Does state ownership breed risk-taking behavior in commercial banks? This paper examines this issue using a panel of Chinese banks. We find that state-ownership is in general associated with higher risks. In addition, we find that banks controlled by the central government have the highest credit risk, while those owned by local governments have the lowest capital adequacy ratio and liquidity ratio. By compiling a complete list of cross-border acquisitions in China’s banking sector, we investigate the impact of foreign acquisition on state-owned banks’ risk-taking using differences-in-differences and matching estimators. We find that foreign acquisition has a reducing effect on state-owned banks’ risk-taking and this effect is particularly significant for banks that are controlled by central or local government. We also find that this risk-reducing effect depends on the percentage of foreign ownership, the local business involvement of the foreign investors, and the number of foreign members on the banks’ boards of directors.

We assemble a property-level panel of appraiser-reported attributes associated with 4.6 million loan applications from 2013 to 2017 to test whether attributes were consistently reported. Appraisers have an incentive to misreport property attributes to justify higher appraised values to ensure that associated mortgage loans are approved. We focus on property transactions with multiple sets of attributes reported by the same appraiser within four quarters and find evidence consistent with an intent to inflate valuations through attribute misreporting. We find that strategic misreporting of attributes is prevalent across markets, and that highly leveraged borrowers whose appraisals had inconsistently reported attributes were 9.8 percent more likely to become seriously delinquent in their loan payments.

Exploiting the staggered expansion of China's passenger-dedicated high-speed rail (HSR) network, we study the relationship between HSR connection and firm performance. By highlighting the importance of firm location and face-to-face interactions, we test the differential impact of HSR connection on the performance and growth of firms that differ in their dependence on communication and inter-city travel as production inputs. Our results confirm that firms in communication-intensive and travel-dependent industries benefit more from the operation of the HSR. Moreover, in examining the specific mechanisms at work, we find evidence that the HSR promotes firm performance and growth for the communication-intensive and travel-dependent through increased analyst attention, productivity boosts, and market expansions. Our findings imply that face-to-face interactions, through facilitating the exchange and acquisition of information, are potentially important for our understanding of “local (home) bias” of investment documented in the literature.