In the construction of ecological civilization, green innovation has become an important driving force for the sustainable development of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper uses panel data of state-owned listed enterprises from 2008 to 2019 to explore mixed-ownership reform’s influence on the green transformation of SOEs and its specific mechanisms. The results show that the diversity of mixed shareholders, the depth of mixed equity, and the restriction of mixed equity significantly promote the SOEs’ green innovation. Moreover, there are distinctions in the impact of the shareholding ratio of heterogeneous shareholders on green innovation. Only the increase in the shareholding ratio of foreign shareholders has a positive correlation with green innovation. The mechanism tests indicate that the mixed-ownership reform plays a governance role in the green transformation of SOEs by optimizing the reasonable allocation of environmental protection subsidies and propelling environmental social responsibility’s active performance. Our study further subdivides the significant promotion effect of mixed-ownership reform on green innovation, finding that it only exists in the SOEs in heavily polluting industries and regions with a high degree of marketization. Finally, we find that the ownership structure adjustment caused by the mixed-ownership reform has improved SOEs’ environmental management system and facilitated its sustainable development capabilities.

China's rapid economic development has caused some environmental damage in recent years. The popularity of the Internet has enriched the ways for investors to obtain information, which would exert an impact on corporate environmental behavior. Focusing on micro-enterprise green innovation from the perspective of informal regulation, this paper investigates the impact of investor attention on corporate green innovation. This study takes Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018 as samples, constructs panel fixed-effects models and adopts multiple linear, Logistic and Tobit regressions. This article finds that investor attention, measured by the web search index, can significantly improve corporate green innovation. The conclusion is still valid after a series of robust tests. Besides, mechanism tests reveal that investor attention can promote corporate green innovation by improving the implementation efficiency of punitive environmental regulation, the use efficiency of environmental subsidies, and by increasing the reputation cost of enterprises. In additional tests, this paper further clarifies that investors' attention to negative public opinion can play a better role in environmental governance, and reveals the reason why investors are motivated to improve corporate green innovation. This research puts forward a unique perspective, which extends the understanding of informal environmental regulation and enriches research on green innovation at the micro-enterprise level, promoting the cross research of finance and environmental protection.

Guided by the conviction that “Clear waters and green mountains are as good as mountains of gold and silver”, China highly values sustainable economic and social development through innovation and Internet technology. Regression analysis is performed to examine the impact of corporate information disclosure environment proxied by the Internet penetration rate on innovation. Leveraging from the city-level Internet penetration rates data in China from 2003 to 2017, this study gets the following findings: (1) Firms headquartered in cities with high Internet penetration rates tend to be more innovative, i.e. they invest more in research and development. (2) This result is supported by several robustness checks, such as alternative measures of key variables, alternative empirical specifications, and tests to mitigate identification concerns. (3) "financing constraint" and "tolerance of innovation failure" are two channels that influence firms’ innovative endeavors. (4) Additional tests show that Internet penetration rates facilitate a firm’s output efficiency of innovation input, total factor productivity, and human capital environment for innovation. The above conclusions not only enrich the relevant literature on the influencing factors of corporate innovation from the perspective of the firm information disclosure environment but also provide an important reference for further understanding the positive role of macro technology development on social and economic development.

This paper aims to empirically analyze the herd behavior in the VC market in the context of China, including the existence, causes and consequences of herding among venture capitalists. For our empirical analysis, we first construct a herding measure and confirm the existence of herd behavior in the Chinese VC market. Then, we perform OLS/logit regression to examine the causes and consequences of herding among venture capitalists. Our results suggest that herd behavior in the venture capital market are driven by positive signals of essential information and a higher degree of information uncertainty. However, we find no evidence of the influence of feedback trading signals on herding among venture capitalists. Further analysis suggests that a better external information environment would help weaken the herding among venture capitalists, while their reputation concerns might amplify the herding effect. Finally, we examine the economic consequence of the herding and find that the herd behavior of venture capitalists would have an adverse effect on their exit performance. In addition to the enrichment and development of herding theory, our study also provides an essential theoretical frame and policy implications for the steady growth of the venture capital market in emerging economies.

Leveraging from the online search index of Chinese listed companies from 2012 to 2018, we empirically test the relationship between investors’ attention and corporate innovation performance for the first time. The main results are as follows: (1) investors’ attention significantly improves listed companies’ innovation performance, which is reflected in the increase of patent applications. This indicates that investors’ active information collection behaviour affects China’s economic development by promoting enterprise innovation. (2) This paper’s conclusion remains intact after a battery of robustness checks, such as alternative measures of key variables and empirical specifications and a series of endogenous treatment. (3) The mechanisms tests show that: “information asymmetry”, “financing constraint”, and “agency cost” are supported. In other words, with the increase of investors’ attention, not only the information asymmetry is reduced, which greatly improved the information environment of the capital market, but also the external financing constraints of enterprises are alleviated. The opportunistic management behaviour is effectively suppressed, thus motivating the corporate innovation incentives and improving the corporate innovation of input, output and quality. (4) Further research shows that investor attention to listed companies also improves the efficiency of capital allocation. This paper’s conclusion shows that investors’ initiative information acquisition behaviour can improve enterprises innovation performance, thus providing a driving force for China’s economic development.

This article constructs the measurement index of core competence by text analysis method and empirically tests its impact on the cost of debt. We find that the stronger the core competence, the lower the cost of debt. The mechanism test shows that the impact of core competence on the cost of debt is mainly realized by reducing the default risk and alleviating the agency problem. In further research, after distinguishing the types of core competence, we find that core competence of resources, especially the tangible resources, is the key factor to effectively reduce the cost of debt; after distinguishing the nature of property rights, we find that the impact of core competence on the cost of debt mainly plays a role in non-state-owned enterprises with strong financing constraints. This article not only enriches the literature on the economic consequences of core competence and factors affecting the cost of debt, but also provides scientific support for the government and other relevant department to alleviate the problem of financing difficulties and financing expensive.