Political risk, one of the most significant uncertainty shocks, affects firms’ future attitudes toward risks and plays a crucial role in their decision making. A stock price crash risk is a classical topic in financial markets; therefore, this paper probes the relationship between firm-level political risk and stock price crash risk based on a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2020. This paper collects the MD&A textual material of Chinese listed firms and calculates the firm-level political risk of Chinese listed firms. Our results show that a firm’s stock price crash risk is positively associated with its firm-level political risk exposure. Our findings hold after conducting various robustness tests, including instrument variable regression and altering the measurement of stock price crash risk. Further discussion reveals that political involvement mitigates the positive effect of firm-level political risk on the risk of a stock price jump.

This paper evaluates the impact of retail investors’ bullish sentiment in comparison to that of financial institutions on the return of Chinese CSI 300 index stocks over the period of 2015 to 2023. We document several regularities. First, the stronger the retail (institutional) investors’ bullish sentiment, the lower (higher) the stock returns, and such contrasting associations hold after an array of robustness tests. Second, mechanism test results show that the retail and institutional investor sentiments affect stock returns mainly by influencing the analysts’ attention and the equity liquidity. Third, heterogeneity analyses reveal that the adverse effect of retail investors’ bullish sentiment on stock returns becomes more prominent for non-state-owned, manufacturing, and non-heavily polluted enterprises, but the positive effect of the emotions expressed by institutional investors on stock returns is greater for non-state-owned, non-manufacturing, and heavily polluted enterprises. Therefore, this paper sheds light on detailing of investor sentiment types and hedging investment risks.

Online healthcare platforms serve not just as a medical knowledge-sharing community but also bring about effective interactions between professional physicians and patients. However, it is unclear whether online technology adoption affects such interactions in the same way between traditional Chinese medicine and modern medical departments. By utilizing a large sample of online doctor-patient interaction information from 168,870 doctor-specific interactive webpages recorded in a famous Chinese online healthcare community, this paper studies the differences between 17,513 traditional medicine doctor homepages and 151,357 others from more than 100 different specialty areas. Our chosen platform is representative since it covers about 800,000 physicians working at over 10,000 hospitals across all major provincial regions in China. We document that online medical service users tend to accept and use online health care services. However, patients seeing Chinese medicine doctors exhibit the following unique characteristics. They still prefer choosing doctors according to third-party information and may be reluctant to pay for the current online service price level. This problem is hard to overcome by the platform in the short run. Patients need a long-term process to adapt to the upgraded medical environment gradually. Therefore, establishing a personalized doctor recommendation system has become the most urgent demand presently.

How does foreign aid affect recipient countries’ labor institutions? Extant empirical evidence is sparse due to ambiguous theoretical predictions and potential endogeneity issues. This study uses data detailing aid flow and institutional functions to mitigate such inconclusiveness and displays originality by constructing a concise theoretical framework in which foreign aid contributes to the improvement of the labor institutions in recipient countries through two mechanisms—economic growth purpose and expected aid attraction. The findings indicate that only aid to enhance local economic growth provides incentives to change domestic labor markets. Such effects have a more crucial influence on labor institutions of minimum wage, collective bargaining rights, and working hours than those related to hiring and firing regulations, mandated costs for worker dismissal, and conscription. For comparison with the actual aid level, we construct forecasted proxies to capture exogenous fluctuations in aid, determining that domestic labor markets can also change via a novel mechanism, as the recipient voluntarily mimics the funder’s labor policies in anticipation of receiving future aid, with exact amounts derived from the noninstitutional characteristics of pairs of bilateral recipient and giver economies. Therefore, we provide policy implications for the aid giver on how to secure a continued and increased aid flow and for the aid receivers on which aspects of reforming measures are most effective in enhancing the labor market regulations.