This study examines whether and how legislative gridlock in Congress affects legislative uncertainty. Results show that legislative gridlock increases cross-sectional dispersion in returns on individual stocks and portfolios over short windows around roll-call votes on Congressional bills. The effect of gridlock is beyond political polarization, Presidential ideology, unified versus divided governments, economic recession, policy uncertainty (Baker et al., 2016), and macroeconomic uncertainty (Jurado et al., 2015). Greater legislative uncertainty is associated with higher bond yield and lower likelihood of seasoned equity offerings and analyst recommendations. The effect of gridlock depends on industry and firm characteristics, as well as political polarization and Presidential ideology. Overall, legislative gridlock increases legislative uncertainty as reflected in cross-sectional dispersion in stock returns.

We examine the impact of venture capital (VC) on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in China. Exploiting the timing of VC exit, we find that the CSR performance of VC-backed companies improves after the exit of VC. Using the age of VC funds as an instrument for VC exit, we find that the effect is likely to be causal. Further analyses suggest that the effect is largely driven by inexperienced, badly performing, and less reputable VCs.

The China Accounting and Finance Review (CAFR) was jointly established in 1999 by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Tsinghua University. Over the past 22 years, CAFR has published original papers in accounting and finance with a focus on China-related research. In this article, we review the journal’s publishing patterns and the impactful articles it has published, with the aim of better understanding past research on China-related issues and recent publication patterns and trends as well as developing new insight that may inspire future submissions. We divide past CAFR articles by topic into six groups: (i) information disclosure; (ii) auditing; (iii) corporate governance; (iv) market efficiency; (v) corporate finance; and (vi) miscellaneous. We use these categories as the basis of our review for articles published before 2020. We also summarize articles by their regional setting, research methodology, and authors’ university affiliation. We then highlight the contributions of a few impactful CAFR articles that are actively cited in both the Chinese and English literature. We complement the literature review by going over China’s financial stability research in JFS. We also compare CAFR with other major accounting and finance journals in the Asia-Pacific region. CAFR stands out by welcoming research using a diversity of regional settings and research topics. Finally, we discuss the new editorial strategies that began in 2020. Under the new editorial policy, CAFR now publishes more non-China and more cross-disciplinary studies than it used to. We review several recent publications to demonstrate the change. Going forward, we intend to call for the publication of more high-quality papers in accounting and finance that are not restricted to a region, area, or methodology providing new insights into accounting and finance.

We study how the information conveyed by fair value (FV) reporting is considered during an initial public offering (IPO). By examining how pre-IPO FV earnings are perceived by underwriters and investors, we document numerous original findings. First, IPOs with higher FV earnings have higher initial valuations and subsequent price revisions, indicating that underwriters and institutional investors value the information conveyed by FV reporting. Second, there is a significantly negative relation between FV earnings and post-IPO initial returns, whereas no such relation exists between non-FV earnings and initial returns. Third, we document robust positive associations between FV earnings and various measures of post-issue long-run stock performance. Fourth, we confirm the informational content of FV earnings by showing their predictive power for future earnings. We interpret these findings as supportive of the underreaction hypotheses, whereby aftermarket investors underreact to the information contained in FV reporting in the short run and gradually recognize the value of such information in the long run. We perform numerous tests to confirm the robustness of our results, including a test to address potential sample selection bias using the adoption of IFRS for small- and medium-sized entities (SMEs) as an exogenous determinant of FV reporting. Taken together, our findings advance our understanding of how fair value information is considered during an IPO issuance.

