Zhaoyong Zhang

Environmental regulation can possibly enhance firm productivity through its competitiveness effects that can induce regulated firms to improve cost-cutting efficiency and to develop or adopt new technologies, known as the Porter Hypothesis, though there is still conflicting evidence reported. This paper examines the impacts of environmental regulation on firm productivity in China’s new energy industry by incorporating the mediating effect and boundary mechanism of green technological innovation and innovation openness within an innovation ecosystem. We find robust evidence that environmental regulation can enhance firms’total factor productivity (TFP) in the new energy industry with green technological innovation being the important mediator and innovation openness as the effective moderator. Our results also suggest that such positive impact of environmental regulation on productivity is region sensitive, with the eastern region being the most significant. These findings have important implications for China’s environmental regulations and policy, especially for its industrial strategy and policy on the development of new energy industry.

A great deal of the foreign aid–growth literature finds that the net effect of aggregate aid on total growth appears to be insignificant. This study argues that this aid–growth nexus can be better explained by testing the variation responses for each of growth sectors to their corresponding allocated aid inflows. It aims to investigate the heterogeneous effects of sectorally allocated aid inflows on their corresponding growth sectors (industry, agriculture and services) using data from 37 Sub-Saharan African and MENA-recipient developing nations from 1996 to 2017. We constructed two measures; one is the (SAASG) Sectoral-Allocated-Aid-for Sectoral-Growth, which was used as a major measure in the first two econometric specifications, and another one was the revised Clemens early-impact aid categories measure, which was used as the secondary measure in the third specification. The seemingly unrelated regression framework (SUR) was employed as the basic estimation approach, while the GMM approach was used to check robustness. The empirical findings revealed clear systematic impacts associated with aid distributed to each sector of growth, which may explain why the net effect of overall aid on total growth appears to be insignificant. The findings show that allocated aid inflows have a strong positive impact on agricultural growth, helping boost overall growth, whereas aid allocated to the service and industrial growth sectors tends to minimize the net benefits of total aid on growth due to financial and institutional reasons. The success of the planned scaling-up of aid to recipient countries depends on the financial system, institutional quality policies, and the ability to design a way to maintain incentives in the MENA and SSA regions’ selected recipient countries to overcome structural bottlenecks of sectoral growth.

Most existing studies on forecasting exchange rates focus on predicting next-period returns. In contrast, this study takes the novel approach of forecasting and trading the longer-term trends (macro-cycles) of exchange rates. It proposes a unique hybrid forecast model consisting of linear regression, multilayer neural network, and combination models embedded with technical trading rules and economic fundamentals to predict the macro-cycles of the selected currencies and investigate the predicative power and market timing ability of the model. The results confirm that the combination model has a significant predictive power and market timing ability, and outperforms the benchmark models in terms of returns. The finding that the government bond yield differentials and CPI differentials are the important factors in exchange rate forecasts further implies that interest rate parity and PPP have strong influence on foreign exchange market participants.

We test the impact of stock split rule changes on liquidity behavior in Bursa Malaysia during 2004–2020. Using event study methodology, this study examines stock liquidity on and around stock split days through three subperiods of study, including the first (2004–2006), second (2007–2009), and third (2010–2020) period. We find that liquidity improvement is short-lived in the first and second periods, while it is a long-lived phenomenon in the third period. Firms in the first and second period experienced liquidity improvement only on the split announcement day, while it lasts up to a year after the Ex-date for firms in the third period. Our findings also show a liquidity improvement after the Ex-date only in the third period for the groups of firms categorized based on the liquidity, split factor, and other simultaneous announcements. The findings suggest a positive effect of stock split rule changes implemented by the Securities Commission.

Systemic risk contagion is a key issue in the banking sector in maintaining financial system stability. This study is among the first few to use three different distance-to-risk measures to empirically assess the domestic interbank linkages and systemic contagion risk of the Chinese banking industry, by using bivariate dynamic conditional correlation GARCH model on data collected from eight prominent Chinese banks for the period 2006–2018. The results show a relatively high correlation among almost all the banks, suggesting an interconnectedness among the banks. We found evidence that the banking system is exposed to significant domestic contagion risks arising from systemic defaults. Given that Chinese markets deliver weak signals of forthcoming stress in banking sectors, new policy intervention is crucial to resolve the hidden stress in the system. The results have important policy implications and will provide scholars and policymakers further insight into the risk contagion originating from interbank networks.

This paper intended to employ a portfolio approach to assess the effect of exchange rate expectation on Chinese RMB internationalization and empirically test the interactive effects among short-term capital flows, RMB appreciation expectation and the internationalization process using a VAR model with monthly data ranging from February 2004 to December 2020. The results suggest that RMB exchange rate appreciation could lead to an increase in the foreign demand for RMB and RMB denominated assets, while RMB internationalization would attract more short-term capital inflow due to the reduced transaction costs. The empirical evidence from the VAR model estimation confirms the finding that expected RMB appreciation induces short-term capital inflow and promotes RMB internationalization. The robustness checks confirm the evidence. The results have important policy implication for RMB internationalization and for maintaining a sound and stable financial system.