This paper investigates whether initial public offering (IPO) announcements have any price impact on existing stocks in China. Using the Chinese IPO approval regime as a natural experiment, we find that IPO approval announcements have a negative price impact on stocks. This price effect appears to be a drift in equilibrium prices and is more pronounced on stocks that are more correlated with the IPO. These findings support an expectation-based downward-sloping demand curve hypothesis. We also document negative price reactions around the IPO listing day, which is consistent with the findings by previous authors. Further evidence rules out the signal effect of IPO approval announcements. In sum, IPO approvals can influence prices of other stocks by shaping the expectation of a change in the supply-demand equilibrium without actual trading of IPO shares.

This study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships among chief financial officers’ (CFOs’) professional qualifications, SOX Section 404 internal control weakness, CFOs’ turnover, CFOs’ qualification improvement, and correction of material weaknesses. We find that firms receiving initial adverse SOX 404 opinions for 2004 have less qualified CFOs. Adverse SOX 404 opinion recipients experience more CFO turnover in 2005, and these firms are more likely to hire CFOs having improved qualifications. Results show that simply hiring a new CFO is not associated with SOX 404 opinion improvement. Opinion improvement requires hiring a better qualified CFO.

This paper addresses a problem that may damage the reliability of an interbank offered rate (IBOR) system. Using evidence from the Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate (SHIBOR), we show that some SHIBOR panel banks imitate peers’ quotes after observing them on the next business day. The strength of the intertemporal behavior can be measured by a “Signed Active-minus-Stationary (SAmS)” index, which significantly predicts SHIBOR changes. Moreover, we find that the consequences of the imitation behavior are not fully perceived and understood by the market, and, as a result, SHIBOR-linked derivatives are mispriced. Our findings suggest that regulators of a poll-based interest rate benchmark should pay attention to the intertemporal imitation of submissions, in addition to bad faith collusion. The SAmS index can be utilized in the quality control of panel bank submissions.

Open-end corporate bond mutual funds invest in illiquid assets while providing liquid claims to shareholders. Does such liquidity transformation introduce fragility to the corporate bond market? To address this question, we create a novel bond-level latent fragility measure based on asset illiquidity of mutual funds holding the bond. We find that corporate bonds bearing higher fragility subsequently experience higher return volatility and more outflows-induced mutual fund selling over the period of 2006–2019. Using the COVID-19 crisis as a natural experiment, we find that bonds with higher precrisis fragility experienced more negative returns and larger reversals around March 2020.

We examine two inconclusive issues in the IPO (initial public offering) underpricing literature. It is unclear whether private firms or state-owned enterprises (SOEs) underprice their IPOs more and how the institutional environment affects IPO underpricing. Using a much larger China IPO sample of SOEs, we conclude that SOEs underprice their IPOs more than private firms. Specifically, SOEs controlled by the central government (CSOEs) underprice their IPOs 27 percentage points more than private firms, whereas SOEs controlled by local governments (LSOEs) underprice theirs 7 percentage points more than those of private firms. Using the National Economic Research Institute Index of Marketization (NERIIM) to measure the institutional environment, we find that one index score improvement in institutional environment is associated with a two percentage-point reduction in IPO underpricing. Importantly, a better institutional environment reduces IPO underpricing most effectively for private firms, followed by LSOEs, and the least for CSOEs.

Employing the staggered opening of the High-speed railway (HSR) as an exogenous shock, this paper examines the impact of functional distance on bank loan pricing. Based on a unique loan-level dataset from a nationwide state-owned Chinese commercial bank, we find that after the HSR opening, the loan pricing of local private firms decreases significantly. The possible channel is the facilitating of bank's easier access to soft information through the shortening of temporal functional distance. Moreover, the effect of HSR opening is more pronounced when the borrowing firm is difficult to visit or when loan pricing is more sensitive to information. We also find that the HSR opening increases the loan volume for local private firms, while there are no significant changes in loan pricing or loan volume for public firms with HSR opening. Our main conclusion remains valid after considering various robustness and endogeneity issues.