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This research examines the relationships between stock prices of solar enterprises and the COVID-19 pandemic for 18 enterprises from OECD countries and 3 enterprises from non-OECD countries from January 2, 2020 to March 8, 2021. The empirical results show that there exists a cointegration relationship between the pandemic and solar stock prices. Moreover, the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on solar stock prices exhibit heterogeneity, as the COVID-19 pandemic affects solar stock prices negatively in the full sample and OECD countries, whereas the pandemic negatively affects solar stock prices in both the short run and long run, but the effects are not significant in non-OECD countries. We conduct a series of robustness tests, including changing variables and employing the Markov switching regression for time-series analysis, and the results support our main findings. According to the empirical results, investors should be prudent about investing in solar enterprises, while policymakers should balance pandemic control and maintain economic performance when implementing prevention policies.

We study the influence of natural disasters on technological innovation for a panel of 49 countries. After controlling for endogeneity issues and using several measures of natural disasters (occurrences, deaths, affected people, and economic damages) we find that natural disasters have a significantly negative effect on technological innovation. We also study the disaggregated effects of natural disasters and find that earthquakes, extreme temperatures, floods, and storms influence innovations most.

Using panel cointegration and panel error correction models from 2002 to 2016, this paper investigates the relationship among corruption, economic growth and financial development in 142 countries in the long run. In order to make the conclusion more targeted, the samples are further divided into developed countries subsample and developing countries sub-sample. The results confirm that between GDP, COR and BM, a long-term cointegration relationship exist in the full sample and the sub-samples of developing countries. Moreover, in the full sample and in developing countries subsample, the panel FMOLS estimations indicate that economic growth has a positive effect to financial development, whereas corruption has a negative effect. The VECM shows the causal relationships exist between economic growth to financial development and corruption to financial development in the long run. But for developed countries the causalities are absent. The policy implication is that, for developing countries, boosting economic growth and can help promote financial development but curbing corruption has adverse effects on financial development. The policy effects are related to the prosperousness of different countries. Overall, developing countries can carry on policies to advance financial development through promoting economic growth and indulging corruption temporarily, while developed countries may have to find other channels.

This research investigates the impacts of three categories of epidemics on crude oil price using both an interaction term as well as a system of simultaneous equations, employing data from throughout the world for the period 1976 to 2018. Our empirical evidence confirms that epidemic strength is a key factor influencing oil price, and that the effect spreads from the stock market due to speculative investor behavior. Considering the wide heterogeneity of national development and income, the contagion channel of the stock market does not exhibit differences among countries based on variation in income level, but the influence of epidemics on oil price and on the contagion channel is significant in OECD countries. One policy implication is that countries should enact synergistic governance to prevent epidemic-based contagion. Moreover, national governments need to increase communication of information and decrease information asymmetry in the stock market.

This research empirically analyzes the impact of various instruments of economic sanctions on official exchange rate volatility by employing data from a panel of 23 target countries covering the period 1996–2015 and using the Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected (LSDVC) model. Our findings suggest that economic sanctions do significantly influence the target countries’ exchange rate volatility. Specifically, we are able to see different sanction present its different effects on exchange rate volatility. Furthermore, the robustness evidence of the eliminating country as Iran, eliminating variable of political ideology, intercepting time period, cross-sectional regression analysis, using real exchange rate volatility as proxy variable and a new sanctions database, are basically consistent with the previous finding. Overall, our empirical findings offer implications for those sanctioned countries about how to stabilize their exchange rate when facing sanctions.

