In recent years, China's housing market has undergone profound changes in its supply-demand structure, with weakening demand and rising downside risks becoming increasingly prominent. In this context, real estate-related macroprudential policies (MPR) have emerged as a key policy instrument for stabilizing housing markets and containing systemic financial risk. While existing studies show that tightening standard tools, such as loan-to-value limits, can effectively restrain mortgage loan growth and house price appreciation during upswings, the policy environment facing MPR has fundamentally changed. Downside risks and balance-sheet pressures have become more prominent, shifting policy objectives from curbing excessive growth to stabilizing prices and preventing risk contagion. At the same time, public house-price expectations have reversed and become strongly procyclical, raising concerns that expectation-driven behavior may weaken policy transmission.
Against this background, this paper focuses on two related questions. First, does the effectiveness of real estate-related macroprudential policy differ between housing upswings and downturns, and to what extent do public house-price expectations shape its policy impact? Second, can policy coordination, especially through policy communication and monetary policy alignment, mitigate expectation-driven frictions and enhance the effectiveness of macroprudential regulation?
To address these questions, we adopt a combined theoretical and empirical approach. On the theoretical side, we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that explicitly incorporates public house-price expectations and policy communication into the transmission mechanism of MPR, thereby capturing how expectation dynamics interact with credit constraints and policy interventions. On the empirical side, we use monthly data from 2010 to 2023 and estimate dynamic policy effects using the local projection method. To this end, public house-price expectations are derived from the People's Bank of China's Urban Depositor Survey, and indicators of real estate policy communication intensity and policy stance are constructed based on official communications issued by the People's Bank of China and other regulatory authorities, combining a keyword-assisted topic model with large language models.
Our empirical results yield three main findings. First, MPR exert a statistically significant countercyclical effect on the house price gap, but this effect is substantially weakened when public house-price expectations become strongly procyclical. Second, policy communication plays an important but asymmetric role in macroprudential transmission. Higher communication intensity helps reduce expectation dispersion, while consistency between communicated policy stance and actual policy actions is a key condition for maintaining policy credibility and effectiveness. Third, monetary policy coordination displays clear instrument-specific patterns, with quantitative tightening reinforcing contractionary macroprudential policy during housing upswings and accommodative price-based policy more effective in supporting stabilization during downturns.
These findings carry important policy implications. Effective stabilization of the housing market requires a shift from a framework that relies primarily on instrument adjustment toward one that places greater emphasis on expectation management and policy coordination. First, macroprudential authorities should develop policy response mechanisms tailored to periods of weakening expectations by strengthening expectation monitoring using survey data and high-frequency indicators, and incorporating expectation measures into policy decision-making, thereby improving policy timing and preventing self-reinforcing downturn dynamics. Second, policy communication in the real estate sector should be institutionalized, with greater emphasis on clarity, consistency, and coherence between policy messages and policy actions, rather than solely increasing communication frequency. Finally, coordination between monetary policy and MPR should be state-contingent and account for the distinct roles of different instruments: quantity-based tools should play a larger role during upswings, while price-based tools are better suited to supporting stabilization and anchoring expectations during downturns.
This study contributes to the literature in three respects. First, it systematically integrates public house-price expectations into the analysis of MPR, highlighting expectations as a key constraint on policy effectiveness. Second, by focusing on the house price gap, it reassesses macroprudential performance from a risk-oriented perspective that accounts for both upside and downside dynamics. Third, it constructs novel indicators of real estate policy communication, providing new empirical tools for studying policy communication, expectation management, and macroeconomic policy coordination. Future research may explore heterogeneity in expectation formation across households and cities and examine interactions between macroprudential, monetary, and fiscal housing policies.

Faced with the escalating twin deficits in the current account and fiscal budget, the Trump administration imposed a 10% “minimum benchmark tariff” on more than 180 economies worldwide on April 2, 2025, and levied additional higher tariffs on 60 economies with substantial trade deficits with the United States. The “reciprocal tariff" policy runs counter to the current rules-based multilateral trading system and the rule of free trade, reducing the volume of U.S. international trade and damaging confidence in the U.S. dollar in the international monetary system. Nevertheless, the U.S. imposition of exorbitant tariffs on China may exacerbate the conditions of China's foreign trade and foreign investment, lead to a slowdown in China's economic growth and fluctuations in the financial market, and exert a negative impact on the internationalization of the Renminbi (RMB). Against this backdrop, what exactly is the impact of U.S. tariff hikes on the international status of the RMB? How can the Chinese government seize the opportunity presented by the Trump administration's tariff measures to further advance the internationalization of the RMB?
From the perspective of a currency anchor, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the impact of U.S. tariff hikes on the international status of the RMB. Intuitively, a currency anchor refers to an institutional arrangement that pegs a country's currency exchange rate to a single foreign currency or a basket of currencies. Taking the period from January 2016 to December 2024 as the observation window, this paper dynamically estimates the RMB currency anchor level of 195 economies worldwide, with a sub-sample of 63 economies adopting intermediate exchange rate regimes as the key research object. It further explores the impact and transmission mechanisms of U.S. tariff hikes on China on the RMB's status as a currency anchor, and conducts an extended analysis of the implications of China-U.S. trade frictions during the second term of the Trump administration.
