The rapid expansion of government debt exacerbates systemic risks and tightens the credit transmission channels of monetary policy, posing a severe threat to the healthy development of firms. Existing literature mainly examines the impact of government debt on corporate financing behavior, innovation, and total output. Using data from a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms covering the period from 2001 to 2022, we investigate the impact of local government debt management on corporate cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Our analysis reveals that effective local government debt management promotes cross-border M&As by alleviating corporate financing constraints, intensifying market competition, and enhancing corporate risk-taking capacity. The findings offer fresh insights into achieving the dual objectives of risk prevention and stable growth through local government debt management and provide significant implications for boosting the high-quality development of the real economy.
This study examined the bias introduced by regional aggregation (RA) when assessing the effect of climate change and trade liberalization through computational experiments. The analysis used global computable general equilibrium models with different pre-aggregation levels, based on the GTAP10 database. The bias was quantified by comparing the effects between large-scale and aggregated models. The results revealed that RA bias comprised over 35% of estimated effects related to climate change and global trade liberalization; it reversed the change direction in the simulation and deviated changes beyond the variation range observed in the sensitivity analysis; and it increased in developing countries where the proportions of imports were high. Much RA bias is artificially created by aggregating countries with different initial shocks, which then spreads to other countries through a pseudo-trade structure. Therefore, adopting a disaggregated global model is crucial to improve the accuracy of climate change assessments with diverse shocks worldwide.