This paper investigates the impact of international sanctions on energy efficiency by employing the panel fixed effect as well as average marginal effect from the Tobit model via data on 30 sanctioned states over the period 1996–2015 with international sanctions including unilateral, plurilateral, U.S., EU, UN, economic, and non-economic cases. Overall, we find that the imposition of unilateral sanctions leads to a 0.067% decrease in energy efficiency, but that of plurilateral sanctions positively contribute to energy efficiency in the case of the full sample of countries. Moreover, the imposition of UN sanctions has a greater decrease on energy efficiency in the target states than the 0.042% reduction of energy efficiency when the sanctionist is the U.S. For robustness, empirical results indicate that the imposition of plurilateral sanctions results in a drop of energy efficiency in Islamic countries, but an increase in non-Islamic countries, while there are also negative shocks induced by the imposition of EU sanctions on energy efficiency in Asian countries, but not for non-Asian countries. We also consider endogenous problems and dynamic specification by using indicator variables and System GMM. In summary, our empirical findings provide policy suggestions for those sanctioned countries about how to maintain energy efficiency when facing international sanctions.

This paper investigates the effect of globalization on innovation by using a combined dataset of 596809 Chinese manufacturing firms with 1,993,154 observations and provincial globalization indices from 1998 to 2009. The empirical findings suggest that overall provincial globalization is associated with better innovation performance for Chinese firms. More specifically, economic, social, and political globalization, present positive impacts on technological innovation. Interestingly, through subsample analysis the findings indicate that globalization expresses a distinct relationship with firms’ innovation performance. In particular, economic globalization correlates to greater technological innovation in private-owned enterprise, a lower one in stated-owned enterprises, and an insignificant one in foreign-owned enterprises. Moreover, a subsample analysis for different industries exhibits similar results as in the full sample except for the resources-intensive industry in which economic globalization is associated with lower innovation. Our findings indicate that China should continue to enhance connections in the economic, social, and political dimensions with other countries.

This study investigates the relationship between government ideology and technical innovativeness of the whole country by using multinational panel data covering 110 countries from 1995 to 2015 and by employing comprehensive indicators for technical innovation, i.e. trademark and patent application in empirical research. We utilize the panel generalized method of moment (GMM) technique to introduce dynamic variables in order to avoid the bias caused by potential endogeneity. Next, we generate three cross items to examine whether the effect of government ideology on technical innovation differs under different circumstances. We then change the measurement of government ideology to assure the reliability of our empirical results, further investigate whether the changes of political ideology influence technical innovation, and carry out a robustness test by dividing the whole sample into two sub-samples based on the level of democracy, by employing two samples which limited by 3 main coalition parties in government at most, such as re-elected government and non-alternated government in countries. Overall, the empirical results show that a leftist ruling party inhibits the progress of technical innovation, whereas a right-wing ruling party promotes the appearance of new technology. The effect of government ideology on innovation is not similar under some circumstances. More evidence is presented by using two dummy variables to represent left-wing and right-wing.

Based on the wavelet analysis approach, this paper firstly examines the dynamic relationship between global economic activity (proxied by the Kilian economic index) and crude oil prices in both time- and frequency-domains. Our empirical results demonstrate significant correlation between crude oil prices and global economic activity at high frequencies (in the short run) during the entire sample period; however, the co-movement between the two at low frequencies (in the long run) is weaker and exists only during certain proportions of the sample period. We also document evidence that global economic activity and oil price are positively correlated, with dynamic lead-lag relationships across time. Our findings are robust to alternative choices of oil price indexes and controlling for other confounding factors such as geopolitical risk, armed conflicts, economic policy uncertainty and equity market uncertainty. The current study provides valuable implications for oil market investors based on the information of global economic situation and its dynamic relationships with oil prices.

This paper investigates the long-run trends of shale gas and shale oil productions by applying univariate and panel Lagrange Multiplier (LM), GARCH-based, and PANICCA unit root tests to discover the mean-reverting behaviors. We employ monthly data from January 2007 to December 2016 of shale gas withdrawals and shale oil productions in the U.S. The empirical results both on specific state/oil well and panel data show that most structural breaks emerge around 2007–2011, during which shale energy was massively produced in the U.S. and the global financial crisis and energy shock occurred. Our results also indicate that most external shocks are transitory and the trends soon converge, and that cross-state/well factors have greater potential as temporary shocks than the state-specific/well-particular components. For robust analysis, we conduct additional LM tests of natural gas and crude oil productions for a comparison with the unconventional shale energy. The unit root test of Narayan and Popp (2010) on shale gas and shale oil productions help us to find more stationary evidence. Overall, we present powerful findings of the mean-reversion property and propose critical implications for authorities and market participants.

