This study investigates the impact of the silver economy on China’s economic growth. As an aging society has taken shape, the silver economy has emerged as a critical driver of economic development. Employing panel data from 2013 to 2023 across China, this study constructs a regression analytical framework to quantify the relationship between the silver economy and the country’s economic growth. The results demonstrate a positive correlation between the silver economy and China’s economic growth, with government investment exerting a moderating effect that reinforces this relationship. Robustness tests confirm the reliability and validity of the empirical findings. This study effectively integrates diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives, thereby achieving a comprehensive quantification of the silver economy’s regional economic impact in China.

Urban residents' consumption serves as the core of the national economic cycle and a stabilizer for economic growth, while expanding domestic demand to promote consumption is a key driver of high-quality economic development. As the core wealth of urban households in China, housing value fluctuations profoundly influence consumption decisions. Against this backdrop, studying the impact of housing wealth changes on urban residents' consumption holds both theoretical and practical significance. Based on microdata and within the framework of the Life Cycle Hypothesis, this paper systematically explores the impact and mechanisms of housing wealth on consumption through empirical tests, robustness checks, heterogeneity analysis, and panel vector autoregression (PVAR) models. The results indicate that housing wealth appreciation significantly promotes total consumption and development-oriented consumption, with heterogeneous effects across groups, differential impacts from price fluctuations of different housing types, as well as asymmetric consumption effects of housing price changes. The wealth effect and credit constraint mitigation effect are identified as the core transmission mechanisms. Based on these findings, policy recommendations are proposed, including optimizing housing asset structures, reconstructing supply systems, and implementing regionally targeted regulation.

This paper systematically reviews advancements in digital empowerment theory and the design of ecosystem service platforms, with the aim of constructing an integrated theoretical framework to address the structural mismatch between design education and industry demands. It first observes that, despite the increasingly widespread application of digital technologies in design, existing platforms remain largely confined to enhancing tool efficiency or accumulating functions, lacking genuine ecological coordination mechanisms. Consequently, the promise of digital empowerment remains suspended between ideal and reality. The study traces the evolution of digital empowerment from "tools" to "enablers" and ultimately to "ecosystems," identifying five core dimensions: structural, resource, service, customer, and psychological empowerment. It further outlines four enabling pathways: technology, ecosystem, market, and talent. Additionally, the paper elucidates the definition, characteristics (user-centredness, integration, collaboration, iteration), constituent elements, and dominant models (university-led versus enterprise-led) of design ecosystem service platforms. It emphasises their role as value co-creation systems that connect the entire education-talent-industry chain. In terms of user experience, the research demonstrates that digital empowerment elevates platform engagement from "tool efficiency" to "value co-creation." It develops an evaluation framework based on participation theory, experiential scenarios, and flow theory, offering theoretical foundations and practical guidance for platform optimisation. Finally, the paper summarises its theoretical and practical contributions: theoretically, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that reveals the intrinsic mechanisms of digital empowerment; practically, it provides systematic strategies for platform construction, talent cultivation, and industry transformation, in alignment with national strategies for digital economy and innovation development. This work not only fills existing theoretical gaps but also charts a course for the future development of design ecosystem service platforms.

Vigorously developing the digital economy and promoting its integration with the real economy is a crucial strategic measure for encouraging modernization and high-quality development. Guided by the five-pronged development approach, this study presents a framework for high-quality development. The framework focuses on examining how the digital economy enables both supply and demand and advances high-quality development. The findings demonstrate a statistically significant positive effect of the digital economy on high-quality development. This conclusion remains valid when historical postal and telecommunications data, as well as the average level of digital economy development in other cities within the same province, are used as instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity issues. Mechanism tests reveal that the digital economy primarily operates through two channels: supply and demand. The digital economy leverages several functions, including optimizing the dynamic allocation of resources, guiding the cross-border flow of technology, generating new green consumption demands, and reshaping traditional consumption patterns. Consequently, there is a transformation in supply efficiency and an upgrade in demand structure. These changes propel supply and demand toward a higher level of dynamic, diverse, and complex equilibrium. Ultimately, this drives high-quality development. The study demonstrates how the digital economy enables high-quality development and provides valuable insights into integrating digital and real industries and regionally coordinating development.

Asymmetric information and economic uncertainty lead to more severe financial constraints for Chinese enterprises, prompting them to hold more cash in order to defend against future uncertainty and market competition. This paper uses Chinese-listed companies as a sample to analyze the relationship between internal control and cash holdings, and the results show that (1) the higher the quality of internal control, the higher the cash holdings. (2) The fierce product market competition promotes enterprises' precautionary motivation, thereby enhancing the positive impact of internal control on their cash holding levels. This paper shows how internal control affects the amount of cash held and how product market competition affects the relationship between internal control and cash holdings. This paper enriches cash-holding theoretical knowledge and helps enterprise managers make rational cash-holding decisions.

