This paper investigate the impact of leverage structure on stock price synchronicity. To better understand the mechanism of the impact of leverage, we break leverage into operating leverage and financing leverage. This breakdown reveals the impact of different component of leverage. Moreover, in this paper, we employ the quantile regression model to investigate the impact of leverage on different level of stock price synchronicity, which provides us a more comprehensive picture. Our empirical results show, operating and financing leverage have negative impact on stock price synchronicity. Moreover, the higher the stock price synchronicity becomes, the higher this impact is. Furthermore, the marginal effect of financing leverage will be attenuated as the profitability of firms becomes higher, but the interaction effect doesn’t exist for operating leverage. On the contrary, the marginal effect of financing leverage will be enhanced as the market capitalization of firms becomes larger, again, it doesn’t exist for operating leverage. Finally, as firms are state-owned, the marginal effect of both operating and financing leverage will be higher.

This study examines how ESG affects the market value of cash holdings to shareholders. Using Chinese listed firms as our research sample, we find that firm ESG performance negatively impacts the effect of cash holdings on excess stock returns. The empirical results show that both principal-agent and principal-principal agency conflicts strengthen ESG’s negative effect on the value of cash holdings. Further analysis shows that ESG’s negative effect is more pronounced for firms with less investor attention and more financial constraints. The results are robust to various tests and alternative explanations.