Natural resources, especially forests, are critical to China's sustainable development. In recent years, effective utilization of forest resources has become a significant concern in China. In this study, on the basis of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis, the relationship between forest resources and economic growth is examined using panel data from 30 provinces in China for the period 2002–2015 and the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach to control for potential endogeneity. The empirical results indicate that with continuous economic growth, the timber output and area of afforestation would at first increase and then decrease after reaching the corresponding turning points. Given the considerable regional gap in economic and social development, three regions of China were investigated to perform a more in-depth analysis. Evidence observed for the country and the three regions suggests an EKC for forest resources. These findings indicate positive effects of China's pursuit of a more balanced growth path where forest resources would be less consumed and more actively protected.

Up to date, collective efforts in greenhouse gas mitigation made by the international community have been rather ineffective. A major reason of the unsuccessfulness may be attributed to imprecise comprehension on the sources of greenhouse gas pollution and their changing dynamics. Utilizing the LMDI decomposition method, this paper investigates the time- and spatial-dynamics of drivers governing global carbon emissions. We decompose and quantify the effects of different drivers, that is, population, affluence, energy intensity and carbon intensity, across time on global carbon emissions. Next based on country-level decomposition, we also calculate and track the spatial gravity centers of the effects of the drivers. Our results show that energy intensity effect is the leading contributor for carbon emission mitigation, whereas economic development, carbon emission intensity and population serve as factors accelerating carbon emissions. We also find significant heterogeneities in the spatial dynamics of the contribution of different drivers, implying that differentiated climate change policies should be made at different countries to effectively curb global carbon emissions.

This paper presents cross-country evidence on whether and how legal origins affect technical innovation. Using panel data on 120 countries between 1996 and 2019 and the Least Square Dummy Variable (LSDV) approach, we find that common law countries generally perform better in both technology innovation inputs and outputs than their civil law counterparts. Interestingly, we further present that French civil law countries exhibit the worst innovative performance, whereas German and Scandinavian civil law countries might even exceed common law countries in technical innovation. At least, there is no solid evidence to show that common law countries outperform German and Scandinavian civil law countries in technical innovation. Our findings further show that legal origins affect technical innovation via the political channel and the adaptation channel, and that legal origins’ actual role in technical innovation correlates with their impacts on financial development and private property protection. Our study offers new insight into legal origins’ economic consequences.

This study investigates the non-linear relationship between venture capital investment and technological innovation for 28 provinces in China, using the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model for the period 2001-2014. Our results confirm that the relationship within the empirical model is indeed non-linear, and venture capital (VC) only presents a positive impact on innovation in China when investment is large enough over the threshold level. However, VC may severely hurt the innovative abilities of invested enterprises when the scale of investment is relatively small, especially in “western” and “lower-investment” provinces after dividing the sample provinces into different groups.

This study investigates the effect of government efficiency on energy efficiency by employing data from a panel of 31 OECD countries covering the periods 1990–2014 using the group-mean dynamic common correlated estimator (DCCE) regression, panel cointegration test as well as vector error correction model (VECM). Overall, our evidence suggests that government efficiency does significantly influence energy efficiency. In particular, greater government efficiency leads to a reduction in energy intensity by enhancing energy efficiency in OECD countries, and similar findings are supported in robustness tests. The estimation results also indicate that left-wing parties in a government, a lower level of corruption, higher real per capita GDP, and greater gross capital formation all contribute to the improvement of energy efficiency, whereas more industrial production, higher imported-oil prices, and stricter energy market regulation lead to an increase in energy intensity. Our robust analysis provides consistent results with the exception of former Communist countries.

