In some cultures vast personal wealth is lauded whereas in others, it is viewed with suspicion and contempt. In recent years, a super rich elite of business people has emerged in China, and, given the country's cultural and socialist past, we believe that people are more likely to react negatively to reports of conspicuous wealth. To test our arguments, we examine the reactions to and consequences of China's entrepreneurs being included on the Hurun Rich List. We find negative consequences for stock market traded firms controlled by the Rich List entrepreneurs: stock prices decline, government subsidies are reduced, and the named entrepreneurs are more likely to be investigated. These effects are strongest in rent-seeking industries and are mitigated by philanthropy.

We develop the concept of auditor industry range as the extent to which an auditor has experiences in auditing clients from different industries, and we link this construct to auditor performance, drawing on prior research in psychology and cognitive science. We find that auditors with a wide range of industry experiences are more likely to require audit adjustments than auditors with a narrow range. We conduct an extensive set of analyses to mitigate the concern that our results are driven by endogenous matching between auditors and clients. The positive relation between auditor industry range and audit adjustments exists regardless of whether the industries covered by an auditor's portfolio exhibit strong or weak economic co-movement, and the relation is stronger for more complex clients, in more uncertain environments, and for auditors with more years of audit experience. Overall, our findings suggest that an auditor's diverse experiences in different industries can enhance audit quality.

We examine the role of relationship-based resource allocations during the approval process of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) in the Chinese capital market. Our results show that guanxi-based relationships significantly increase the likelihood of SEO approvals, particularly for suspect SEO applicants with abnormal levels of earnings management (EM), related-party transactions (RPTs), and intercompany loans. More importantly, we find that guanxi-influenced SEO firms have significantly poorer performance in the post-SEO period, which indicates that it results in inefficient resource allocations. Overall, our evidence suggests that relationship-based resource allocations lead to negative spillover effects that impose social welfare losses.

Using unique datasets on investor bidding and on investment bankers' biography, we examine the role of individual investment bankers in the process of IPO pricing. We find that when an investment banker has a social connection with a mutual fund manager, this manager is significantly more likely to (1) participate in the IPO, (2) submit above average bid prices, (3) realize lower IPO returns. The effect of investment bankers' social relationships is more pronounced when the issuer has low accounting quality and/or when the underwriter is a small bank. Further evidence shows that social relationships between investment bankers and fund managers reduce IPO underpricing. Overall, our findings suggest that social interactions help individual investment bankers to efficiently exchange value-relevant information with IPO investors.

We use a large pictorial sample of Chinese financial analysts to test the association between facial width‐to‐height ratio ( fWHR ) and performance in men. Financial analysts offer an ideal setting for our investigation because we can objectively track individual analysts’ behaviors and performance. We find that high‐ fWHR analysts are more likely to conduct corporate site visits and they exhibit better performance. The positive fWHR –performance association survives a battery of robustness checks and the association is more pronounced for analysts with lower status, for firms with higher uncertainty, and for analysts facing more intense competition. Our results suggest that the dominant trait predicted by fWHR is achievement drive.

Using a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the effect of industry-specific knowledge transfer on audit performance after a merger of two Chinese audit firms with different levels of expertise in an industry. For clients in an industry audited by both merging audit firms, those audited by the audit firm less specialized in that industry belong to the treatment group, while all other clients belong to the control group. We find an economically significant improvement in audit quality (as reflected in a reduction in financial misstatements) for the treatment group relative to the control group in the same merged audit firm. We show the treatment effect is not driven by changes in auditor incentives or personnel movement and is more pronounced when we expect stronger communication between the less and more specialized auditors after the merger. We caution that our findings are specific to China and may not generalize to other countries. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources identified in the text.

We find that economic conditions at the time an auditor enters the labor market have a long-term impact on her judgment and decision making. Specifically, engagement partners who started their career during economic downturns issue audit adjustments more frequently. For the subsample of company-years with no audit adjustments, downturn auditors are more likely to issue a modified audit opinion. In addition, companies audited by downturn auditors are less likely to violate financial reporting and disclosure regulations. Together, our findings suggest that the early career stage is a critical formative period for auditors.

Relying on the frequency of typos in engagement partners’ graduate theses to measure their conscientiousness, we find that more conscientious partners conduct higher-quality audits, evident in that they are more likely to require an audit adjustment. Our core results hold for both upward and downward adjustments, implying that being conscientious is not equivalent to being overly conservative. Consistent with DeAngelo’s (1981) theory, cross-sectional evidence suggests that the role that partner conscientiousness plays in audit quality comes through both the auditor competence and independence channels. Additionally, we find that the frequency of partner thesis typos is negatively associated with auditor effort. Collectively, our evidence implies that engagement partner conscientiousness plays a major role in shaping audit outcomes. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Government-controlled brokerage analysts serve as a market stabilization tool in China. Examining the 2005–2019 period, we show these analysts issue relatively more optimistic—yet less accurate and timely—forecasts during market rescue periods, supporting stock prices. During market booms, they issue comparatively pessimistic but more accurate and timely forecasts, tempering excessive optimism. These patterns are stronger for large firms and state-owned enterprises, and at the most government-influenced brokerages. Markets appear to respond to these forecasts: stocks with greater government-brokerage coverage experience higher liquidity during downturns but lower liquidity during hot markets, with corresponding post-earnings price adjustments. Our findings match Brunnermeier, Sockin, and Xiong’s (2022) theoretical predictions: state interventions can erode information efficiency under intensive intervention while maintaining it under moderate intervention. Collectively, these results underscore that analysts can serve a dual role—as information providers and policy instruments shaping market expectations and stability—in a coordinated economy. Data Availability: The data used in this study were obtained from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) database under a commercial license and cannot be redistributed by the authors. Researchers can obtain equivalent data through institutional access to CSMAR.