Investment banker human capital is valuable in mergers and acquisitions. Exploiting a unique hand-built dataset, this paper studies whether and how investment banker's education and experience impact the merger performance in China. We find that investment bankers' education credentials are positively related to the post-merger performance; however, greater investment banker experience does not. We further explore the channels and show that the education effect is stronger in deals with higher information asymmetry and acquirers with worse corporate governance. On the other hand, experience increases merger performance in deals with high information asymmetry but reduces deal performance in poorly governed firms. Our findings suggest that higher education attainment facilitates both the advisory and monitoring role of investment bankers, while more experience makes investment bankers better advisors yet worse monitors. Our findings also suggest that investment bankers' roles in value creation are highly dependent on different institutional backgrounds, and one cannot generalize the findings in the U.S. across borders.

We assess the impact of nationwide minimum wages on employment throughout the whole wage distribution by exploiting geographical variation in the level of wages. We find a substantial increase in wages at the bottom of the wage distribution, while we detect a small, statistically insignificant negative effect on employment. Combining the estimated change in the wage distribution with a tax and benefit microsimulation model, we show that the minimum wage generates considerable proportional income gains up to the middle of the household income distribution.