The 8th CEIBS Finance and Accounting Symposium was held on June 27, 2025, at the CEIBS Shanghai campus. The event brought together more than 80 scholars from top universities in the US, Europe, and Asia to discuss current issues at the intersection of finance, accounting, economics, and politics.

Organised by the Department of Finance and Accounting at CEIBS, The Symposium serves as a forum for scholars to share cutting-edge research and generate new ideas that have implications for both theory and business practice. This year’s Symposium featured presentations by leading scholars as well as rising stars working in various areas of finance. Seven papers, selected from over 200 submissions, were presented during the Symposium. The Keynote Address was delivered by Professor Wei Xiong of Princeton University, who presented his paper “Taming Cycles: China’s Growth Targets and Macroeconomic Management.”

In his welcome address, CEIBS Vice President and Co-Dean Zhu Tian articulated the profound alignment between the Symposium and the School’s guiding principle of "China Depth, Global Breadth." He emphasised that bringing together distinguished international scholars to discuss significant global issues with direct relevance to China constitutes a powerful demonstration of CEIBS’s commitment to research excellence.

Keynote Speech: Taming Cycles: China’s Growth Targets and Macroeconomic Management 

Presenter: Wei Xiong, Princeton University

Professor Wei Xiong and co-authors conduct an in-depth analysis of China’s hybrid economic model, which combines state planning with market mechanisms, using annual growth targets as a central tool for macroeconomic guidance. Their research identified a distinct pattern of asymmetric adjustment in target-setting by local governments: targets are raised aggressively during economic expansions but adjusted downward only gradually during slowdowns. This behaviour became especially pronounced after 2010, leading to increased intervention in economic activity. When regional growth falls below targets, localities significantly boost infrastructure investment, land sales, and government debt. Between 2011 and 2019, over-optimistic growth targets resulted in additional local government debt equivalent to 14.0% of regional GDP. Although these measures help smooth economic fluctuations and moderate GDP deceleration, they undermine the reliability of GDP as an indicator by weakening its correlation with microeconomic fundamentals such as corporate revenues, household demand, and total factor productivity (TFP) growth.

Picking Up the PACE: Loans for Residential Climate-Proofing

Presenter: Guosong Xu, Erasmus University

Discussant: Tianyue Ruan, National University of Singapore

Professor Guosong Xu and his coauthors investigate the economic and policy implications of Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, which enable homeowners to finance environmentally friendly residential upgrades through property tax assessments. Utilising original loan-level data and an innovative method to reconstruct household investment choices using building permit descriptions, their analysis demonstrates that investments in PACE projects are capitalised into home values. However, the resulting expansion of the property tax base is partly counterbalanced by increased tax delinquency rates among participating households. The study further reveals that in counties where PACE is available, mortgage lenders extend greater credit access, indicating improved recovery values attributable to higher collateral quality despite the super-priority status of PACE liens. Overall, the adoption of PACE programs not only enhances municipal fiscal revenues but also strengthens the climate resilience of the local housing stock. Their work provides timely empirical evidence on the effectiveness of green financing incentives in promoting sustainable household investments and informing public policy design.

The Under-Disclosure of Environmental Innovation

Presenter: Elvira Sojli, University of New South Wales

Discussant: Ilona Babenko, Arizona State University

Professor Elvira Sojli presented an empirical analysis of the economic and environmental effects resulting from the disclosure of clean innovations, with a specific focus on technologies classified under the OECD’s environmental patent framework. To establish causal identification, the study employs a novel instrumental variable derived from exogenous regulatory enforcement shocks. Their findings reveal a pronounced wedge between technology spillovers and product market spillovers, demonstrating that the social returns to clean innovation disclosure substantially surpass private returns—often by an order of magnitude. This divergence underscores a critical misalignment in firms’ incentives for disclosure, an issue that remains largely unaddressed within prevailing policy frameworks. The authors argue that effective policy must not only stimulate the development of environmentally sustainable technologies but also create tangible incentives for their disclosure to ensure that society fully captures the broad benefits of technological advancement.

