We study how government control affects the roles of the media as an information intermediary and a corporate monitor. Comparing a large sample of news articles written by state-controlled and market-oriented Chinese media, we find that articles by the market-oriented media are more critical, more accurate, more comprehensive, and timelier than those by the state-controlled media. Moreover, only articles by the market-oriented media have a significant corporate governance impact. Subsample analyses, interviews with journalists, and a survey of university students suggest that the market-oriented media’s superior effects are explained by their operating efficiency and independence.

By exploiting the staggered city-level establishment of specialized environmental courts in China as exogenous shocks and using a difference-in-differences research design, we find that an increase in the efficiency of environmental enforcement leads to a decrease in companies’ access to bank loans. The channel tests show that these same shocks lead to an increase in environmental litigation, operational and reputational risk. The cross-sectional analyses also reveal consistent evidence. Collectively, our findings suggest that the environmental mandate has important externalities for bank lending decisions, indicating that the costs of environmental enforcement go beyond reducing environmental pollution.

We study how political capture affects the corporate governance role of the media. Relying on a unique media market in China that is characterized by the prevalence of both state-controlled and market-oriented media, we manually construct a comprehensive financial news sample containing 80,008 articles during the 2004–2010 period and provide evidence that negative coverage by the market-oriented media significantly increases the chance of forced top executive turnover, whereas similar coverage by the state-controlled media has no such impact. A multi-pronged approach that includes an instrumental variable test, an exogenous event, firm fixed effects, and change-in-change specifications provides positive evidence of the casual link. Further analysis reveals that the disciplinary effect of the market-oriented media is stronger for firms that are less likely to be influenced by political capture, such as non-state-owned firms or firms located in provinces with good institutions.

Exploiting China’s anti-corruption campaign, we show that following a decrease in corruption, firm performance improves. Small and young firms benefit more. We identify the channels through which corruption hampers firm performance. Following the anti-corruption campaign, the allocation of capital and labor becomes more efficient. Firms operating in ex ante more corrupt environments experience larger productivity gains, higher growth of sales, and lower cost of debt than other firms. Taken together, our results suggest that corruption is an inefficient equilibrium for an economy because it creates negative externalities.

We predict that entrepreneurs are more likely to have a long-term orientation to their decision making if they have male heirs, because traditionally sons, not daughters, have been expected to carry on the family business. Our results support this prediction. Specifically, we find that when entrepreneurs have at least one son, have more sons, and have a firstborn son, their firms are more innovative. The results are robust to a battery of robustness tests, including alternative measures of innovation, instrumental variable approach, and Heckman two-step correction for selection bias. Our further analyses show that the positive association between male heirs and firm innovation is stronger for entrepreneurs with a greater son preference and is weaker for entrepreneurs who more impacted by the one-child policy.

Using a large-scale proprietary data set from China, we examine the cross-border transmission of policy uncertainty within multinational corporations (MNCs). Our results show that policy uncertainty in MNCs’ home countries negatively affects the capital investment of their foreign subsidiaries. Our analyses of cross-sectional heterogeneity reveal that the effect is strengthened by subsidiary-level investment irreversibility and the dependence of subsidiaries on parent firms, and weakened by bilateral meetings and psychic closeness between the home and host countries. Together these findings suggest that policy uncertainty travels across borders and has a spillover effect on foreign subsidiary investment.