Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the determinants of bank profitability in China. It examines the effects of inflation on bank profitability, while controlling for comprehensive bank‐specific and industry‐specific variables.Design/methodology/approach: The sample comprises a total of 101 banks (five state‐owned banks, 12 joint‐stock commercial banks and 84 city commercial banks). The period under consideration extends from 2003‐2009. The two step generalized methods of moments (GMM) estimators are applied.Findings: Empirical results exhibit that there is a positive relationship between bank profitability, cost efficiency, banking sector development, stock market development and inflation in China. The authors report that low profitability can be explained by higher volume of non‐traditional activity and higher taxation. Moreover, the authors confirm that there is a competitive environment in the Chinese banking industry. Furthermore, the authors propose policy actions that should be taken to improve bank profitability in China.Research limitations/implications: Further research can be conducted by investigating the profitability of numerous branches of all national banks and its determinants.Practical implications: The findings of the current study have considerable policy relevance. First, Chinese banks should emphasize the improvement of labour management and training skills, the purpose of which is to increase their productivity and boost the profitability. Furthermore, the government should gradually continue to open the banking and stock market, as the development of the financial sector is helpful in increasing the banks' profitability in China.Originality/value: Particular emphasis will be placed on the investigation into the effect of inflation on bank profitability while controlling for most comprehensive internal and external factors.

This article examines the effect of GDP growth on bank profitability in China over the period 2003–2009. The one-step system GMM estimator is used to test the persistence of profitability in the Chinese banking industry. The empirical findings suggest that cost efficiency is positively related to bank profitability, while lower profitability can also be explained by higher taxes paid by banks. In addition, there is a negative relationship between GDP growth and bank profitability. Furthermore, the results show that (1) the profitability in the Chinese banking industry is significantly affected by the level of non-performing loans, and (2) Chinese banks with higher levels of capital have lower profitability. Finally, we find that the departure from a perfectly competitive market structure in the Chinese banking industry is relatively small.

This paper tests how financial performance indicators and combined ESG score for large-cap stocks impact on stock return. In particular, we examine how market capitalization, price to book value, Sharpe ratio and ESG score of large-cap firms in Europe are related to their stock performance. We consider a panel data consisting of six European countries—Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, France and Germany—for the period 2010–2020. For Greek and French firms, a firm’s size tends to negatively affect its stock returns. The investors in European countries (except Italy) do not jeopardize their returns by investing in highly ESG scoring firms. We argue that the benefit of not investing in highly ESG-scoring firms might lead investors to select smaller size companies with a higher price to book value and higher Sharpe ratio, as it is more likely to generate higher returns. Moreover, Italian firms are more susceptible to ESG issues, as ESG performance and stock return seem to have a significant negative correlation. This valuable result was confirmed by conducting a robustness test for Europe as a whole using the Euronext100 index. Finally, we find no evidence that ESG motivates herding in our selected sample (this is not the case for Greece and France), while we report evidence of ESG herding behavior during the Covid-19 outbreak in Portugal, Italy and Greece.