The empirical findings are as follows: First, when the tariff rate is low, an increase in U.S. tariffs on China first elevates and then diminishes the currency anchor's status of RMB, indicating a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between the two variables. The regression results based on the full sample show that the inflection point of the tariff rate is approximately 13%. For economies with closer trade and investment links with China as well as Asian economies, the tariff inflection point is higher, indicating that they are less affected by U.S. tariff hikes. Second, the fundamental channel, trade diversion and outward investment channel, financial volatility channel, and financial openness channel are the main transmission mechanisms through which U.S. tariffs affect the RMB's currency anchor status. On the one hand, higher U.S. tariffs on China weaken China's economic fundamentals and amplify financial market fluctuations, thereby undermining the RMB's currency anchor status. On the other hand, such tariff measures drive trade diversion and outward investment from China, consolidate China's central position in the global industrial chain, raise the level of RMB denomination in trade transactions, and expand the openness of China's financial market and the stock of offshore RMB, thus boosting the RMB's currency anchor's status. Third, when the tariff rate reaches an extremely high level, the currency anchor's status of RMB does not suffer a significant decline. Through trade diversion and outward investment, China has consolidated its core position in the industrial chain and enhanced the network externalities of RMB, which in turn exerts a notable positive effect on its currency anchor's level.
The above conclusions have important policy implications. First, in response to China-U.S. trade disputes, China should adhere to a stance of retaining both retaliatory measures and negotiation efforts. On the basis of taking reciprocal retaliatory actions, China should engage in trade negotiations with the United States, striving to reduce bilateral tariff rates to the levels prior to 2025, or even to those before 2018. Second, China should persist in promoting trade diversion and capital export to consolidate and elevate its core position in the Asian industrial chain. Seizing the development opportunities brought by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), China should consolidate and strengthen its core role in the regional industrial chain, proactively expand RMB settlement and bilateral local currency settlement through cross-border financial cooperation, and thus raise the currency anchor's level of RMB.The potential contributions of this paper are threefold: First, it examines the impact of U.S. tariff hikes on the RMB's currency anchor's status, providing evidence for China's advancement of RMB internationalization amid China-U.S. trade frictions. Second, it delves into the internal mechanisms underlying the nonlinear impact of U.S. tariff hikes on the currency anchor's status of RMB, offering a path reference for RMB internationalization. Third, the paper not only analyzes the scenario of the first round of China-U.S. trade frictions (2018-2020) but also discusses the latest developments of the second round (since 2025), thereby putting forward feasible policy recommendations for China-U.S. tariff negotiations, the enhancement of the currency anchor's status of RMB, and the further advancement of RMB internationalization.

China has been making substantial efforts to prevent and mitigate financial risks in key fields in recent years. As a critical part of these efforts, the reform and risk reduction of small and medium-sized financial institutions have achieved significant milestones. However, potential risks remain pronounced among China's local small and medium-sized banks (SMBs), particularly urban and rural commercial banks. The bankruptcy of Baoshang Bank Limited serves as a stark reminder in this regard. To better address the potential crises of local SMBs and formulate targeted policy measures, it is essential to first clarify the underlying mechanisms.
Existing studies generally suggest that the external causes of the crises of local SMBs in China is that they have been forced to concentrate credit on long-cycle, low-return investment projects because of the fiscal pressure and debt expansion of the local government. The internal causes lie in governance issues, such as insider control and a lack of checks and balances among major shareholders. There are two debatable assumptions in existing literature: the local industrial structure is static, and the investments by local governments including state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are always economically inefficient. In reality, China's vertical industrial structure, differentiated by the capital intensity of local SOEs and private-owned enterprises (POEs), is in a dynamic adjustment process. Moreover, China's local governments have played a proactive role in promoting industrial upgrading through SOEs in capital-intensive sectors, which is a positive role that should be considered. However, this also implies that local governments need a specific financial institutional arrangement to allocate local credit resources: the proportion of credit available to SOEs versus POEs. Financial Decentralization (FD) has proven to be a feasible arrangement, which delineates and allocates control over financial resources between the government and the market entities (primarily POEs).
From the perspective of FD, the crisis of local SMBs results from an unreasonable arrangement of control over financial resources, which in turn induces credit misallocation across different industries. Local governments utilize the FD system to allocate credit from local SMBs, supporting SOEs in achieving industrial upgrading and increasing intermediate goods output. Subsequently, this process supports POEs in rapidly completing capital accumulation, thereby jointly driving local industrial advancement and economic growth. If both POEs and SOEs operate in industries where they hold comparative advantages, and the actual efficiency of POEs is relatively higher, FD helps improve credit allocation and reduces the potential for crisis in local SMBs. In this context, FD is directly reflected in the relative weight of control over local financial resource allocation between local governments and POEs. However, this capital investment-driven industrial upgrading is prone to imbalances. This includes SOEs over-upgrading into new industries or delaying exit from industries where they lack competitive advantages, thereby crowding out credit resources of POEs. Consequently, POEs become confined to the lower-output-level industries. In such cases, FD can easily lead credit to move towards less efficient sectors, which is credit misallocation across industries, breeding significant non-performing assets and increasing the potential crisis in local SMBs.
