Can the improvement of competitive adequacy and fairness reduce discriminatory M&A behavior?Evidence from the market access negative list pilot in China

Corporate mergers and acquisitions(M&As)are subject to skewed logic due to excessive government regulation.China is progressively adopting the Market Access Negative List(MANL)pilot to transfer the power of resource allocation from the government to the market.Using the DID method,we examine the impact of relaxing market access regulation on firms’M&A behavior against China’s institutional background and the M&A events of listed companies from 2012 to 2019.The MANL significantly increases firms’M&A tendency and amount and strengthens the competitive adequacy and fairness of market-oriented M&A decisions.Post-M&A financial performance does not increase,but human capital productivity,innovation effectiveness and total factor productivity do,demonstrating the dynamic balance of profit and efficiency in M&As.

Chairman's government background, excess employment and government subsidies: Evidence from Chinese local state-owned enterprises

Local state-owned enterprises(SOEs) in China continue to face government interference in their operations. They are influenced both by the government's"grabbing hand" and by its "helping hand." Our study examines how SOE chairmen with connections to government influence their firm's employment policies and the economic consequences of overstaffing. Using a sample of China's listed local state-owned enterprises, we find that the scale of overstaffing in these SOEs is negatively related to the firms' political connections to government. However,this relationship turns positive when the firm's chairman has a government background. Appointing chairmen who have government backgrounds is a mechanism through which the government can intervene in local SOEs and influence firms' staffing decisions. We also find that in compensation for the expenses of overstaffing, local SOEs receive more government subsidies and bank loans.However, the chairmen themselves do not get increased pay or promotion opportunities for supporting overstaffing. Further analysis indicates that whereas the "grabbing hand" of government does harm to a firm's economic performance, the "helping hand" provides only weak positive effects, and such government intervention actually reduces the efficiency of social resource allocation.

Do significant risk warnings in annual reports increase corporate bond credit spreads? Evidence from China

Based on listed companies issuing bonds on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2007 to 2017, this study analyzes the relationship between significant risk warnings in Chinese companies’ annual reports and corporate bond credit spreads. The main findings are as follows. First, in the Chinese market, ‘‘substantial warnings of significant risks' can significantly improve corporate bond credit spreads, reflecting the risk-warning effect;second,state-owned property rights weaken this effect, which only pertains to listed companies with poor risk management and low information quality;third, significant risk warnings increase investors’ heterogeneous beliefs, also affecting credit spreads;and fourth, through textual analysis, it is found that the corporate bond credit spread is greater when the disclosed risk factors are more pessimistic and less similar to those of the previous year. The findings of this paper help to enrich the literature on credit spreads and risk disclosure.