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In this article, we contribute to the earnings management literature by addressing the issue of Related Party Transactions (RPTs) during a firm's Initial Public Offering (IPO) process. We regard RPT-based earnings management as a kind of agency problem in the context of Chinese IPOs, and argue that the conflicts of interests between the controlling shareholders and the minority shareholders are the root of RPT-based earnings management in Chinese IPOs. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that RPT-based earnings management in a portfolio of earnings management tools including accruals management, and how it affects the firm's post-IPO long-term performance in China. Using 257 Chinese A and B shares IPOs during 1999 and 2000, our empirical findings suggest that controlling shareholders structure operating RPTs in pre-IPO period and these RPTs are positively associated with firm's operating performance. The decline in operating RPTs after IPO contributes to firm's post-IPO long-term underperformance and negatively affects firms' stock return.

Global warming and Climate change are now widely recognized as two of the most important issues facing human society. Thus, the determinants of CO 2 emissions have attracted many researchers over the past few decades. One of the important factors is the democracy level of a country. Most of studies, however, ignore the possibility that effect of democracy on CO 2 emissions could vary throughout the CO 2 emissions distribution. In this paper, we address this issue by applying panel quantile regression methods. Our results show that the effect of democracy on CO 2 emissions is higher heterogeneous across conditional distribution of pollution. The coefficient is highly significant and has the positive sign at lower quantiles. Yet the magnitude decreases toward the higher quantiles and then it becomes insignificant. However, it turns into negative and becomes significant again at the higher quantile. In addition, financial openness is not statistically significant at any quantile. These novel findings not only help advance the existing literature, but also can be of special interest to policy makers.

This paper empirically examines the effects of urbanization and income inequality on CO emissions in the BRICS economies (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) during the periods 1994-2013. The method we used is the panel quantile regression, which takes into account the unobserved individual heterogeneity and distributional heterogeneity. Our empirical results indicate that urbanization has a significant and negative impact on carbon emissions, except in the 80, 90, and 95 quantiles. We also quantitatively investigate the direct and indirect effect of urbanization on carbon emissions, and the results show that we may underestimate urbanization's effect on carbon emissions if we ignore its indirect effect. In addition, in middle- and high-emission countries, income inequality has a significant and positive impact on carbon emissions. The results of our study indicate that in the BRICS economies, there is an inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) between the GDP per capita and carbon emissions. The conclusions of this study have important policy implications for policymakers. Policymakers should try to narrow the income gap between the rich and the poor to improve environmental quality; the BRICS economies can speed up urbanization to reduce carbon emissions, but they must improve energy efficiency and use clean energy to the greatest extent in the process.

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Highlights Our study confirmed the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) has good reliability and validity in frontline health workers during the outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019. The Chinese version of PCL-5 can be used as a reliable screening tool to conduct psychological screening for Chinese healthcare workers during the outbreak of 2019-nCoV. Almost 60% of frontline healthcare workers met the criteria of provisional PTSD diagnosis in the outbreak of 2019-nCoV.

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