This paper may have two potential contributions. First, we introduce an industrial upgrading mechanism involving both SOEs and POEs into a bank run model, clarifying the theoretical mechanism through which the implicit institution of FD affects local SMB crises via credit misallocation. This macro-level perspective differs notably from the existing literature focusing on corporate governance and local government debt expansion. Second, while existing studies have empirically tested the impact of FD on the risks of urban commercial banks through channels such as financial competition and credit expansion, this paper further empirically examines the mechanism linking financial decentralization to local SMB crises through credit misallocation.
This study finds that FD determines the extent to which credit resources are allocated to private enterprises. When private firms are sufficiently efficient, FD helps alleviate credit misallocation, thereby reducing the probability of banking crises. Otherwise, its effect becomes insignificant. Local fiscal pressures partially offset the risk-mitigating role of FD. The findings of this study can help local governments adjust the control structure of financial resources according to their local conditions, thereby mitigating the risks of local SMBs while maintaining a dynamic balance between economic growth and local financial security.

For a long time, China's bond market has operated under the belief of an implicit “guarantee” for bonds issued by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), whereby investors generally expect local governments to provide implicit guarantees for the debts of local SOEs. Breaking this implicit guarantee is an essential requirement for standardizing market discipline, optimizing resource allocation, and clarifying risk attribution, holding significant positive implications for the market. However, during the dismantling of these implicit guarantees, financial risk prevention for entities with weaker risk resilience cannot be overlooked. This paper focuses on small and medium-sized banks (SMBs) as one such entity.Theoretically, the net directional impact of removing local implicit guarantees on the risk of local SMBs is ambiguous. On one hand, for SMBs and large banks coexisting within the banking system, the removal of local implicit guarantees may alter the competitive landscape between these two types of banks, potentially exacerbating the risks faced by SMBs. A relevant background is that China's banking and financial system has long maintained a tiered structure for financial service provision: large banks primarily serve SOEs and large enterprises, while SMBs focus on serving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the private economy. The removal of implicit guarantees would significantly reduce the attractiveness of SOE credit business for large banks, an effect likely to spread strongly among SOEs. As large banks become inclined to reduce their SOE-related credit business, the traditional segmentation of the banking market is disrupted, prompting large banks to expand their services downward. This “horizontal” structural adjustment in banking operations may affect SMBs through the following channels: (1) Intensified Regional Bank Competition Effect: Increased banking competition itself can elevate bank risks, particularly for SMBs. (2) Diversion of High-Quality Clients Effect: The downward expansion of large banks may directly siphon off high-quality clients and loans originally served by local SMBs, a practice commonly referred to as “cream-skimming”, thereby worsening the asset quality of SMBs. (3) Expansion of High-Risk Business Effect: Under competitive pressure, SMBs may be forced to shift towards higher-yield, riskier business areas such as shadow banking, which are harder for large banks to enter.
Beyond being affected by the “horizontal” competition and cooperation among banks, the reshaping of the relationship between local governments and SMBs will also “vertically” influence the risk level of SMBs, primarily due to the reduced intervention of the local government's “visible hand” in economic activities. However, the direction of this impact is not straightforward. This is because prior to the removal of local implicit guarantees, government intervention could have a dual effect on SMB risk. On one hand, local governments might increase SMB risk by interfering with their market-oriented operational decisions and distorting market resource allocation. On the other hand, local governments could also act as a “helping hand (or supporting hand)” for SMBs, which often have strong local ties but weaker competitiveness, thereby enhancing their risk resilience.
Given these intertwined forces, determining which force ultimately dominates requires rigorous empirical analysis. Accordingly, this paper uses the first occurrence of local SOE bond defaults in various regions as a proxy for the removal of local implicit guarantees. By constructing a staggered difference-in-differences model, the study finds that the removal of local implicit guarantees significantly exacerbates risks for local SMBs. The reason is that once the belief in “implicit rigid repayment” for SOEs collapses, large banks, which originally primarily served SOEs and large enterprises, shift their business focus downward, creating competitive overlap with SMBs. This leads to intensified local competition, diversion of high-quality clients, and expansion of high-risk activities among SMBs. The paper also finds that the removal of local implicit guarantees has a certain mitigating effect on SMB risks, which may be partly attributed to the weakening of the local government's “interventionist hand” in market resource allocation. However, this risk-mitigating effect is outweighed by the risk-increasing effect. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this risk-exacerbating effect is more pronounced in SMBs with a higher proportion of collateralized loans (high-quality loans) and weaker prudential management practices. This research not only enriches the study of risks faced by SMBs but also provides policy insights for addressing local government debt risks and preventing systematic financial risks.

