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This study examines how human capital in the financial sector affects corporate debt maturity. To illustrate the mechanisms underlying the effects, we propose a theoretical framework that highlights the effects of human capital in the financial sector on mitigating the information asymmetry between financial intermediaries, households, and firms. Using the Chinese National Economic Census in 2008 and the Industrial Enterprises Database over 2011–2013, we find that the financial sector's human capital plays a significant and positive (negative) role in short-term (long-term) debt and this effect is more pronounced for firms with greater information asymmetry. Further analyses demonstrate that the baseline findings are consistent with the credit supply hypothesis. Our study indicates that human capital in the financial sector strengthens its renegotiation capacity for corporate borrowing, which is consistent with China's financial repression policy and leads to increased exposure of firms to credit and liquidity risks.

Whereas numerous studies have evaluated the effects of public research and development (RD thus, enhancing regional innovation capacity. Our findings document that China's land resource is a curse for its innovation-driven growth as it impedes local governments' fiscal incentives for R&D.

This paper designs a quasi-natural experiment for the identification of causal relationships between economic policy uncertainty and firms' investment-financing decisions using China's supply-side structural reform in 2015. We construct measures of asset reversibility across industries using China's national input–output flow table and match them with nonfinancial firms listed in China's A-share stock market from 2013 to 2017. We then use the difference-in-difference estimation strategy to investigate two-dimensional variations in periods (i.e., before and after 2015) and asset reversibility (i.e., high- and low-reversibility industries). The empirical results show that economic policy uncertainty significantly impedes real investment and reduces net debt issuance for private firms, whereas no such effects exist in state-owned firms. Interestingly, however, economic policy uncertainty has no significant impact on firms' cash-holding decisions.

Based on an extended neoclassical growth model, this paper explores the endogenous mechanism between financial structure and economic growth. Our theoretical analysis shows that there exists an optimal financial structure evolving to meet different demands of the real economy in the process of economic development. We then investigate whether financial structure matters for economic growth using a panel data of 29 provinces across the eastern, central, and western regions in China from 1996 to 2013. The empirical results show that financial structure has a significant impact on economic growth. However, the effect of financial structure on regional economic growth varies and presents an inverse U-shape. These results confirm the evolving effect of financial structure on economic growth at different stages of economic development.