This paper examines the impact of climate change on corporate innovation. We use the regional drought to construct the climate scenario, choose the climate sensitive firms as research samples, and find that climate change has a significant impact on corporate innovation. The deterioration of regional drought will encourage firms to carry out innovative activities, which is called “environment-incentive effect”. This influence of the drought on firms’ innovations mainly comes from two factors: Firstly, the adverse impact of regional drought on firms’ operations has forced firms to engage in innovations. Secondly, the more forward-thinking management will be better able to capture the opportunities presented by climate change and improve corporate innovation. In addition, when the geographical dispersion of subsidiaries is low, the promoting effect of drought on innovations is more pronounced, which shows the regional feature of climate effect. This paper contributes to the study of corporate innovations from the perspective of climate change and emphasizes the importance of incorporating climate risk into policy assessment and firm decision-making process.

In 1899, Veblen first used conspicuous consumption to depict the behavior of economic individuals in his The Theory of the Leisure Class. Although this theory provides an intuitive explanation for consumption behavior, limited by the data, the relevant empirical work is still rare. This paper uses a micro data of auto mortgage transaction provided by a large company in Shanghai to empirically test the impact of migrant identity on conspicuous consumption. We find that the conspicuous consumption expenditure of the migrants is significantly higher than that of local residents. On average, the automobile consumption expenditure of migrants is 2.3% higher than that of local residents. Using the theoretical relationship between the average income of reference group and conspicuous consumption behavior, this paper verifies the status signaling nature of conspicuous consumption, that is, the mechanism of seeking wealth social status by showing personal information, such as income and assets. Further welfare analysis shows that conspicuous consumption significantly increases the credit burden of the migrants, specifically, the average net present value of the credit burden of the migrants for purchasing automobile is 2533.28 yuan higher than that of the local residents. Furthermore, conspicuous consumption in the automobile market has also increased the purchase of gas guzzler, resulting in an increase in fuel consumption per 100 km of automobiles purchased by the migrants, which is equivalent to an increase of 1.226 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per vehicle during its lifetime. Overall, our findings have clear implication for understanding the consumption behavior of the migrants, reducing personal financial risk and promoting green consumption.

In the new era, can enterprises take advantage of digital transformation to alleviate the current severe overcapacity problems? Based on A-share listed companies from 2004 to 2020, this paper finds that: First, digital transformation of enterprises will significantly reduce their overcapacity. This result is still very robust with alternative measures and by using an instrumental variable. Second, by further exploring the mechanism, we find that the enterprise digital transformation reduces overcapacity by alleviating the degree of information asymmetry and improving the level of corporate governance. Third, the effect is stronger among firms with lower market competition, higher capital intensity and high firm performance volatility. Our results have policy implications for digital development and help resolve overcapacity problem.