Twenty five novel chemical analogs of the previously reported Aurora kinase inhibitor BPR1K653 (1-(4-(2-((5-chloro-6-phenylfuro[2,3-d]pyrimidin-4-yl)amino)ethyl)phenyl)-3-(2-((dimethylamino)methyl)phenyl)urea) have been designed, synthesized, and evaluated by Aurora-A and Aurora-B enzymatic kinase activity assays. Similar to BPR1K653, analogs 3b-3h bear alkyl or tertiary amino group at the ortho position of the phenylurea, and showed equal or better inhibition activity for Aurora-B over Aurora-A. Conversely, preferential Aurora-A inhibition activity was observed when the same functional group was moved to the meta position of the phenylurea. Compounds 3m and 3n, both of which harbor a tertiary amino group at the meta position of the phenylurea, showed 10–16 fold inhibition selectivity for Aurora-A over Aurora-B. The in vitro kinase inhibition results were verified by Western blot analysis, and indicated that compounds 3m and 3n were more than 75-fold superior in inhibiting T-loop autophosphorylation of Aurora-A (Thr288), compared to Aurora-B (Thr232) in HCT116 colon carcinoma cells. The computational docking analysis suggested that the tertiary amine at the meta position of the phenylurea formed a more stable interaction with residues in the back pocket of Aurora-A than in Aurora-B, a possible explanation for the observed discrepancy in the selectivity. These results support an alternative small molecule design strategy targeting the back pocket of Aurora kinases for selective isoform inhibition.

This study examines the effect of government ideology on carbon dioxide emissions along the entire length of the conditional distribution of the dependent variable (i.e., carbon dioxide emissions) using the instrumental variable quantile regression technique with fixed effects in a balanced panel of 65 countries over the period of 1981–2012. The estimation results indicate that government ideology is a significant determinant of carbon dioxide emissions only in the lower quantiles of the distribution. Specifically, the left-wing governments are associated with lower carbon dioxide emissions among the least polluted countries. Contrarily, the effect of government ideology on carbon dioxide emissions is statistically insignificant in the median and upper quantiles of the distribution, suggesting that government ideology does not have significant influences on carbon dioxide emissions among the median and most polluted nations. It was also found that the effects of government ideology on carbon dioxide emissions differ remarkably at different quantiles of the distribution in developed and developing countries.

This research empirically tests the Popper hypothesis (2012) by utilizing panel data that cover 132 countries over the time period 1980–2017 and via panel GMM estimation in order to investigate the causal link from democracy to innovation, which is captured by two comprehensive variables, patent application and trademark application. Aside from the relationship between democracy and innovation, we further explore whether or not the change of democracy significantly influences innovation, whether the influence of democracy on innovation varies among different kinds of democracy or autocracy, and hence pay more attention on factors such as economic development level, economic performance, globalization, and international trade, and how do they change the democracy's impact on technical innovation. To confirm credibility, we carry out the robustness test by changing the measurement of democracy, the measurement of innovation and deleting extreme values. In summary, while democracy promotes innovation performance, autocracy generally exhibits lower technological innovation performance. This study provides evidence on the influence of democracy on innovation being affected by other factors such as those stated above.

Using daily data from January 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021, this research explores COVID-19 shocks on the stock market of 15 representative oil exploration and production enterprises from 7 countries. We measure the COVID-19 epidemic from two levels, government response stringency index and number of confirmed cases, and employ stock prices and stock market returns to reflect the stock market. Our research results confirm that both the government response stringency index and the number of confirmed cases have a significantly negative influence on stock prices. We further find that the negative reaction of the stock market to the government response stringency index is greater than that from confirmed cases. Finally, we conclude that the government response stringency index have a significantly positive effect on stock market returns of oil exploration and production enterprises. Similar findings arise from analyzing specific enterprises. Overall, our conclusions provide some useful information for the decision-making of oil exploration and production enterprises’ investors and policy makers.

