This paper examines the impact of early Party school education for top executives on corporate innovation using Chinese listed SOEs data during 2003–2017. We find that SOEs with top executives who get a Party school degree engage in less innovative activities with the lower number of patent application and grants. The text description of the patents applied by the company is less similar to the text description of the company's main business operation, even filed patents are less capable of improving the future performance if SOEs' executives get a Party school degree. We further find that top executives with the Party school degree affect SOEs' innovation activities mainly through the government intervention originated from covert alumni relationship with local officials, which intensifies the executives' political promotion incentive. Our results are robust after we control for other managerial background characteristics, political connection, R&D expenditure and potential endogeneity. Our paper offers first evidence on the economic consequences of Party school education in China.

A key aspect of Chinese-style institutions is that the growth of the economy can be severely restricted by the adjustment and implementation of policy, leading to serious uncertainty in business practices. This paper investigates whether political connections help private firms obtain policy information ahead of public disclosure that would allow them to hedge against policy uncertainty. Using the quarterly data on non-financial private listed companies over 2007:Q1–2017:Q4, we find that the negative effect of policy uncertainty on fixed-asset investment is lower in politically connected firms than in non-connected firms, especially in industries with low asset reversibility and regions with a high degree of marketization. Further, a positive mitigation of policy uncertainty exists in firms whose top executives served as officials rather than deputies, and higher administrative as well as finance-related political connections show more information advantage. In addition, robust evidence is provided that controls the impacts of political connections on financing constraints, business performance and policy burdens, overcoming potential endogeneity, and the cash-holdings perspective. Our findings suggest that political connections are conducive to mitigate information asymmetry between private firms and policymakers in China.

Using a quasi-natural experiment based on the introduction of Rule 18, a key component of China's anti-corruption campaign, this paper finds that the accuracy of analysts' earnings forecasts, especially for firms whose headquarters are located in regions with less developed markets, exhibits improvement after Rule 18. We investigate plausible underlying mechanism and find that after Rule 18, firms improve the quality of information conveyed by reported earnings, become more willing to respond to investors' online questions, and are more likely to have their chairpersons or CEOs attend meetings with analysts during analyst site visits. In addition, compared to the pre-Rule 18, the market reacts more positively to analyst earnings forecast reports for firms that lost political connections due to Rule 18 relative to those for other firms. There is also a decrease in stock price synchronicity after Rule 18. However, these effects of Rule 18 last only one year or two, and disappear three years after the policy. These findings suggest that in the short period after the policy, firms increase their information disclosure to the market. Regarding the disappearance of these effects after a longer period of policy implementation, one possibility is that firms adapt to the new rules over time, finding more covert ways to seek rents and re-establish political ties.

Using the data of Chinese industrial enterprises, we examine how the incentive to reach GDP growth targets affects the local firms' capacity utilization. We find that Chinese economic growth targets exhibit a persistent pattern of top-down amplification along different jurisdiction levels, which is associated with a decline in local firms' capacity utilization. Moreover, the effect of amplified targets on overcapacity is more pronounced (1) when officials utilize hard-constraint vocabulary in setting the economic growth target, (2) during the National Congress of Communist Party, and (3) when the age of prefecture-level officials is close to 55. We also find officials intervene local firms' capacity decisions by increasing private communication with local entities and loosening public policies for local firms within their jurisdictions. Further results show that the amplification of economic targets is detrimental to future development of both regional economy and local firms.

Abstract Based on a reduced-form model of credit risk, we explore mispricing in the credit default swaps (CDS) spreads of North American companies and its economic content. Specifically, we develop a trading strategy using the model to trade out of sample market-neutral portfolios across the term structure of CDS contracts. Our empirical results show that the trading strategy exhibits abnormally large returns, confirming the existence and persistence of a mispricing. The aggregate returns of the trading strategy are positively related to the square of market-wide credit and liquidity risks, indicating that the mispricing is more pronounced when the market is more volatile. When implemented on the Markit data, the strategy shows significant economic value even after controlling for realistic transaction costs.