This paper contributes to the literature on foreign strategic investors (FSIs) by examining the influence of FSIs on non-interest activities. Using data from China’s banks for 2001–2016, we find that FSI entry is associated with significantly increased non-interest activities, especially commission and fee activities, of Chinese banks. Furthermore, local banks with directors appointed by FSIs have increased non-interest activities. Moreover, in state-owned banks, the effects of FSIs and directors assigned by FSIs on non-interest activities are both weaker. We also find that non-interest activities have not significantly changed after the exit of FSIs. These empirical findings will be informative and relevant to both policymakers and practitioners.

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.

This paper identifies a novel channel—corporate fraud—through which local firms protect themselves during anti-mafia periods. We initially explore the impact of the anti-mafia campaign on mafia-like forces captured by accepted mafia-like criminal cases. The results indicate that the average number of accepted mafia-like criminal cases increases by 10.03%. More importantly, the accepted mafia-like criminal cases committed by firms also exhibit a notable increase, mainly within the first 30 months of the anti-mafia campaign. We then theorize that the anti-mafia campaign may have two contradictory effects on corporate fraud: deterrence and self-protection. The main results show that the self-protection effect prevails over the deterrence effect and that firms are more likely to commit fraud to strategically protect themselves from potential losses. The baseline findings reveal that the fraud occurrence of an average firm increases by 44.07% during anti-mafia periods.

The vacuum caused by the absence of a political leader has a major economic impact. We manually collect data on the absence of a political leader in 247 Chinese cities between 2009 and 2019 and find that firms reduce their investment by an average of 2.326 % for each month that a political office remains vacant. This result holds even after subjecting the data to a series of endogeneity tests, robustness tests, and alternative explanations. We also demonstrate that the absence of a political leader reduces corporate investment through increased uncertainty of economic policy, reduced governmental efficiency, and disrupted political connections. Finally, our results show that this kind of absence has a more pronounced impact on younger firms, firms located in provinces with slower marketization, firms located in provinces with weak media development, non-state-owned enterprises, and firms located in regions under significant promotional pressure.