The production of shale gas depends not only on shale resources and capital investment but also on having a flexible and stable policy environment. This paper examines whether and how partisan ideology affects the extraction of shale gas. We use panel fixed effects as well as the system–generalized method of moments approach with quarterly panel data from 15 US states over the period 2007−2016. We consider not only the political ideology of the state governor but also the state legislature’s influence on the governor, control over the governorship and the legislature by the same party, the reelection of an incumbent government, and turnover in the political party in power. The results indicate that because the right-leaning party is more likely to support shale gas development, when a member of that party heads the state government, shale gas production performance is higher than when the left-leaning party is in power. Therefore, the production of shale gas rises with a turnover in political control from left to right, reelection of a right-leaning incumbent, and more right-leaning power in the state legislature. We believe our results shed light on the role of partisan ideology in shale gas production, which has implications for environmental regulations.

The nexus between extreme events and energy price risk is of great importance in energy finance analysis due to the fact that those events generally exert strong impacts on energy financial risk. For a better estimation of the influence of extreme events on energy price risk, this research employs long span daily data from April 1, 1983 to December 30, 2019 and find first that both natural and human extreme events significantly increase oil price risk. Second, among all natural disasters, we find that the negative impact of an epidemic on oil price risk is the greatest. After replacing the measurement indicators of extreme events, re-estimating the models for two subsamples, using different data frequencies of weekly data and monthly data and using SVAR model to further analyze the relationship between extreme events and oil price risk, the above conclusions are still robust. Third, we also used natural gas price risk as a substitute variable for energy price risk, and found that the occurrence of natural disasters increases natural gas price risk, but terrorism has no significant impact on it.

This research quantitatively investigates the bi-directional relationships between environmental protection expenditure and environmental performance by utilizing annual data for 34 countries during 2005–2017 and employing panel approaches like the cointegration test and VECM estimation. Our benchmark results support long-run bi-directional relationships between environmental protection expenditure and performance, but present no links between both variables in the short run. Pedroni's cointegration tests for sub-samples again confirm that both variables move together in the long run for all sample countries, but the panel VECM results support that while there are bi-directional relationships between variables among non-OECD countries, there are only unidirectional relationships from environmental performance to environmental expenditure in OECD countries. Our study offers important implications for policymakers that a better reallocation of environmental expenditure and long-term investment in environmental protection are critical for improving environmental performance.

Background The GLA IVS4 + 919G > A which is linked to late-onset Fabry disease shows high frequency in Taiwan. Methods To determine whether IVS4 + 919G > A is a frequent cause of heart disease, we genotyped it in normal controls and other disease cohorts (type 2 diabetes, heart failure, ventricular tachycardia, atrial fibrillation and coronary artery disease). Normal controls and diabetes patients carrying the variant were evaluated for their cardiac condition. Minigene constructs were used to study GLA splicing patterns in different cell lines. Results GLA IVS4 + 919A was found in 4/1634 males (0.245%) and 2/1634 females (0.123%) in normal controls and in 4/2133 males (0.188%) and 7/1816 females (0.385%) in the type 2 diabetes cohort. Of all the 17 IVS4 + 919A carriers in these two groups, only two males reported heart-related disease (myocardial infarction and hypertensive heart disease). Furthermore, in the heart disease cohort (n = 649), only one male carried the variant. Minigene constructs showed that the AGS (stomach) cell line showed a distinct GLA splicing pattern. Conclusion Most subjects carrying GLA IVS4 + 919A did not show abnormal cardiac phenotypes. The near-absence of GLA IVS4 + 919A in heart disease cohort suggested that this variant is not a frequent cause of overt heart diseases in Taiwan and that the genotype-phenotype correlation and natural course of the disease need further investigation. We also showed that the GLA IVS4 + 919G > A nucleotide change did influence alternative splicing in a tissue-specific manner. Synopsis The GLA IVS4 + 919G > A variant is not a frequent cause of overt heart disease in Taiwan.

