Cheng Yan

University of Essex · Essex Business School (EBS)

This paper examines the role of external resources and information advantages embedded in a firm's alumni network in the adoption of aggressive competitive strategies. We extend the competitive dynamics literature and social network theory by analysing the effect that the acquisition of external resources and information advantage has on corporate...

This study empirically investigates the impact of public environmental concerns on the pay gap within polluting companies. It uses the extreme environmental event of the PM2.5 surge at the end of 2011, which led to an upsurge in public environmental concerns in China, as a quasi-natural experiment. According to our findings, public environmental co...

Using a large sample of S&P 1500 firms during 1993–2021, we empirically examine the implications of CEO gender on corporate debt structure. We find that after controlling for endogeneity, firms managed by female CEOs issue less debt than those managed by male CEOs. Female CEOs being more risk averse than male CEOs is the underlying mechanism which...

This paper studies the impact of green disclosure on firm investment efficiency, leveraging a policy experiment in China. Since 2012, the Chinese government has begun to implement the Ambient Air Quality Standards (AQS), which have strengthened the requirements for green disclosure throughout the country. We exploit the rollout of the AQS and find...

Synopsis The research problem This paper assesses whether and how people’s perceptions of time — strong future time reference (FTR) versus weak FTR — affect corporate default risk. Motivation or theoretical reasoning Studies have shown that default risk varies across firms, regions, and countries, highlighting the need for a comprehensive understan...

This research examines how media coverage affects stock price delays, a crucial indicator of how efficiently information is reflected in market prices. Using a comprehensive dataset of 297,718 firm-year observations across 38 countries from 2000 to 2021, the study reveals a notable inverse relationship between media coverage and stock price delays....

The popularity of the circular economy attracts more attention to balance environmental and economic impacts. Many supply chain remanufacturing firms have started to use the cash flow to invest in cost-reduction technologies to increase profits. However, the uncertainty of cash flow significantly affects the technology investment effectiveness, and...

Green innovation is a key driver of green transition. However, empirical research on the positive economic consequences of green innovation is limited, which may reduce the incentive of companies to engage in green innovation. This study examines the data from Chinese listed companies for the years from 2003 to 2019 to investigate the effect of cor...

We study the relationship between the level of societal trust in a country and corporate trust-building activities. Using an international sample of firms from 32 countries from the period of 2004-to 2018 and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR)...

This study investigates peer effects in the online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market using data from a Chinese online lending platform (Renrendai). The empirical results indicate that peers’ greater success rate in attracting loans leads to borrowers’ greater success rate (peer effects of lending), and peers’ greater default rates lead to borrowers...

We empirically investigate the effect of the centrality of mutual funds (MFs) on the holding network of each listed firm in cross-province acquisitions in China using a unique dataset covering the 2010–2019 period. We find a positive association between the centrality of MFs and the likelihood and value of cross-province acquisitions made by the li...

With the successful convening of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) and the constraints of carbon neutrality targets, China faces an increasingly severe task of energy conservation, reducing emissions, and improving carbon emission efficiency (CEE). The development of the Internet economy provides a perfect opportunity for Ch...

We study the effects of oil price uncertainty (OPU) on stock price informativeness based on investment-price sensitivity. Using Chinese stocks from 2008 to 2021, we find a negative relationship between OPU and the strength of Tobin's q (a standardized measure of prices) for predicting investment opportunities. This finding is likely due to the crow...

This paper examines the relationship between oil price uncertainty and stock price information for managerial decision making. Under the investment-q sensitivity framework, we use the data of listed U.S. companies from 2008 to 2020 and find that oil price uncertainty has a positive impact on investment-q sensitivity that is mainly driven by the cro...

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effect of pilot green financial reform and innovation zones on corporate investment efficiency. To this end, we rely on a quasi-natural experiment of China’s introduction of this pilot policy in 2017. Our sample covers A-share listed Chinese companies from 2015 to 2020, and the di...

We examine the effects of managerial compensation (i.e., inside debt holdings of chief executive officer, CEO) on price efficiency, proxied by the measures of stock price delay. Based on a sample of 2,617 firm-year observations for the 2006–2017 period, we find that CEO inside debt holdings have a significant positive effect on price efficiency. Fur...

This paper uses a new measure of international trade, i.e. the international trade potential index, to measure the welfare gains from trade across countries. The measure is based on the import shares of countries in their gross domestic products. It is observed that gains from international trade are low in prosperous economies, but they are larger...