This discussion makes several observations regarding the past 25 years of China-related accounting research reviewed in Lennox and Wu (2022). First, we discuss factors of supply and demand that led to the rise of China-related studies and how this growth has contributed to the internationalization of accounting research. We note that the taxonomy of the literature by geographic region rather than topic or methodology is unusual and makes it difficult to formulate a common framework that would help organize the many contributions. Next, we distill distinct patterns in authorship, choice of topics, and asserted contributions of China-related studies. Studies are increasingly shaped by the availability of new data and regulatory reforms. These features should be interpreted carefully, as most reforms are interconnected and reflect the purposeful outcome of a tightly controlled economy. As a result, issues of generalizability arise. Alternatively, researchers could embrace the China setting and strive to identify the local institutional forces that make it special. We see such a more institutional, context-specific view of China-related—or better—international research as an opportunity for the field. We close by presenting five broad themes we view as promising areas for future China-related research.

This study investigates the impact of banks’ strategic move to cloud computing on bank performance and risk-taking. Based on a novel index of banks’ exposure to cloud computing, we find that banks’ adoption of cloud computing is associated with lower cost efficiency, higher profit efficiency, and greater operational risk using data on Chinese banks over the period 2008–2019. We also find that cloud computing interacts with other newly emerging technologies, leading to synergy gains in cost efficiency and operational risk control but with a substitutive effect on profit efficiency from blockchain. The findings are of timely policy importance and practical relevance for regulators, policy-makers, and bank managers.

ABSTRACT We examine whether restricting managers' discretion through GAAP impacts the usefulness of accounting information in debt contracting. Our study informs standard setters and regulators regarding the debt contracting implications of limiting managers' discretion via accounting standards. We predict and find that under more restrictive standards, lenders make more non‐GAAP modifications to GAAP‐based performance measures, suggesting that restrictions of managers' discretion reduce the usefulness of accounting information. We perform two additional analyses to enhance identification. First, in line‐item‐level analysis, we document a positive relation between the exclusion of specific nonrecurring items from contractual definitions of earnings and the number of restrictions in the GAAP standards that apply to each specific item each year. Second, using difference‐in‐differences tests around standard changes, we find that the propensity to exclude items varies positively with changes in the restrictiveness of related standards. Moreover, we predict and find that restrictive standards are also positively associated with loan spreads but significantly less so when lenders adjust GAAP numbers in loan contracts. Overall, this study improves our understanding of how attributes of accounting standards impact the usefulness of accounting information.

This paper analyzes the asset pricing and portfolio implications of an important barrier to sustainable investing: uncertainty about the corporate ESG profile. In equilibrium, the market premium increases and demand for stocks declines under ESG uncertainty. In addition, the CAPM alpha and effective beta both rise with ESG uncertainty and the negative ESG-alpha relation weakens. Employing the standard deviation of ESG ratings from six major providers as a proxy for ESG uncertainty, we provide supporting evidence for the model predictions. Our findings help reconcile the mixed evidence on the cross-sectional ESG-alpha relation and suggest that ESG uncertainty affects the risk-return trade-off, social impact, and economic welfare.

We examine relationship between common institutional ownership and corporate social responsibility (CSR). We find that common institutional ownership is negatively associated with the level of CSR, which supports an anti-competitive view. We conduct a propensity score matching (PSM) analysis and a difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis based on a quasi-natural experiment of financial institution mergers. The results alleviate concerns about endogeneity. Using the DiD setting, we find further support for the anti-competitive view, and can rule out alternative explanations. Additional analyses on investor characteristics show that our results come mainly from common owners with long-term investment horizons or lower social inclination. Moreover, we find that the anti-competitive effect is more pronounced for mature firms, and for firms in industries with lower labor intensity and lower customer sensitivity.

Abstract Fund flows are more correlated among funds with similar investment horizon, consistent with correlated demand for liquidity. We find that stocks held by institutions with more heterogeneous investment horizon are more liquid and have lower volatility of liquidity. Identification tests confirm that the improvement in stock liquidity holds when the increase in investor heterogeneity arises from an exogenous shock due to the 2003 tax reform. In addition, extreme flow-induced trading by institutional funds has a bigger price impact when stocks have a less heterogeneous investor base. Moreover, the premium associated with stock illiquidity is concentrated in stocks with low investor heterogeneity.