We study the political determinants of the world's largest privatization program by exploiting an age-related discontinuity of politician promotion in China. As a local politician's age exceeds 58, his promotion likelihood quickly diminishes. Consistent with changes in the politician's incentives, we find that Chinese cities whose top officials were older than age 58 were less likely to privatize local state-owned enterprises. Using the promotion discontinuity as an instrument, we report that privatization has significant effects on the firm's efficiency.

We investigate the relationship between investor attention and financial market anomalies. We find that anomaly returns tend to be higher following high-attention days. The result is robust after controlling for the effect of news and in a natural experiment setting in which a stock market regulation and rounding errors generate exogenous variations in attention. An analysis of order imbalances suggests that large traders trade on anomaly signals more aggressively upon observing higher attention. We discuss the extent to which the findings are driven by inattention-driven underreaction, bias amplification, or coordinated arbitrage mechanisms, thereby providing insight into the understanding of anomalies.

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are a major financial innovation related to debt contracting. Because CDS markets facilitate bad news being incorporated into equity prices via cross-market information spillover, CDS availability may curb firms’ information hoarding. We find that CDS trading on a firm’s debt reduces the future stock price crash risk. This effect is stronger in active CDS markets, when the main lenders are CDS market dealers with securities trading subsidiaries, or when managers have more motivation to hoard information. Our findings suggest that debt market financial innovations curtail the negative equity market effects of firms withholding bad news.

We provide causal evidence on the value of asset pledgeability by exploiting a unique feature of Chinese corporate bond markets: bonds with identical fundamentals are traded on two segmented markets with different rules for repo transactions. Using a policy shock that rendered AA+ and AA bonds ineligible for repo on one market only, we compare how bond prices changed across markets and rating classes around this event. When the haircut increases from 0% to 100%, bond yields increase by 39 bps to 85 bps. These estimates help us infer the magnitude of the shadow cost of capital in China.