The steady growth of the real economy relies on the support of the financial system. As the core business of the banking industry, bank lending plays a pivotal role in boosting the development of the real economy. Therefore, exploring the factors that influence bank lending is of great practical significance. Media coverage, as a vital information intermediary, plays a key role in market discipline. Existing studies mainly focus on the role of media in the external governance of non-financial enterprises, or examine how media coverage affects bank risks and stock prices, while the impact of media coverage on bank lending remains underexplored. Meanwhile, research on the factors influencing bank lending has largely centered on macroeconomic policies, local government intervention, and bank-specific characteristics, failing to systematically investigate the role of media. In this context, this paper focuses on exploring the impact of negative media coverage on banks' loan growth and credit allocation.
Drawing on the perspectives of information intermediary and external monitoring, this paper constructs an analytical framework to examine how negative media coverage influences bank lending. First, as an information intermediary, negative media coverage discloses unfavorable information about banks. This triggers a crisis of confidence among depositors and participants in interbank and capital markets, increasing financing difficulty and thereby suppressing lending. Second, its external monitoring role amplifies reputational loss and increases the likelihood of regulatory penalties. On the one hand, it forces banks to adopt more prudent operations, thereby reducing banks' loan growth. On the other hand, it intensifies compliance pressures, prompting banks to better align with policies and, consequently, reducing lending to non-real economy sectors.
Empirically, this study uses a sample of A-share listed commercial banks in China from Q1 2010 to Q4 2023. Data on negative media coverage are obtained from the Datago news database, and bank-level financial data from BankFocus and CSMAR. Results indicate that negative coverage reduces banks' total loan growth and restrains lending to non-real economy sectors. Mechanism tests reveal that negative media coverage increases banks' financing difficulties by disclosing adverse information and strengthens prudential operation through external monitoring, thereby constraining overall loan growth. Additionally, its external monitoring role curbs non-real economy lending by intensifying compliance pressures. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that total loan growth is mainly affected by market-oriented media, whereas non-real economy lending is more strongly influenced by policy-oriented media. Original news reports exert a more pronounced impact. With respect to total loan growth, state-owned and rural commercial banks are more responsive to negative coverage, while city commercial banks show the largest decline in non-real economy lending. Further analysis shows that banks' internal governance moderates the impact of negative media coverage. The effect is stronger for banks with higher ownership concentration, larger state-owned shareholding, non-dual leadership structure, a higher proportion of female directors, and lower executive compensation. As an external governance mechanism, media complements external auditors but acts as a substitute for financial regulation.
This study confirms the critical role media plays in banks' external governance systems, particularly in promoting prudent operations and encouraging banks to better serve the real economy. Accordingly, we propose the following policy implications. First, banks should incorporate negative media coverage into risk governance frameworks, strengthening monitoring and ensuring timely response to negative coverage. Second, financial regulators should value and make full use of media information to understand banks' operating conditions more comprehensively. In the event of negative coverage, regulators should respond promptly and guide public opinion rationally. Third, policymakers should improve norms for banking media coverage and encourage independent, original, in-depth reporting to strengthen the media's external governance effectiveness.
The main contributions are threefold. First, by exploring the potential constraining effect of negative media coverage on bank lending, this study expands the literature on both banks' external governance and the determinants of bank lending. Second, it empirically examines the interactive relationships between the media and other internal and external governance mechanisms, providing valuable empirical evidence for constructing more effective and comprehensive bank governance systems. Third, it offers a new perspective on the role of the media as an external governance mechanism, demonstrating that the media can play a positive role in optimizing the allocation of financial resources and improving the quality and efficiency of financial services for the real economy.

Government investment is a pivotal policy instrument for stabilizing growth and facilitating industrial upgrading in China. Recent policy directives, including the 2024 Central Economic Work Conference and the fourth plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee, underscore the need to strengthen the guiding role of government investment funds, coordinate fiscal and financial policies, energize private investment, and remove bottlenecks and obstacles hindering the development of a unified national market. Within this policy context, a systematic understanding of how government capital is allocated across regions, and how institutional reforms reshape government investment behavior, is of substantial theoretical and policy significance.
Government Venture Capital (GVC) represents a hybrid form of public capital that combines policy objectives with market-oriented operations. Although GVC funds are typically established by local governments to support local development, a substantial share of their investments flows across administrative boundaries. Existing studies primarily examine the effects of GVC on firm performance and innovation, while the institutional determinants and economic implications of their cross-regional allocation remain underexplored. This paper seeks to fill this gap by investigating whether urban agglomeration policies promote cross-regional GVC investment and identifying the mechanisms through which such effects operate.
The urban agglomeration construction constitutes a central component of China's regional coordination strategy. By promoting interjurisdictional cooperation and policy alignment, the initiative seeks to reduce administrative fragmentation and improve the cross-regional allocation of factors. However, under fiscal decentralization, local governments face strong territorial incentives that may impede capital mobility. Whether urban agglomeration policies can effectively reshape these incentives and facilitate the cross-regional deployment of policy-oriented capital remains an open empirical question.
