We explore the effects of a blockchain-based environmental monitoring technology on emissions. Our model of firm competition in the presence of regional regulators reveals that blockchain adoption reduces industrial pollution but triggers business relocation, creating trade-offs between local emission reduction and economic contraction. When pollution-induced social losses are highly dispersed across cities, a partial-adoption equilibrium fails to mitigate aggregate emissions because of the pollution leakage. We further present the first piece of empirical evidence corroborating model predictions, by taking advantage of a recent regulation change in China. The concentrations of SO2, NO2, and CO in blockchain-adopting cities are on average 16.6 percent, 7.9 percent, and 4.6 percent, respectively, lower than other cities. However, blockchain-based monitoring disproportionately hurts the industrial sector, and the average economic growth are 1.8–2.6 percent lower than other cities. Firms in adopting cities open more non-local plants to avoid regulation.

From 2007 to 2020, unlisted Chinese firms paid an average of over US $500 million to listed firms for their shell value in reverse merger transactions. We show that this large shadow price for a public listing sheds light on other features of Chinese markets, including (i) near-zero mortality rates, (ii) frequent major-asset restructurings (MARs), (iii) insensitivity of small-firm prices to corporate earnings, and (iv) a large size effect. A firm-level measure of expected shell probability (ESP) predicts stock returns, MARs, earnings-to-price sensitivity, and short-window returns to initial public offering-related regulatory news. Furthermore, adding ESP to existing pricing models for Chinese stocks significantly improves model performance.

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically connected than pre-listing IPO firms. Chinese RM firms also have superior post-listing performance, in terms of both operations and stock returns, compared to IPOs matched on industry and size. Unlike IPOs, RM firms do not underperform the market in the long run. These results are in sharp contrast to the evidence on RMs from developed countries. We trace these differences to China's stringent and potentially biased IPO policies, which appear to preclude even high-quality firms from accessing public markets.

Using detailed data on company visits by Chinese mutual funds, we provide direct evidence of mutual fund information acquisition activities and the consequent informational advantages mutual funds establish in local firms. Mutual funds are more likely to visit local and nearby firms both in and outside of their portfolios, but the ease of travel between fund and firm locations can substantially alleviate geographic distance constraints. Company visits by mutual funds are strongly associated with both fund trading activities and fund trading performance. Our results show that geographic constraints and costly information acquisition amplify information asymmetry in financial markets.