Chinese local governments have issued a large number of local government financing vehicle (LGFV) bonds since 1994 when the Budget Law was promulgated, where local governments were prohibited from raising debt on their own. Although LGFV bonds are implicitly backed by governments, there has been...

Models of political risk predict that increases in political uncertainty cause stock prices to fall, especially for politically sensitive firms. We use the event of the Bo Xilai political scandal in 2012 in China as an exogenous shock to identify the impact of political uncertainty on asset...

Using the staggered introduction of regional specialized debt recovery courts as a quasi-natural experiment, we estimate the impact of bankruptcy resolution on the financing cost of corporate bonds in China. We find that the introduction of specialized courts reduces the bond financing cost by...

We replicate 469 anomaly variables similar to those studied by Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2020) using Chinese A-share data and a reliable testing procedure with mainboard breakpoints and value-weighted returns. We find that 83.37% of the anomaly variables do not generate significant high-minus-low...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Contrary to recent accounts of off-balance-sheet securitization by financial firms, we show that asset securitization by nonfinancial firms provides a valuable form of financing for shareholders without harming debtholders. Using data from firms’ SEC filings, we find that...</p>

Historical market-to-book has been shown to explain current leverage. Prior studies attribute the evidence to market timing. This study shows that with the presence of time-varying targets and adjustment costs, historical market-to-book has a significant impact on leverage even when firms do not...