Social media platforms are becoming increasingly important channels for information dissemination. This study examines how microblogging by top executives affects the information environment for listed firms in an emerging market. Using a manually collected data set of Sina Weibo, one of China's most popular and largest social media platforms, we find that a board chair having a Weibo account is associated with the dissemination of more firm-specific information to the capital market. This result holds up to a battery of robustness tests, including an alternative noise-trading explanation and alternative measures of information flows and definitions of Weibo usage. We also show that the relationship between board chairs' Weibo usage and information dissemination is stronger for smaller firms, firms that went public more recently, and firms characterized by less analyst coverage. In addition, Weibo usage primarily disseminates firm-specific news rather than industry news. Finally, we document that institutional trading is an important channel through which private information is incorporated into stock prices. Findings in this study have important implications for the understanding of the role of social media in the dissemination process of corporate information and corporate communication strategy.

Previous studies have linked personal characteristics of business leaders to corporate decisions and outcomes. We analyze if the traumatic experience of the Chinese Famine has an impact on managerial decisions. By exploiting the exogenous variation in local severity of the famine, we find that having lived through the famine during one's younger years is associated with more conservative financial, investment, and cash holding policies, a lower likelihood of unethical behavior, and better firm performance during economic downturns.

This study examines the stock-picking ability of mutual funds in China using evidence from the IPO market. We hypothesize that the decision to invest in the IPO market contains positive information about a fund’s underlying expectation of newly listed firms’ future prospects. Using residuals from a model on the determinants of mutual funds purchases in the IPO market as proxy for consensus expectations, we find that IPO firms with high residual funds have significantly better stock returns and operating performance than those with low residual funds. In other words, residual funds can predict IPO future performance. These results are also robust to different specifications and alternative explanations such as mutual fund preferences or monitoring effects.

We study how Chinese private entrepreneurs benefit from participating in politics. Using original hand-collected data on listed firms controlled by private entrepreneurs, we document a significant positive relationship between political participation and subsequent change in firm performance. We also provide evidence that the change in social status cannot explain the change in performance. We then identify several ways through which firms gain preferential treatment when the controlling entrepreneur participates in politics: better access to debt financing, preferential tax treatment, more government subsidies, and superior access to regulated industries.