Along with the continuous development of the global economy, environmental deterioration has been widely recognized as a pressing issue nowadays, bringing environmental governance to the forefront of human survival. Asia, the largest continent in world in terms of both landmass size and population, has long been facing the exhaustive challenge of environmental pollution. We empirically prove that the level of environmental governance, proxied by government expenditure on environmental protection as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), exerts significant impacts on environmental conditions among Asian countries. For Asian countries, basically three main conclusions can be drawn that may be useful for improving the condition of environmental quality: (i) the authority should increase the share of government expenditure on environmental protection, since it contributes significantly to the reduction of CO2 emissions and the promotion of energy efficiency; (ii) the government should make an effort to control the overheating economic growth, since excessive economic growth is detrimental to the environment, and increasing GDP per capita leads to increasing CO2 emissions, decreasing energy efficiency, and decreasing comprehensive environmental performance; and (iii) although foreign direct investment has no impact on CO2 emissions and the Environmental Performance Index, it exerts a significantly negative impact on energy intensity and thus promotes an effect on energy efficiency; therefore, we recommend that the government should implement relevant policies to attract more foreign investment.

Climate change may affect energy consumption and thus bring shocks to clean energy investment. By employing instrumental variable quantile regression model, this research investigates the effects of climate change on clean energy investment according to global panel data spanning a long period. In addition to the sample of all countries, we also carry out investigations of sub-samples for OECD and non-OECD countries to analyze whether there exists heterogeneity in development levels. Overall, we provide a diversified exploration on how climate change shocks impact clean energy investment. More specifically, we find that effects of climate change on clean energy investment vary significantly in countries with different levels of clean energy investment; i.e., climate change is likely to promote clean energy investment in countries whose clean investments are greater, and there exists significant heterogeneity in the subsamples. From these results, we offer policy implications such as carrying out differentiated clean energy plans based on the specific environment, implementing policies on clean energy, and copying the practices in some OECD countries that have high levels of clean energy investment.

This study investigates the relationship between natural gas price and production and analyzes whether the recent shale gas boom has changed the nexus between the two. We set up a framework to test the directions of causal links between natural gas price and two measures of natural gas production: (1) gross natural gas production (aggregate of conventional natural gas and shale gas productions) and (2) conventional natural gas production only. Based on monthly data of 16 states in the U.S. between January 2007 and December 2016, we find robust evidence of a reliable relationship between natural gas price and gross production, but no reliable cointegration between gas price and conventional natural gas production. Our results are robust when we account for potential structural breaks and cross-section dependence in the data. Our evidence denotes that the recent shale gas boom has changed the relationship between natural gas price and production in the U.S. Moreover, our study shows that the structure break in the U.S market highly correlates to shale gas and also provides some evidence on that while cross-state factors result in long-term mean reversion, state-specific factors lead to a permanent shock.

How a government should act when facing the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection has long been an open question. Using multinational panel data covering 85 countries from 2002 to 2012, this research investigates the relationship between government ideology and environmental quality, while for the first time employing comprehensive indicators for environmental quality, i.e. EPI, EHI and EVI, in an empirical study. We utilize the bias-corrected least square dummy variable (LSDVC) method to first introduce the dynamics and control for potential endogeneity. Then, we incorporate the interactive terms of the ideological indicators and GDP to examine the possible indirect impact of ideology on environmental performance through its influence on economic development. Finally, we investigate the policy area specific position of political parties in coalition governments as well as the plausible role of Christian democratic parties in their environmental attitude in depth. Overall, we find that left-wing governments prefer environmental quality to economic performance, while right-wing governments care more about economic growth than environmental issues. However, when under pressure for a better economic performance, both left- and right-wing governments tend to forgo environmental goals for higher economic growth. More evidence is shown that parties classified as promoting “anti-growth economy” and “environmental protection” exhibit a better environmental performance, and that Christian democratic parties tend to promote an environment-friendly policy in OECD countries.

Based on panel data of 23 OECD countries from 1990 to 2015, this research empirically analyzes the impact of environmental policy strictness on air quality (proxied by PM2.5, CO2, NOx, and SOx emissions) and compares it to PM2.5 exposure using the method of System Generalized Moments (SYS-GMM). We further test the robustness of the empirical results by the methods of restricted samples period, cross-sectional regression, and Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected (LSDVC) model. Overall, we find that environmental policy stringency (EPS) has a negative impact on CO2, NOx, and SOx emissions, while EPS presents a weak impact on both PM2.5 emissions and PM2.5 exposure, due to two potential reasons: first, the causes of PM2.5 are complex, and environmental policies are difficult to succeed; second, during the process of formulating the EPS composite index, there is no emphasis on the policy of PM2.5 restrictions. Overall, our empirical results confirm the role of environmental policy stringency and point out some shortcomings.

