一、主讲学生与论文题目：
1. 苏自力（2017级博士生）：Impact of Share Pledging by Controlling Shareholders on Firm Value in the Context of China's Tighter Regulatory Reforms
2. 吴祯姝（2018级博士生）：ESG in China Evidence from the COVID-19 Market Crash
3. 胡云鹏（2018级博士生）：Bank Loan Sales and Stock Price Crash Risk
二、时间：2022年5月21日（周六）下午14:00-16:30
三、地点：腾讯会议
四、点评与讨论教师：
姜富伟 suncitygroup太阳新城 教授
丁娜 suncitygroup太阳新城 助理教授
张欣然 suncitygroup太阳新城 助理教授
五、主持人：姜富伟 suncitygroup太阳新城 教授
六、论文摘要
1. Impact of Share Pledging by Controlling Shareholders on Firm Value in the Context of China's Tighter Regulatory Reforms
This paper investigates the impact of 2018 regulatory reforms of share pledging by controlling shareholder on firm value in China. Using samples span from 2015 to 2020, we find that tighter regulations effectively reduce firms’ crash risk, relax financial constraints, reduce bankruptcy risk, and mitigate controlling shareholder expropriation of minority shareholders wealth via tunnelling, hence, creating positive effects on firm value, and baseline results are robust to a variety of tests. We further reveal that controlling shareholders invest more pledged funds to the listed firm after reforms, which foster capital investment and R&D expenditure, benefit firm growth and competitiveness. Our findings offer policy implications by highlighting alter controlling shareholders’ harmful impacts on firm value by adjusting pledges regulations.
2. ESG in China Evidence from the COVID-19 Market Crash
We study the effect of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) on firm value during the COVID-19 market crash, using a novel measure of ESG performance covering the entire cross-section of China A-shares. We find that stocks with stronger ESG performance have significantly higher stock returns during the crash. The result is driven by community relations, employee relations, and information transparency. Moreover, the ESG stocks with a higher proportion of holdings by the pension fund, insurance companies, funds, brokers, and qualified foreign institutional investors experience higher stock returns during the crash. We also find, for CSI800 constituents over the period from 2016 to 2020, ESG stocks have significantly higher stock returns, return on assets and net operating margins. Interestingly, all our results confirm that the effects of ESG concentrate on non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) and do not exist for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), suggesting that private ownership affects the value of ESG in China.
3. Bank Loan Sales and Stock Price Crash Risk
We examine whether bank loan sales in the secondary market are associated with the stock price crash risk of borrowing firms from 1996 to 2017. We find that borrowing firms are associated with significantly higher stock price crash risk after bank loan sales, and such effect is concentrated in sales of the term loan, limited line, and banknotes, and loans with longer maturity. Moreover, the increase in stock price crash risk is more pronounced for firms with higher risk-taking behaviors and more financial constraints. The reduced monitoring incentives from lead lenders are identified as the underlying mechanism as it leads to higher information asymmetry and less accounting conservatism in borrowing firms. Overall, our findings provide support to the notion that bank loan sales in the secondary market have strong risk implications for stock prices.