Inflation Expectation and Cryptocurrency Investment

Presenter: Jiasun Li, George Mason University

Discussant: Shumiao Ouyang, University of Oxford 

Professor Li and his coauthors investigate the interplay between inflation expectations and cryptocurrency investment behaviour, drawing on proprietary data from India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange and the national Household Inflation Expectations Survey. Their analysis reveals a significant positive relationship between elevated inflation expectations and individual purchases of cryptocurrencies, with the effect particularly pronounced in Bitcoin (BTC) and Tether (USDT) trading. This pattern remains robust after controlling for speculative motives, measured through surveys of expected cryptocurrency returns. The study also documents that higher inflation expectations correlate with an increase in new investors entering the cryptocurrency market. Using instrumental variables strategies, the authors provide causal evidence that households turn to cryptocurrencies—especially Bitcoin and stablecoins—as hedges against inflation. These findings help explain the notably high adoption of cryptocurrencies in developing countries that lack a globally dominant reserve currency.

The Effects of Monetary Policy on Macroeconomic Expectations: High Frequency Evidence from Traded Event Contracts

Presenter: Renxuan Wang, CEIBS 

Discussant: Dun (Calvin) Jia, Peking University

CEIBS Assistant Professor of Finance Renxuan Wang presented his work on the impact of Federal Reserve interest rate hikes on macroeconomic expectations. While standard macroeconomic models and VARs typically predict that such monetary tightening should reduce output, employment, and inflation over subsequent quarters, monthly professional forecast data often respond positively—a puzzling discrepancy that has sparked considerable debate. To address this paradox, the study employs novel high-frequency data from macroeconomic event contracts traded on Kalshi, a CFTC-licensed prediction market based in the United States. These contracts enable robust identification and estimation of the effects of monetary policy announcements on market-implied macroeconomic expectations. The results align with conventional monetary transmission channels and show little to no evidence supporting a “Fed Information Effect.” This research provides timely empirical support for traditional macroeconomic mechanisms and demonstrates the value of prediction markets in studying expectation formation.

Remotely Productive: The Efficacy of Remote Work for Executives 

Presenter: Denis Sosyura, Arizona State University

Discussant: Rik Sen, University of Georgia

Professor Denis Sosyura shared his research that examines the efficacy of remote working arrangements between CEOs and their firms. While such arrangements can help attract executive talent and mitigate labour market segmentation, they also introduce significant operational frictions. The study finds that remote CEOs are associated with lower firm operating performance, reduced market valuation, and poorer insider evaluations. These negative effects are more pronounced when the CEO resides farther from corporate headquarters, particularly across multiple time zones. To establish causality, the authors employ an instrumental variables strategy based on the private costs incurred by uprooting the CEO’s spouse, which influences the executive’s decision to work remotely. Their findings indicate that performance shortfalls are driven by CEO short-termism, informational disadvantages, and increased leisure consumption—manifested in higher acquisitions of recreational properties such as beach homes and boats. The research provides nuanced evidence on the trade-offs inherent in remote executive arrangements and highlights meaningful organisational design implications in increasingly decentralised work environments.
  
Entrepreneurial Spawning from Remote Work

Presenter: Ting Xu, University of Toronto

Discussant: John (Jianqiu) Bai, Northeastern University

Professor Xu and co-authors use a novel firm-level measure of remote work, constructed from large-scale internet activity data, to examine its impact on employee entrepreneurship during the pandemic. Their analysis reveals that firms with higher rates of remote work are significantly more likely to have employees transition into entrepreneurship—both in absolute terms and relative to other types of job turnover. Using instrumental variables and panel event studies, the authors establish a causal link between remote work and venture creation. The new businesses launched under these conditions are of notably higher quality than the average start-up. Importantly, the effect is not attributable to employee selection, shifting preferences, or involuntary turnover. Instead, remote work fosters entrepreneurship by affording employees greater time flexibility and downside protection, thereby enabling more ambitious and deliberate entrepreneurial experimentation.

Native-Immigrant Entrepreneurial Synergies

Presenter: Zhao Jin, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB)

Discussant: Dongmei Li, University of South Carolina

Professor Zhao presented his work on the performance dynamics of startups co-founded by immigrant and native entrepreneurs. By leveraging unique matched data that links startup outcomes to detailed employment and education histories of founders and early employees, this research demonstrates that mixed native-immigrant founding teams significantly outperform both all-native and all-immigrant teams. Startups with mixed teams exhibit larger employment growth three years after founding, higher probabilities of securing venture funding, access to larger funding rounds, and increased rates of successful exits. Using an instrumental variables approach that exploits the native share in university-degree programs, the study confirms that native-immigrant teams are not only larger but also more successful in attracting investment. The outperformance is driven primarily by superior access to diverse talent pools, connections to high-quality venture capitalists, and the ability to access broader product markets. These findings highlight the tangible advantages of demographic diversity in entrepreneurial founding teams.