This paper investigates the long-run cointegration relationship between shale gas production and natural gas prices during the period from January 2007 to December 2016 for 16 states in the U.S., by utilizing the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) based univariate unit root test, the PANICCA panel unit root test, the cointegration tests of Gregory and Hansen (1996), Westerlund and Edgerton (2008) as well as Banerjee and Carrión-i-Silvestre (2015) tests with structural breaks. The empirical finding shows that the mean-reverting property exists in both variables, and most structural breaks emerge around 2007-2009 and 2011-2014, during the period when shale gas production sharply increased, the global financial crisis erupted, and external energy shocks emerged. We also find a strong cointegrated relationship, denoting a long-run equilibrium property appears among the variables. Overall, we demonstrate an interaction nexus between price and production variables and put forward some vital implications for authorities and gas market participants.

This research investigates the effect of the separation between firm ownership and control on the cost of debt, with attention to the moderating role of state ownership and bank competition. We make use of a sample of 1744 Chinese A-share firms for the years 2011–2017. We find that separation between ownership and control is positively associated with the cost of debt. This is consistent with the view that separation of control from ownership allows controlling shareholders to engage in tunneling and other behaviors that increase the risk of default. State ownership weakens this positive link because government debt guarantees mitigate the risk of default. Greater competition in the banking industry generally reduces the cost of debt for non-state enterprises while having no effect for state enterprises. At the same time, greater bank competition amplifies the positive effect of ownership and control separation on debt cost for non-state enterprises as banks must still cover the higher default risk. Finally, the global financial crisis raised the cost of debt for non-state enterprises but had no effect for state enterprises.

China’s carbon market has become increasingly active in recent years, and thus it is of great significance to study the characteristics of the carbon allowance price fluctuation for the healthy and steady development of this market. As leverage is common in asset prices in general financial markets, this paper adopts the leverage stochastic volatility (SV-L) model to characterize the price volatility of the five pilot carbon markets in China. We first make a Bayesian inference for the SV model, then construct a Monte Carlo calculation process based on Gibbs sampling for empirical analysis, and finally compare the SV-L model with the normal stochastic volatility (SV–N) model. The results show that the carbon price fluctuations of the five pilot markets are quite different. Among them, Shenzhen, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Beijing have a “positive leverage effect”, and Hubei has an “anti-leverage effect”. Through comparative analysis, we find that the SV-L model is superior to the SV-N model in terms of the degree of data fitting and simulation ability. Finally, we offer suggestions on the development of China’s unified carbon market.

Using a sample of 110 countries over the period 1984–2013, this paper examines the impacts of country risks on choosing a specific exchange rate regime (first by utilizing the Levy-Yeyati and Sturzenegger de facto classification and then robusting it by the IMF de jure measurement) relative to other regimes via the panel multinomial logit approach. Empirical findings are as follows. First, in the full samples case we provide evidence that government is more likely to implement a flexible regime, but less likely to adopt a fixed regime, under a low level of composite and financial risk. Second, we find that Eurozone countries are more likely to choose a fixed exchange rate regime with a decrease in the level of country risk and favor a flexible regime in response to a shock from an increase of risk, which is opposite to non-Eurozone countries. Third, we note that high-risk countries are more likely to choose a fixed regime with a low level of composite and political risk in the government, but do not adjust the exchange rate regime as a shock absorber when facing economic and financial risks. It is interesting to see that those countries with relatively low risk display almost opposite results versus high-risk economies. Overall, we believe that it is critically important to account for political economy variables in a government’s exchange rate policy decisions, especially for country risks. All results are robust to the panel ordered probit model.