China’s new Labor Contract Law (LCL), which came into force in 2008, has greatly improved the protection of workers and increased the cost of labor. This study investigates its effect on firms’ risk-taking behavior and industrial upgrading. The analysis finds strong and robust evidence that...

The productivity of manufacturing firms in China has increased tremendously after China’s WTO accession. Most of the existing research focuses on examining the contribution of input and output tariff reductions to the increasing productivity of Chinese manufacturing firms. However, an...

Does the discovery and operation of a nearby oil field carry long-term health consequences? Existing studies focus primarily on relatively short-term impacts, and disregard potential effects of mobility-driven external influences. We fill this gap by capitalizing on the unique features of the...

During the past decade, new regulations have been adopted to improve audit committee effectiveness. Prior research has generally provided evidence in support of these regulations and suggests that a more independent and expert audit committee is more effective. We posit that CEO power reduces or...

A medium - for example, points or money - is a token people receive as the immediate reward of their effort.It has no value in and of itself, but it can be traded for a desired outcome. Experiments demonstrate that, when people are faced with options entailing different outcomes, the presence of...

In a field study, we identified an intriguing inconsistency between real estate developers' desired sales pattern (selling all apartments at the same rate) and the actual sales pattern (selling good apartments faster). We explained this inconsistency with Tversky, Sattath and Slovic (1988)'s...

This paper evaluates the impact of machine learning (ML) and alternative data (AD) on ethnic/racial bias in residential mortgage underwriting. Based on the newly enhanced Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, we simulate data bias and AD bias and construct multiple test scenarios by interacting the...