Using detailed data on cross-city investments by GVC from 2011 to 2022, this study exploits the State Council's approval of national urban agglomeration as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a staggered difference-in-differences design at the city-pair-year level to identify the causal impact of urban agglomeration policies on cross-regional investment. The results show that urban agglomeration designation significantly increases both the likelihood and scale of cross-city GVC investments within the same cluster. Mechanism analyses suggest that this effect operates through changes in local government incentives: urban agglomeration policies reorient performance evaluation toward regional coordination, thereby mitigating interjurisdictional competition, and facilitate interregional benefit-sharing through joint fund sponsorship and cross-city delegation of fund management, which reduces transaction costs and administrative frictions. Further analysis indicates that cross-regional GVC investments outperform local investments, implying more efficient capital allocation, and generate an “investment-attraction effect” by strengthening long-term linkages with high-quality external firms. Moreover, cross-regional GVC investments exhibit a capital-leading role, crowding in cross-regional private investment and fostering intercity innovation collaboration, as evidenced by increased joint patenting. Overall, the findings suggest that under urban agglomeration policies, GVC are gradually evolving from instruments of local competition into institutional bridges that promote regional integration.
This study makes three main contributions. First, it advances the literature on cross-regional capital flows by focusing on GVC, a form of policy-oriented capital that has received far less attention than market-based capital. In the context of building a unified national market, examining the cross-regional investment behavior of GVC offers novel insights into how administrative barriers can be dismantled and capital mobility enhanced. Second, the paper contributes to the evaluation of economic integration policies by providing new evidence on the effects of national urban agglomeration development. By using cross-regional GVC investments as a direct and observable outcome, it elucidates how urban agglomeration policies reshape local government incentives and strengthen interregional coordination. Third, the study offers micro-level evidence relevant to improving the institutional design and investment practices of GVC, demonstrating how regional integration policies transform their investment logic and reinforce their role in promoting coordinated regional development.

Enhancing total factor productivity (TFP) is not only a key lever for fostering new quality productive forces but also an important foundation for promoting high-quality economic development. Against the backdrop of the deepening global division of labor within industrial and supply chains, competition among firms has gradually evolved from individual game theory to comprehensive competition within supply chain networks. How to effectively integrate innovative resources within supply chains to enhance firms' TFP has thus become a key issue in promoting high-quality economic development. Existing studies predominantly focus on the effects of firms' own innovation on TFP, while overlooking innovation spillovers embedded in supply chain networks, particularly the role of upstream supplier innovation. To address this gap, this paper adopts the perspective of supplier innovation and systematically examines the mechanisms and channels through which innovation within supply chain networks affects firms' TFP.
Based on multi-source matched data from the CSMAR database, firm-level patent data, and the Chinese Research Data Services Platform (CNRDS), this study constructs firm-upstream supplier paired samples and conducts an empirical analysis of Chinese listed manufacturing firms from 2004 to 2022 using fixed effects models, instrumental variable approaches, and propensity score matching (PSM) methods. The main findings are as follows. First, supplier innovation significantly enhances firms' TFP, and this result remains robust after addressing potential endogeneity concerns and conducting a series of robustness checks. Second, after separating firms' own innovation from supplier innovation, we find that when both suppliers and firms innovate simultaneously, the promotion of firms' TFP is the strongest; even in cases where firms' own innovation is insufficient, reliance on supplier innovation can still significantly improve firms' TFP. Third, mechanism analyses indicate that supplier innovation improves firms' TFP primarily through three channels: stimulating firms' own innovation activities, alleviating financing constraints, and restructuring supply chain procurement networks. Fourth, heterogeneity analyses show that the TFP-enhancing effect of supplier innovation is more pronounced for firms operating in competitive industries, and innovation spillovers are stronger when suppliers and firms are located in the same region. Moreover, as firms' absorptive capacity increases, the positive impact of supplier innovation on TFP is further amplified. Supplier innovation also contributes to improvements in firms' product competitiveness and operating performance.
The marginal contributions of this paper are primarily manifested in the following three aspects. First, this study examines productivity effects from the perspective of the supply chain networks and empirically identifies the role of supplier innovation in enhancing firms' TFP. It effectively disentangles firm-level innovation from supply chain innovation spillovers, thereby enriching the literature on supply chain innovation and productivity. Second, with respect to theoretical mechanisms, this paper develops a systematic analytical framework through which supplier innovation affects firms' TFP. Along two fundamental pathways of technological progress and resource allocation efficiency, it highlights three specific channels: promoting firm innovation, easing financing constraints, and restructuring procurement networks. Third, this study not only examines the moderating role of firms' absorptive capacity in the relationship between supplier innovation and TFP, revealing how firms can amplify innovation spillovers by strengthening absorptive capacity, but also analyzes the effects of supplier innovation on firms' product competitiveness and operating performance. This not only provides feasible pathways for strengthening the effectiveness of supplier innovation, but also extends the scope of research on the spillover effects of supplier innovation.
