Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies最新文献

Exploring the turnover of city heads in China, I find that state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which possess competitive advantages (especially resource-based) due to innate government connections, significantly increase innovation compared with non-SOEs when local policy uncertainty heightens. In particular, when the turnover of city heads occurs, SOEs are able to obtain a larger amount of external financing at lower costs than non-SOEs. Additionally, SOEs that file invention patents at the height of local policy uncertainty have better product market performances. My findings indicate that heightened local policy uncertainty enables firms with innate government connections to explore first-mover advantages through innovation activities.

Using 2.09 million pieces of media coverage associated with Chinese firms during 2006–2019, we find a significantly positive relationship between media coverage and labor investment efficiency. Both newspaper and online media coverage can effectively reduce firms' labor over-investment and under-investment. Our results are robust after addressing a range of endogeneity concerns. Further analyses show that the positive relationship between media coverage and labor investment efficiency is more pronounced for firms with higher labor cost stickiness or when human capital is more important to the firm's business model. Mechanism analyses reveal that media coverage improves labor investment efficiency through the compensation incentive mechanism, supervision mechanism, and information disclosure mechanism.

This study investigates the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial distress in China using the O-score and a Chinese sample of 4202 observations between 2011 and 2017. The relationship is accordingly more pronounced in weak corporate governance firms with low levels of institutional shareholders and free cash flow and among non-state-owned enterprises and mandatory CSR disclosure firms. The findings are robust to endogeneity through robustness checks and the 2013 Sichuan Lushan earthquake as an exogenous shock to CSR. Ultimately, the study will help investors, shareholders, and policymakers appreciate the impact of CSR dimensions.

In this paper, we examine the January effect in China's A-share stock market from January 1995 to December 2019 using both the solar and lunar calendars. Consistent with the existing literature, we find the absence of a traditional January effect in the solar calendar; however, we observe a strong January effect in the lunar calendar. Moreover, the effect is much stronger in small firms. We demonstrate that the tax-loss selling and window dressing hypotheses cannot explain the turn-of-the-year effect in China. Instead, the turn-of-the-year effect in trading volume and buy orders help to explain the strong lunar January effect. As a falsification test, we examine the B-share market that is predominantly composed of foreign investors and find no evidence of the lunar January effect. Our results show that Chinese financial markets are more closely aligned with the traditional lunar calendar than the standard solar calendar.

Using textual information regarding innovation in the annual reports of Chinese listed firms for the period from 2007 to 2019, we examine how firms alter their innovation activities in response to the tone of peer firms' discussions of innovation in their annual reports (“innovation tone”). We find that a positive innovation tone in peer firms' annual reports results in a significant reduction in R&D investments by the focal firm, especially when such a tone pertains to the future. Our cross-sectional analyses show that peers' innovation tone strongly affects R&D investments when the focal firm operates in a non-high-tech or highly competitive industry, or is readily willing to adjust its innovation strategy. Further investigation shows that the marginal benefits of a focal firm's R&D investments decline when annual peer reports adopt relatively positive innovation tones. Our results enrich the literature on the peer effects of textual information on innovation and have implications for firms' innovation strategies.

Based on the survey data from the China National SME Survey Database in 2019, we analyze the relationship between executive financial literacy and the performance of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that executive financial literacy helps improve corporate performance, especially for companies with weak external supervision and low competitive pressure. After controlling for the effects of the variables at the individual executive and enterprise levels, addressing possible endogenous problems in the analysis, robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses indicates that our findings remain unchanged. We further show that executive financial literacy improves corporate performance by alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate risk management. Our findings have important policy implications for stimulating the vitality of economy and promoting high-quality economic development.

This study employs data from Chinese firms between 2017 and 2019 to explore how government–business relations affect corporate cash holdings. We find that healthy government–business relations have a significantly positive impact on corporate cash holdings. The mechanism test reveals that the former affects the latter via investment opportunities. Furthermore, product market competition positively moderates the relationship between government–business relations and corporate cash holdings, but financial constraints negatively moderate this relationship. The results of our research have implications for the government to optimize the quality of governance and for enterprises to adjust their business strategies.

This study introduces a new BEKK-CARR model to explore the volatility spillover effects among mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan stock markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also extend the approach of Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012) to infer a brand-new volatility spillover index to discuss the bi-directional volatility transmission. Our results show that the trading information flow among these three markets has changed significantly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The strength of volatility spillover is increasing during this momentous period. The Hong Kong stock market plays a pivotal role in volatility transmission. The values for half-lives by exogenous shocks keep relatively low during the pandemic period. A reasonable explanation is that the trading information transmissions among stock markets are quicker than in the non-pandemic period.

We study the impact of intended use of proceeds disclosed in the section of “Use of Proceeds” in prospectuses on ChiNext IPOs' initial underpricing. After splitting the entire period into two non-overlapping sub-periods to control for regulatory changes and after controlling for the firm-level characteristics and market conditions, we find that the overall information disclosed from “Use of Proceeds” affects IPO initial underpricing significantly over the two sub-periods. Moreover, the intended use of IPO proceeds in several specific categories affects underpricing too. The proceeds raised for IPO firms' information platform and research and development over the second sub-period while the proceeds to promote marketing and sales and to expand existing products over the first sub-period are significantly and positively related to initial underpricing. The significance changes for the IPOs with the opportunity to change their use of proceeds after IPOs. We explore the causes and effects to explain our findings.