This paper reexamines the beta-return relation through the lens of time-varying risk aversion. We show that the security market line (SML) depends critically on the level of aggregate risk aversion. During periods of high risk aversion, the SML exhibits a positive slope and an intercept that is statistically indistinguishable from zero, with investor sentiment playing only a minor role. During periods of low risk aversion, the SML slope becomes negative and the intercept is significantly positive. Investor sentiment affects the SML only when risk aversion is low. These patterns are robust across alternative portfolio constructions, longer investment horizons, and multiple measures of risk aversion.

Unique to the world, China adopts a “T+1 trading rule”, which prevents investors from selling stocks bought on the same day. We develop a dynamic price manipulation model to study the effects of the “T+1 trading rule”. Compared to the “T+0 trading rule”, which allows investors to buy and sell the same stocks during the same day, we show that the “T+1 trading rule” reduces the total trading volume and price volatility, and improves the trend chasers’ welfare when trend-chasing is strong. An empirical test using data on China’s B-share stock market supports the model’s theoretical predictions.

This study examines how institutional investors' corporate site visits affect tax avoidance. Using quantile regressions, we find that corporate site visits decrease tax avoidance for firms at high levels of tax avoidance and increase tax avoidance for firms at low levels. The effect of corporate site visits on tax avoidance is stronger for firms subject to a weaker information environment, which suggests that institutional investors acquire additional firm-specific information via corporate site visits and play a more effective monitoring role. We also find that visitors who visited low-tax firms in prior years share tax-planning knowledge with high-tax firms which they visit in the current year. The effect of tax knowledge transfer is more pronounced when the visitors are from incumbent institutional shareholders. This study identifies corporate site visits as a channel via which institutional investors serve as monitors to managers and as facilitators of tax knowledge transfer.

This paper investigates whether top-tier M&A investment bankers (financial advisors) create value for acquirers with different financial conditions in both the short and long term via analyzing 3420 US deals during 1990–2012. In this paper, deals are divided into three groups based on acquirer financial constraints – acquisitions by constrained, neutral and unconstrained firms. We find that the effects of top-tier bankers are dependent on acquirer financial conditions. Specifically, top-tier advisors improve performance for constrained acquirers rather than neutral, and unconstrained acquirers. Our results show that top-tier investment bankers improve constrained acquirers’ short- (5 days) and long-term (36 months) performance by 1.45% and 24.27% respectively, after controlling for firm, deal and market characteristics. For deals with investment banker involvement, constrained acquirers advised by top-tier advisors have the lowest deal completion rate, and pay the lowest bid premiums; while unconstrained acquirers that retain top-tier investment bankers have the highest deal completion rate, and pay relatively high bid premiums. Our findings imply that constrained acquirers tend to retain top-tier investment bankers to gain superior synergy, while unconstrained acquirers appear to retain top-tier investment bankers to ensure the deal completion.

We use household data from northeast China to examine the link between investment and land tenure insecurity induced by China's system of village-level land reallocation. We quantify expropriation risk using a hazard analysis of individual plot tenures and incorporate the predicted “hazards of expropriation” into an empirical analysis of plot-level investment. Our focus is on organic fertilizer use, which has long-lasting benefits for soil quality. Although we find that higher expropriation risk significantly reduces application of organic fertilizer, a welfare analysis shows that guaranteeing land tenure in this part of China would yield only minimal efficiency gains.

We exploit the implementation of a rural pension policy in China to estimate the average rural‐to‐urban migration cost for workers affected by the policy and the average underlying sectoral productivity difference. Our estimates, based on a large panel data set, reveal significant migration costs and substantial sectoral productivity differences, with sorting playing a minor role in accounting for sectoral labor income gaps. We construct and structurally estimate a general equilibrium household model with endogenous labor supply and migration. The results of this model align with the reduced‐form findings and illustrate how the rural pension policy influences migration, GDP, and welfare through improving within‐household labor allocation. Counterfactual analyses based on the model show that the positive effects of the policy remain even if migration costs were significantly lower, and that scaling up the rural pension policy would lead to even larger improvements in labor allocation, GDP, and welfare.

We investigate whether air pollution affects household stock market participation. Using representative household survey data in China, we find that households significantly reduce their financial risk taking when exposed to heavy air pollution. This finding is robust to an instrumental variable analysis and a regression discontinuity test based on the Huai River policy. To explore the underlying mechanisms, we find that air pollution significantly impairs health, increases unemployment risk, impedes cognitive performance, and dampens mood. We further show that these channels explain a non-trivial proportion of the relationship between air pollution and stock market participation. Our study sheds light on the far-reaching influence of air pollution on households’ well-being from the perspective of portfolio choice.