Overall, this study extends the network perspective in the literature on innovation and productivity, and provides important theoretical and empirical evidence for firms seeking to integrate innovative resources through supply chains, as well as for governments aiming to implement more targeted innovation support policies.

Personal bankruptcy is a fundamental debt resolution mechanism in modern market economies. Its core purpose is to provide “honest but unfortunate” debtors with an opportunity for debt discharge and a fresh start, thereby striking a balance between protecting creditors' rights and preserving overall economic efficiency. Although China's corporate bankruptcy framework has been progressively strengthened, a formal mechanism for individual insolvency has long been absent. This institutional gap is particularly salient in a context where private entrepreneurs commonly bear personal joint-liability guarantees for corporate borrowing, effectively piercing limited liability and substantially magnifying the personal debt risks associated with entrepreneurial failure. Against this backdrop, the introduction of personal bankruptcy reform represents a critical step toward improving the market exit mechanism and fostering a rule-based business environment. Since 2019, the Supreme People's Court has guided pilot reforms in multiple regions, creating a quasi-natural experimental setting for evaluating the economic consequences of establishing a personal bankruptcy system in China. Building on this institutional context, this paper systematically examines the impact of personal bankruptcy reform on regional entrepreneurial activity and explores its underlying mechanisms.
Specifically, we construct a staggered difference-in-differences design using county-month panel data on business registrations from 2015 to 2023, combined with detailed information on the timing and location of personal bankruptcy pilot implementation. The results show that following the reform, pilot regions experienced a significant increase in new firm entry: our baseline estimates indicate that the number of newly registered market entities rose by approximately 8.39 percent. These findings remain robust to a range of tests, including parallel trend validation, spillover analysis, alternative outcome measures, and controls for concurrent policy shocks.
To uncover the mechanisms, we focus on two primary channels: risk mitigation and credit market effects. Through the risk channel, personal bankruptcy limits the upper bound of debt liability in the event of business failure, thereby reducing the downside risks of entrepreneurship. Empirical evidence shows that the reform has a stronger effect on market entities subject to unlimited liability and on private firms. Moreover, women, individuals with higher risk aversion, and those with higher levels of education and occupational status are more likely to engage in entrepreneurship after the reform. The positive effect is also more pronounced in environments characterized by heightened policy uncertainty, economic downturns, or elevated climate risks. These findings suggest that personal bankruptcy effectively lowers the cost of failure and alleviates risk concerns among potential entrepreneurs.
Through the credit channel, conventional theory predicts that debt discharge may exacerbate moral hazard and tighten credit supply. However, using enforcement case records, P2P lending platform data, and court-level private lending dispute data, we find that the reform does not increase strategic default. Instead, it significantly reduces the number of dishonest judgment debtors and cases involving enforcement obstruction, indicating that the combined framework of debt discharge for honest debtors and sanctions for dishonest ones reshapes repayment incentives. At the same time, loan sizes increase and borrowing costs decline in pilot regions, suggesting an improvement in credit supply conditions. These results imply that, under appropriate institutional constraints, debtor protection does not necessarily undermine creditor rights; rather, by strengthening repayment incentives, it can improve credit market expectations.
We further examine entrepreneurial quality. While short-term survival rates of newly established firms decline after the reform, long-term survival rates increase significantly. In addition, the share of innovative firms and firms operating in strategic emerging industries rises in pilot regions. This pattern suggests that although lowering the cost of entry may initially increase market experimentation, the reform ultimately facilitates the emergence and selection of higher-quality entrepreneurial activity.
Overall, our evidence from China's personal bankruptcy pilot reforms indicates that debt discharge arrangements can achieve a balance between risk protection and incentive discipline, thereby exerting a positive effect on entrepreneurial activity. Under a well-designed institutional framework, debtor protection does not necessarily weaken credit constraints; instead, by reshaping the expectations and behavior of both debtors and creditors, it can improve financing conditions and provide an institutional foundation for entrepreneurship. These findings contribute to the broader literature on debtor protection and credit markets and offer important policy implications for the development of a more stable and incentive-compatible market exit system.

The report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC emphasizes “accelerating the transition to a model of green development” and “working actively and prudently toward the goals of reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality.” Recently, carbon reduction policies, including emissions trading, have strongly driven the green transition under high-quality development. However, these policies expose high-carbon assets to risks of depreciation or stranding, which may further trigger financial risks. Effectively responding to these transition risks and smoothly promoting the low-carbon transition are currently a crucial research topic.
In the context of coordinating carbon reduction with transition risk prevention, promoting corporate green technology adoption is not only a fundamental means to advance the economic transition but also a potentially effective countermeasure to mitigate transition risks. By adopting green technologies, enterprises reduce emissions, which helps resolve emission pressures and operational risks, thereby alleviating the depreciation pressure on high-carbon assets and resolving transition risks caused by carbon policies.
