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In China, offering inexpensive industrial land is a major means for local governments to participate in interregional subsidy competition, which caused regional industrial land price distortions. This article examines the effect of regional industrial land price distortions on the overinvestment of Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Chinese industrial enterprises data and land price monitoring data of 49 major cities in China between 1998 and 2007 are employed. This article has found that industrial land price distortions will significantly stimulate the overinvestment of manufacturing enterprises. Such a promoting effect varies among manufacturing enterprises of different ownership and industry attributes. Industrial land price distortions have the most significant promoting effect on the overinvestment of foreign-invested firms, followed by private firms, while state-owned enterprises are the least affected. Compared with private heavy-industry firms, industrial land price distortions have a more significant effect on the overinvestment of private light-industry firms. Compared with foreign-invested heavy-industry firms, industrial land price distortions have a more significant effect on the overinvestment of foreign-invested lightindustry firms. This study represents a positive exploration and supplement to the existing studies on the effects of subsidy competition on corporate investment behaviours and the studies on Chinese-style subsidy competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards primary stakeholders on the cost of equity capital in Chinese listed firms, and divides the sample into state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) for comparison. We construct a set of CSR index systems to measure the quality of the CSR practices and use several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante cost of equity capital. The results show that firms with higher CSR scores have significantly lower cost of equity capital. In particular, we find that investments in improving CSR towards investors make the greatest contribution to reducing firms’ equity financing costs, and the cost of capital effects of CSR is more significant in recessions than in economic booms. In addition, SOEs have better CSR and lower cost of equity capital than NSOEs, but the effect of CSR in reducing the cost of equity capital is greater for NSOEs than for SOEs. The findings suggest that CSR toward primary stakeholders can be profitable and beneficial to Chinese firms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]