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This study investigates the effect of decentralisation of SOEs on stock price crash risk. In so doing, we test two competing hypotheses. Under the Political Influence Hypothesis, decentralisation aggravates local government's expropriation of minority shareholders (type II agency conflict), and thus increases crash risk. Under the Local Information Hypothesis, decentralisation decreases monitoring distance (type I agency conflict), strengthens external monitoring and thus decreases crash risk. We find robust evidence supporting the Political Influence Hypothesis. Cross‐sectional analyses show that our baseline results are more pronounced when firms are decentralised to the provincial level and politicians have greater incentives to pursue their political objectives. We further show that bad news hoarding and risk‐taking are two potential channels through which SOE decentralisation increases crash risk. Taken together, our results imply that the decentralisation exacerbates the type II agency conflict rather than ameliorates the type I agency conflict in SOEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the long‐term effects of the administrative system using the Great Wall as a geographical discontinuity. Using town‐level nighttime light luminosity per capita as a measure of economic development, we find that today, luminosity per capita is significantly and robustly higher in towns south of the Great Wall than in those north of it. The holding of resource allocation authority by the administrative hierarchy and the uniform enforcement of justice by hierarchy officials were advantageous for city building and judicial cross‐territory enforceability on the south side of the great wall, which had a long‐term impact on the imperial bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how credit rating agencies affect audit fee. We find robust evidence that the coverage of investor-paid rating agency increases audit fee. The coverage of investor-paid rating agency increases bad news disclosure and makes the tone of media reports on the firm more negative. Auditors get informed and more aware of the firm's risk, resulting in higher audit fee. Our findings suggest that the monitoring roles of auditors and credit rating agencies are complementary to each other. The cross-sectional analyses suggest that the effect of investor-paid rating agency on audit fee is more prominent for firms with high risk and poor corporate governance. To sum up, the coverage of investor-paid rating agency has a spillover effect on other participants in capital markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subsequent measurement of goodwill in mergers and acquisitions has been controversial for a long time in academia and practice. This article attempts to propose a new conceptual view of the "attrition" of goodwill to improve the subsequent measurement model of goodwill. In this paper, the survival analysis method is introduced into the study of goodwill impairment decision-making and the influencing factors of economic life for the first time. Through the non-parametric analysis of Kaplan-Meier survival function, Nelson-Aalen cumulative risk function and risk rate function estimation, it is found that goodwill has the characteristics of wasting: the goodwill impairment risk of M&A projects is in an inverted U-shape and the goodwill starts to be impaired in the 3rd year on average within the 95% confidence interval, and the impairment risk rate reaches the highest (up to 8%) in the fifth year, and the probability of no impairment for 10 consecutive years is about 50%. Further regression analysis based on the survival risk model shows that human factors such as the pre-acquisition valuation level of the acquirer, management motivation and external supervision distort the impairment decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the geographic distance between corporate locations and headquarters of credit rating agency as a proxy for corporate private information acknowledged by rating agency, to investigate the effect of corporate private information on its credit ratings. Our samples include the Chinese institutional and corporate bond's credit ratings from 2008 to 2018. Results indicate the geographic distance is negatively associated with the corporate private information accessed by rating agency, leading to a higher information asymmetry, worse institutional and corporate bonds' credit rating and lower quality of the rating information content. Results remain solid and significant after controlling for the implicit guarantee of the government, corporate public information, ownership structure and analysts' skills. We find corporate private information generates more values for corporates whose information environments are more complex, reflected in more business segments and less covered analysts. We also find the open of high-speed railway in China facilitates rating agency's access to corporate private information, thus reducing the impact of geographic distance, while the lockdown periods of Covid-19 pandemic in China suddenly increase the cost of collecting private information and thus aggravating the distance effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of hiring former officials of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) on a firm's misconduct likelihood. Using the CSRC's enforcement actions data from 2008 to 2015, we find that revolving-door directors significantly increase a firm's ex ante misconduct likelihood. Further analysis shows that the effect of revolving-door directors is more significant in firms with higher administrative ranks for revolving-door directors and firms without financial expertise. Our findings are consistent with the "regulation circumvention" hypothesis, which suggests that revolving-door directors may help regulated firms to game the system after they join the regulated firms. Moreover, to establish causality, we adopt the number of direct flights from Beijing to the firm's headquarters as the instrument variable. Our results are robust to a variety of model specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]