Based on this, accurately quantifying the impacts of carbon policies on China's economic and financial systems, exploring the role of green technology adoption in resolving transition risks, and examining mitigation policies such as green finance and fiscal policy from an endogenous technology perspective will provide valuable references for a smoother low-carbon transition in economic development.
This paper constructs an environmental dynamic general equilibrium model featuring endogenous corporate green technology adoption, alongside green and brown sectors, to explore carbon policies' transition risk effects and the risk-resolving role of green technology. Taking carbon emissions trading as the policy, we solve the steady-state changes of the model to analyze its long-term effects. We then analyze the transition dynamics of carbon pricing and how green technology adoption influences its risk effects. Additionally, we study the risk-mitigating effects of green technology subsidies and the synergistic effects of green fiscal and financial policies. Finally, using bank risk indicators as proxies for transition risks, we empirically test the low-carbon transition's risk effects and green technology's moderating role using financial data from 277 local banks between 2009 and 2023.
The findings reveal: (1) Carbon pricing effectively reduces emissions and facilitates the industrial green transition, but negatively impacts macroeconomic and financial stability, indicating the existence of transition risks. (2) Corporate green technology adoption accelerates the green transition while resolving risks triggered by carbon pricing. (3) Green technology subsidies simultaneously promote the transition, mitigate risks and enhance welfare. (4) While green finance efficiently mitigates risks, it deteriorates transition-period welfare. Synergizing green fiscal and financial policies can achieve multidimensional goals. (5) The empirical analysis of regional banks validates conclusions of the theoretical model.
This paper proposes the following policy recommendations: First, coordinate emission reduction and risk prevention by solidifying cross-departmental coordination mechanisms. Establish a carbon accounting and financial data sharing platform and a joint policy risk assessment system. Second, deepen market mechanisms to promote the capitalization and financialization of green technologies. Improve technology trading markets, establish interconnection mechanisms with carbon markets, and solidify green sci-tech financial service platforms. Third, deepen green fiscal and financial synergy. Combine direct subsidies with technology commercialization financing guarantee funds, and create a combined model of “targeted local fiscal interest subsidies plus the central bank's structural monetary tools.”
The contributions of this paper are threefold: First, it explores the impacts and channels of carbon policies on macroeconomic and financial risks under endogenous green technology, and examines the impact of technology adoption on the transition path of carbon pricing, thereby enriching the mechanisms of how carbon policies affect economic and financial instability. Second, from an endogenous technology perspective, it explores the synergistic effects of green fiscal and financial policies, providing policy references for preventing macroeconomic and financial risks during the transition. Third, it empirically advances research on the impacts of carbon policies on bank risks, revealing the mitigating effect of green technology adoption on transition risks.

Achieving common prosperity for all is a fundamental requirement of Chinese-style modernization. In 2020, China successfully lifted impoverished rural residents living under the current poverty line out of poverty, accomplishing a globally recognized milestone in eliminating absolute poverty. However, consolidating these poverty alleviation achievements remains a long-term and challenging task. Rural low-income households have limited capacity to withstand future uncertainties and remain vulnerable, facing the risk of falling back into poverty. Individual health is the foundation of personal well-being, and public health is the cornerstone of national development. Illness not only directly harms individual health but also reduces labor capacity and income, thereby increasing the likelihood of household poverty. Ensuring the health of rural residents is therefore a critical measure to reduce household poverty vulnerability. Despite the continuous increase in the total supply of medical resources, the problem of their uneven distribution across regions still exists, which restricts the balanced development of basic public health services. How to improve rural healthcare service quality to reduce household poverty vulnerability, prevent large-scale poverty relapse, and sustain income growth among the formerly poor is an urgent policy concern. Against this backdrop, this study systematically examines the impact of healthcare resource decentralization on household poverty vulnerability, offering important insights for consolidating poverty alleviation achievements, advancing comprehensive rural revitalization, and promoting the construction of a modern socialist country.
Building on the institutional background and existing literature, this paper develops a theoretical framework linking healthcare resource decentralization to rural household poverty vulnerability. We first verify that the reform of Close-knit Medical Communities (CMCs) improves the supply of primary public healthcare resources. We then exploit the 2019 CMC pilot program as a quasi-natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences approach, using five waves (2015-2023) of microdata from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) to estimate the causal effect of healthcare resource decentralization on rural household poverty vulnerability. The results show that healthcare resource decentralization driven by CMC reform significantly reduces rural household poverty vulnerability, and this finding remains robust across a series of specification checks. In terms of resource provision, CMC reform significantly increases the number of medical personnel in community health stations and clinics, hospitals, and village health centers, thereby improving the supply of primary public healthcare resources. Mechanism analysis indicates that reductions in household health risks, increases in medical insurance participation, and higher reimbursement rates for medical expenditures are key channels through which healthcare resource decentralization lowers rural household poverty vulnerability. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the vulnerability-reducing effect of CMC reform is more pronounced among rural households with lower levels of human capital, physical capital, and social capital.
