerably fair business environment. Moreover, we confirm the real effects of anticorruption on the distortion of resource allocation at the firm level. Finally, the results of this research have policy implications for the world's largest emerging market.

Utilizing text analysis through machine learning techniques, this study investigates the influence of enterprise digital transformation on audit opinions within China's A-share listed companies spanning from 2011 to 2020. The findings underscore that enterprise digital transformation has the potential to bolster standard unqualified audit opinions through the enhancement of internal control quality and information transparency. Additionally, factors such as marketization level, property rights nature, and industry classification are found to be pivotal in shaping this relationship. These research outcomes not only extend the theoretical horizons of audit opinion studies but also offer valuable insights and recommendations for auditors to optimize the efficacy of audit opinions.

Financial frauds can cause serious damage to financial markets but are hard to detect manually. In this study, we develop an intelligent detecting model to efficiently identify financial frauds by using XGBoost on raw financial data items in corporation financial statements. With listed companies in Chinese A-share Market taken as samples, empirical results reveal that the proposed model works better than traditional models by a large margin in detecting fraud. Notably, the proposed model exhibits superior performance when used together with raw financial data items than with financial indicators. Moreover, the proposed model remains robust on outperformance in fraud detection when serial fraud cases are recoded, test periods are altered, more raw financial data are input, as well as other machine learning models–the AdaBoost and SVM–are selected as benchmark models. Our study enriches the application of machine learning in finance sector, and highlights the economic significance of raw financial data as the financial system's most fundamental components.

The advent of the digital economy has ushered in unprecedented opportunities for corporate development. Utilizing a comprehensive data set comprising Chinese listed companies spanning the period 2011–2020, this study empirically examines the impact of digital transformation on corporate illegality. The findings reveal a significant reduction in corporate illegality attributable to digital transformation. This empirical result retains its significance even when subjected to a battery of robustness tests. In terms of the underlying mechanisms, this paper conjecture that digital transformation reduces the internal and external information asymmetry, thereby curbing corporate illegality. Further heterogeneous analysis shows that digital transformation is more effective among corporates with higher agency cost (state-owned or large corporates) or corporates located in regions with lower degree of marketization level. These heterogeneous effects provide supportive evidence to the above conjecture. The implications of this study extend the boundaries of digital transformation research and furnish novel and actionable insights into the prevention of corporate illegality.

As a platform for the trading of bulk commodities, securities, and futures, exchanges, characterized by platform-like attributes, provide inexhaustible power for the further development of commodity economy through horizontal integration. This paper examines the international integration landscape of the modern exchanges through the lens of platform economy theory, specifically examining the ramifications of their horizontal integration on market efficiency. Employing the net utility hypothesis within the Hotelling model, we construct a nuanced trader utility model. Through a comparative analysis of platform profit, trader utility, and social welfare, the research discerns the impact of exchanges' horizontal integration. We highlight the intrinsic incentives for such integration within exchanges and put forth pertinent policy recommendations, adding a dimension of practical relevance to the academic discourse. The paper concludes by highlighting the role of government in promoting the efficiency of platform enterprises.

This study explores how enterprise digital transformation affects audit quality. The results show that the relationship between enterprise digital transition and audit quality takes on a U-shaped. Mechanism test results indicate that during the initial stages of digitization, the restrictive effect of auditor's professional competence mismatch predominates. Conversely, during the mature stages of digitization, the promotion effect of improved auditor's substantive independence predominates. Heterogeneity tests demonstrate that this U-shaped relationship is significant primarily within the sample set of short audit tenure and state-owned enterprises. The study reveals the internal mechanism of the impact of enterprise digital transition on audit quality, offering empirical evidence to comprehend the incremental dynamic effects of enterprise digitalization and mitigate potential adverse consequences throughout the transformation process.

In this article, we investigate the influence of local official turnover on litigation efficiency using manually collected data from listed companies in China from 1995 to 2013. Our findings indicate that official turnover leads to a decrease in litigation efficiency, with a 16.3% increase in the duration of litigation cases. This effect is more pronounced when newly appointed officials are working in different locations. It is more significant when the involved enterprise is a private entity, suggesting that political cycles contribute to the selective enforcement of private enterprises. Further analysis reveals that the adverse impact of official turnover on litigation efficiency is short-lived. The conclusions contribute to the existing literature on official turnover and litigation efficiency and hold potential implications for judicial independence reforms.

In China, the deviation of enterprises from the real economy to the financial sector has raised concerns. Using a sample of listed companies held by central state-owned enterprises from 2009 to 2018, we investigate the influence of government supervision on this deviation. We find that government supervision effectively reduces investments in financial assets by central state-owned enterprises. The impact is more significant in enterprises with internal control deficiencies, especially in those related to finance. Further study finds that the effect of government supervision conducted for the first time, second time, and third time shows a decreasing trend.

The extant research provides inconsistent results regarding the effect of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on firm productivity. There is no research on the effect of OFDI in belt and road (B&R) countries on Chinese firm productivity. In this paper, the impact of B&R OFDI on Chinese firm productivity and its influencing mechanisms are investigated. The main findings of this research are as follows. First, B&R OFDI positively influences productivity by alleviating firms' financial constraints. Second, the presence of market-driven and production-driven subsidiaries in B&R countries exerts a favorable moderating impact on firm productivity. Finally, the productive influence of B&R OFDI is more pronounced for firms in eastern China and for those in the energy and transportation sectors, and it is particularly significant for nonstate-owned enterprises. These findings have practical implications for governments engaged in the design of effective policies for the promotion of B&R OFDIs and for firms developing robust OFDI strategies along the Belt and Road to improve their levels of productivity.