We study how political corruption affects stock market participation among households in China. Our identification strategy exploits recent anticorruption campaigns that reduce households’ exposure to political corruption and within-province variation in lifetime exposure to local corruption. We find that households with higher corruption exposure participate less in the stock market at both the extensive and intensive margins. Removals of top provincial officials during the anticorruption campaign increase the probability of stock market participation by 3 percentage points and households’ net equity purchases and equity share percentage by 13.2 and 0.2 percentage points, respectively. The effect is predominantly driven by the nonpecuniary effect of corruption on households’ trust and perceptions of institutional quality rather than on households’ accumulation of wealth. Our work highlights the negative externalities of political corruption on financial markets.

How do bankers treat green firms? Using unique loan application and banker preference data from a mid-sized bank, we find that customer managers, serving as front-line bankers, give more favorable recommendations to green firms, especially when they hold green values themselves. However, a minority of environmentally skeptical loan officers, aware through internal training that customer managers generally have greener preferences, counter this by downgrading positive evaluations of green firms. Despite not knowing the customer manager’s identity, these officers use their discretion to mitigate what they perceive as green biases, demonstrating the significant moderating role of superiors within the bank’s hierarchy.

We report the results of a longitudinal intervention with students across 5 universities in China designed to reduce online consumer debt. We allocate participants to either a financial literacy treatment group, a self-control treatment group, or a zero-touch control group. Our self-control training intervention features detailed tracking of spending and borrowing, budgeting, and introspection about consumption choices. This intervention reduces online borrowing and delinquency charges, mainly driven by a reduction in entertainment-related spending and borrowing. In contrast, financial literacy interventions improve test scores but only marginally affect borrowing. Our results suggest that cultivating self-regulation and budgeting skills can improve borrowing behavior on e-commerce platforms.