Based on these findings, three policy implications follow. First, optimizing the structure of healthcare resource allocation and promoting the sustained downward deployment of high-quality medical resources, which can be achieved through personnel rotation, technical assistance, and equipment sharing, can enhance the service capacity of primary healthcare institutions. Expanding CMC coverage while emphasizing equity and accessibility in resource distribution is essential. Second, deepening health insurance reform by expanding coverage, increasing reimbursement rates for primary care, improving provider payment mechanisms, and enhancing fund efficiency can strengthen households' financial protection. Designing flexible contribution schemes and targeted fiscal subsidies for elderly rural residents would further improve the inclusiveness and fairness of the medical insurance system. Third, improving the quality of primary healthcare services through enhanced training of grassroots medical personnel, upgraded medical facilities, and the promotion of family doctor contract services and preventive health management can reduce health risks at the source and lower the probability that illness translates into poverty vulnerability.
The marginal contributions of this study are threefold. First, it examines the impact and mechanisms of healthcare resource decentralization on rural household poverty vulnerability, providing direct evidence on how decentralization reduces vulnerability. Second, it expands health economics research by focusing on how the downward allocation of high-quality medical resources affects rural poverty vulnerability, offering new empirical insights for resource allocation and poverty alleviation. Third, the findings offer practical policy guidance for strengthening county-level medical communities and establishing routine mechanisms to prevent rural households from falling back into poverty, supporting rural revitalization and the pursuit of common prosperity.

Product quality bears critical implications not only for firm survival and development but also for public welfare and high-quality economic growth. In recent years, guided by the strategy of boosting China's strength in product quality (“Quality power” strategy) and the goal of high-quality economic development, enhancing product quality has become an important pathway to strengthen corporate competitiveness, ensure the smooth flow of domestic consumption circulation, and improve societal well-being. However, frequent incidents of product quality violations in the past have led to substantial damage to the brand equity of the firms involved, posed severe risks to consumer health and safety, and hindered the sustainable development of the economy and society. While the literature predominantly highlights the roles of government regulation and media scrutiny in mitigating product quality violations, less attention has been paid to the effectiveness of alternative external governance mechanisms. From the perspective of capital market information intermediary monitoring, this paper investigates whether analyst coverage, as an important external governance mechanism, can supervise managers and thereby reduce product quality violations.
Regarding the relation between analyst coverage and corporate product quality violations, theoretical reasoning provides competing predictions. On one hand, analysts possess interdisciplinary expertise. They can leverage their profound knowledge reservoirs and superior information-processing capabilities, and holistically evaluate multifaceted corporate attributes encompassing internal control, strategic management, and governance structures, enabling timely detection of violation risks. Furthermore, through site visits and direct engagements, analysts can articulate quality concerns to managers, potentially shaping managerial quality-related decisions. Such activities also reduce information acquisition and evaluation costs for other market participants, engendering broader social oversight of managerial quality decisions and reducing product quality violations. On the other hand, earnings forecasts disseminated by analysts may exacerbate managerial myopia, precipitating underinvestment in quality control and potentially increasing product quality violations.
To assess the impact of analyst coverage on corporate product quality violations, this study uses a sample of Chinese manufacturing listed firms from 2002 to 2024, measuring product quality violations from both incidence probability and frequency dimensions. Violation data are manually collected from the official websites of product quality regulatory authorities, supplemented by searches via Baidu and Google. Analyst coverage data and control variables are extracted from the CSMAR and Wind databases. Employing a fixed effects model with extensive controls for firm-specific and regional characteristics, we find that firms with more analyst coverage exhibit significantly lower probabilities and frequencies of product quality violations. Mechanism tests reveal that analysts exert external governance through on-site inquiries concerning product quality practices, compelling managerial improvements in quality management protocols. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the effect of analyst coverage is more pronounced when analysts possess industry specialization, command higher reputational capital, or maintain closer geographical proximity to covered firms.
This study makes two contributions. First, it extends the literature on the impact of analyst coverage on corporate social responsibility. While prior research provides mixed evidence regarding this relationship, this paper reveals the inhibitory effect of analyst coverage on corporate product quality violations and its underlying mechanisms, enhancing the understanding of analysts' governance functions in China's capital market. Second, it contributes to the emerging literature on corporate social responsibility violations. By examining analyst coverage as a determinant of product quality violations, this study complements existing work investigating workplace safety violations, environmental violations, and other forms of social responsibility violations.
Based on these findings, we propose several policy recommendations. First, analysts should be formally integrated into the social co-governance framework underpinning the strategy of boosting China's strength in product quality. This would fully harness their monitoring capabilities as capital market information intermediaries to establish a robust safeguard for public interests. Second, institutionalization and standardization of quality-related inquiries during site visits should be promoted, transforming analysts' informal oversight into binding market constraints that incentivize managerial internalization of external monitoring pressures. Third, differentiated incentive structures should be developed to leverage analysts' industry expertise and reputational capital, encouraging focus on corporate long-term development while providing sustained momentum for the strategy of boosting China's strength in product quality.