Capital investment is vital for sustainable tourism growth, particularly in times of geopolitical turmoil. This study examines how tourism investment was influenced by geopolitical risks considering social globalization as a moderating factor. Data were collected from 18 developing economies between 1995 and 2018. The results from the fixed-effects...

We examine whether the public environmental concerns promote the development of new energy enterprises through a quasi-experiment China's extreme event of 2011 when the PM2.5 Surge incident escalated public environmental concerns. After this incident, the market power of new energy enterprises in severely polluted regions became 108% higher than th...

Using the sample of China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2019 and the index of jinshi density to measure the historical imperial examination system, we empirically test the influence of the imperial examination system on corporate social responsibility. We find that the imperial examination system can encourage firms to improve their Corpo...

We provide a theoretical model in which investor attention affects the cross-section of equity returns. Based on the reaction of three types of investors to market signals, we derive a negative (positive) correlation between the proportion of continuous attentive (new attentive) investors and stock returns. We also provide empirical support for the...

We empirically gauge the relative importance of the various push and pull factors for the magnitude of foreign flows to 51 emerging markets (EMs) across quantiles. We propose a quantile regression dynamic panel model with fixed effects and reveal several new findings: (a) Global risk aversion and regional contagion are generally significant across...

We investigate bubble-like dynamics in 22 Emerging Market Economies (EMEs). We identify the existence of synchronized stock markets' exuberance across EMEs before the 2000s Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We also investigate whether international short-term capital flows help to predict such episodes of exuberance. We find that all three types of sh...

We study whether Google search behavior for “mortgage assistance” and “foreclosure help” aggregated in the mortgage default risk indicator (MDRI) of Chauvet et al. (2016) helps predict future house prices and foreclosures in local residential markets. Using a long-run equilibrium model, we disaggregate house prices into their fundamental and bubble...

In this paper, we regard the Baidu index as an indicator of investors' attention to China's epidemic stocks. We believe that when seeking information to guide investment decisions, investor sentiment is usually affected by the information provided by the Baidu search engine, which may cause stock prices to fluctuate. Therefore, we constructed a GAR...

Background: This article studies the relationship between the COVID-19 epidemic, public sentiment, and the volatility of infectious disease equities from the perspective of the United States. We use weekly data from January 3, 2020 to March 7, 2021. This provides a sufficient dataset for empirical analysis. Granger causality test results prove the...

We investigate the impact of public environmental concern (PEC) on corporate green investments from the perspective of CEO turnover using the extreme event of PM 2.5 surge at the end of 2011 in China as a quasi-natural experiment. Compared with non-heavily polluting companies, the probability of CEO turnover in heavily polluting ones has significan...

Using daily credit/debit card spending data for personal consumption expenditures for the period from 24 January 2020 to 10 June 2020, this paper shows that personal consumption expenditures in the United States have been significantly affected by the economic shocks in the COVID-19 era. The evidence is valid when we consider the data both at the n...

We examine the problem of an investor who trades in a market with unobservable regime shifts. The investor learns from past prices and is subject to transaction costs. Our model generates significantly larger liquidity premia compared with a benchmark model with observable market shifts. The larger premia are driven primarily by suboptimal risk exp...

We investigate the role of managerial ability in the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm performance in the energy industry, where sustainability issues are of special interest. We first identify a positive association between CSR and firm value, which, however, disappears when considering managerial ability. Only th...

This paper empirically investigates the out‐of‐sample performance of the 1/N naive rule and the Markowitz mean–variance strategies in the largest emerging market (i.e., China's A‐shares market) and provides three new findings. First, we show that some mean–variance optimization strategies can outperform the 1/N rule in China's A‐shares market, whil...

This study investigates the impacts of access to high-speed railway networks (HSRN) on urban innovative performance using a difference-in-difference method and a unique dataset including patents, nighttime lights, and HSRN at the city-level in China. First, access to HSRN significantly and positively affects the city’s innovative performance. Resul...

In this study, we investigate the effects of globalisation on polarisation in a panel data set of 149 countries between 2000 and 2017. We consider the Revisited KOF Globalisation indices and two measures of polarisation: polarisation of society and political polarisation. The findings show that globalisation decreases polarisation. We also separate...

This paper examines the implication of top executive gender on the zombie likelihood of firms listed in China's stock market. Our investigation shows that an increase in female executive percentage can significantly reduce corporate risk and zombie likelihood. This reduction in zombie likelihood is mainly achieved by the financial supervision of th...

Infrastructure fund is a critical way to improve the liquidity of infrastructure projects and enhance the professional management ability of investment. The paper fills the gap in the academic research of infrastructure funds, namely investigating investors’ preferences and possible conflict of interest between investors and fund companies. This pa...