Amidst the global economic upheavals brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly critical to understand the role of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG for short) in corporate performance. Aiming to address the issue of how ESG influences corporate outcomes and examines whether COVID-19 moderated this relationship, this research establishes a two-way fixed effect (TWFE) panel data model by utilizing a sample of FTSE 350 firms in the UK from 2016 to 2022. Using a TWFE model, we find that higher ESG scores are significantly associated with improved return on assets (ROA) but not with return on equity (ROE) over the full period. The pandemic exerted a universally negative impact on all corporate performance metrics. However, firms with stronger ESG demonstrated greater resilience during the crisis. Further analysis reveals a nuanced moderating role of COVID-19: while the interaction between ESG and COVID-19 significantly enhanced ROA but no such effect was observed for ROE. These findings underscore the value of ESG as a risk-mitigation tool during systemic shocks and highlight the differential impact of ESG dimensions on financial outcomes. The study contributes to stakeholders theory, agency theory, signaling theory, resource-based view by contextualizing ESG's role in crisis management and provides actionable insights for firms and policymakers to prioritize ESG integration for long-term sustainability.

The raises of the federal funds rate and the US dollar have led to international capital flowing to the United States, and sudden stops events are more likely to occur in emerging economies. Sudden stops are defined as large and current-account reversal events that might cause asset price crashes and recessions. To study the impacts of sudden stops on stock market risk and the stance of monetary policy, we first construct a portfolio theory model with international capital flows. By using the time-varying parameter model, we explore the interaction between sudden stops and stock market risks, as well as the implications of monetary policy on them. We find that the occurrence of sudden stops raises the volatility of the optimal portfolio, which in turn stimulates occurrence of sudden stops, showing a pattern of “spiral rise”. The monetary policy has various effects on the relationship between the two variables for different industries.

Aquaculture production contributes to livelihood systems through the channels of employment, nutrition, farm productivity, and income growth. Empirical information on the welfare impact is relatively sparse for Nigeria. Using novel survey data on household welfare standards collected by the National Bureau of Statistics, income inequality was decomposed across livelihood systems and the relative contribution of aquaculture income estimated. In addition, the average effect of aquaculture production on selected welfare outcomes at the level of a household was determined using Propensity Score Matching technique and controlling for model specification bias. From the results, a uniform increase in aquaculture income was found to reduce income inequality and thus an equalizing enterprise income source in livelihood systems. The estimated average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) reveals that aquaculture production has a statistically significant impact on consumption and poverty reduction. Combining the results, we conclude that small-holder aquaculture production alleviates poverty, but the extent depends on the inclusiveness of programmes targeted at promoting aquaculture production. A possible implication of this result is that for aquaculture development in rural and urban areas to be poverty reducing; aquaculture income growth should be accompanied by additional policies and regulations supporting vulnerable fish farmers, such as the provision of marketing facilities, extension services, access to credit, and other market services.

This study utilizes data from A-share listed companies between the years 2012 and 2022 to empirically investigate the impact of management incentives on corporate ESG performance. The results reveal that both management compensation incentives and equity incentives can promote corporate ESG performance, but excessive incentives have a negative effect on corporate ESG performance. Furthermore, compensation incentives and equity incentives improve ESG performance by promoting corporate green innovation and reducing agency costs, and digital transformation serving a positive moderating role in this relationship. Additionally, the impact of management incentives exhibits heterogeneity, compensation incentives demonstrate a more substantial promoting effect on ESG performance in heavily polluting industries and state-owned enterprises, while equity incentives show the opposite tendency. These findings provide valuable insights for designing effective management incentive mechanisms and improving corporate ESG performance.

In recent years, as global climate change intensifies and ESG investment concepts gain prominence, climate risk has become a crucial factor for investors and financial markets. Investigating how climate risk is priced in the Chinese capital market is both theoretically and practically important for promoting the sustainable development of China's capital markets and advancing green finance. This study employs natural language processing (NLP) to quantify the proportion of climate risk-related content in the annual reports of listed companies, creating an indicator to assess their climate risk level. The study uses climate risk of listed companies as the explanatory variable and annual stock returns as the dependent variable, applying a fixed-effects model to empirically examine the impact of climate risk on investment returns. The study finds that: first, the climate risk of listed companies shows a clear trend of change over time; second, there is a significant positive correlation between the climate risk of listed companies and investment returns.