Financial technology (fintech) has seen fast development recently in China; however, studies exploring the contributions of fintech to China’s economic growth remain limited. Thus, this study motivated by the knowledge gaps and fast expansion of fintech examined: (i) the impact of fintech and the submeasures of third-party payment, credit, and insurance on China’s economic growth; (ii) the regional and provincial impact of fintech on China’s economic growth; (iii) the causality relationships between fintech and economic growth. By using a sample of 31 provinces in China and the instrumental variable generalized method of moments (IV–GMM) technique, the study established the following: (i) fintech and the submeasures of third-party payment, credit, and insurance have a statistically significant positive effect on China’s economic growth. Specifically, a 10% rise in fintech, third-party payment, credit, and insurance raises China’s economic growth by 8%, 4%, 5%, and 16%, respectively; (ii) the eastern region has the highest growth effect of fintech. Moreover, Zhejiang province has the highest growth effect of fintech at the provincial level; (iii) a unidirectional causality exists from third-party payment and credit to economic growth, and economic growth to insurance; a bidirectional causality exists between fintech and economic growth. This article explicitly suggests substantial institutional reforms to promote the healthy development of fintech in China.

Ending poverty in all its forms by 2030 remains the first agenda of Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015. Motivated by this agenda, this study examined the direct and indirect effect of financial technology (fintech) and its sub-measures of third-party payment and credit on poverty measured by household per capita consumption. We used a panel of 31 provinces in China from 2011 to 2017. The results indicated that fintech and these sub-measures reduce poverty in China. The results further showed that fintech complements economic growth and financial development to reduce poverty in China.

Prior CSR and firm performance research has produced mixed results. Even so, numerous researches examining this relationship from the perspective of international standardisation have primarily concentrated on developed economics. This leaves an obvious gap within the extant literature with regards to evidence from sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the extent of CSR disclosure performance and firm value, in an emerging institutional setting. Using hand collected data of South African listed companies, we apply the GRI G3.1 guidelines, as a measure of disclosure performance. Based on the panel data fixed effect model, we document a positive but insignificant relationship between CSR disclosure performance and firm value. Secondly, a negative and insignificant relationship was found between environmental disclosure performance and firm value. Lastly, we found a positive and statistically significant relationship between social disclosure performance and firm value. Overall, our findings suggest that CSR disclosure has a limited effect on firm value. Our findings hold for a set of robustness tests. Our findings suggest that the incorporation of sustainability disclosure, on the basis of GRI, is moderately high among the selected companies. Implications of our results suggest that CSR disclosure may not necessarily influence firm value, despite its numerous benefits. We contribute to this line of research from a multi-theoretical perspective.

Background: There is growing literature promoting corporate governance mechanisms as important elements that could mitigate the inconclusive findings within the corporate social performance and firm profitability research. A key theoretical assumption within the extant literature that provides support for this proposition is that corporate social performance and firm profitability are organisational outcomes in the presence of good corporate governance.Aim: Firstly, the aim is to re-investigate voluntary social performance disclosure (SPD) and long-term profitability association from the perspective of international standards, using the Global Reporting Initiative G3.1 guidelines. Secondly, to examine the joint moderating effect of board independence and managerial ownership (MO) on the voluntary SPD and profitability nexus.Setting: The South Africa institutional setting, where recent corporate governance regimes require firms to voluntarily make corporate governance related disclosures on both shareholder-and stakeholder-related information is used as the study context.Method: Utilising manually extracted data of listed firms, over the period 2010 to 2015, the generalised least square regression and seemingly unrelated regression (with a 1-year lag as the main independent variable) are used to examine the stated hypotheses.Results: We found a positive association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability. We also found that the presence of non-executive directors positively moderates the association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability. Thirdly, the proportion of MO significantly positively moderates the association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability. Lastly, the complementary role of the presence of non-executive directors and the proportion of MO significantly positively moderates the association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability.Conclusion: This study finds support for scholarly theoretical arguments that organisational outcomes are largely possible in the presence of good corporate governance, which has a long-term implication for firms’ shareholder wealth maximisation. This study contributes to the ongoing research examining the notion of substitutive versus complementary effects of governance mechanisms, and a growing research literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure from the perspective of international standardisation. This study therefore makes far-reaching contributions to the corporate governance and social responsibility literature in an African context.

This paper studies the valuation problem of European call options when the presence of distressed selling may lead to further endogenous volatility and correlation between the stock issuer's asset value and the price of the stock underlying the option, and hence influence the option price. A change of numéraire technique, based on Girsanov Theorem, is applied to derive the analytical pricing formula for the European call option when the price of underlying stock is subject to price pressure triggered by the stock issuer's own distressed selling. Numerical experiments are also provided to study the impacts of distressed selling on the European call option prices.