Using a gravity-like approach, we study how Covid-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries' imports from China during 2020. We find that a country's own Covid-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its imports from China, suggesting that the negative demand effects prevailed over the negative supply effects of the pandemic. On the other hand, Covid-19 deaths in the main trading partners of a country (excluding China) induces more imports from China, partially offsetting countries' own effects. The net effect of moving from the prepandemic situation to another where the main variables are evaluated at their 2020 mean is, on average, a reduction of nearly 10% in imports from China. There is also significant heterogeneity. For example, the negative own effects of the pandemic vanish when we restrict the sample to medical goods and are significantly mitigated for products with a high "workfrom-home" share or a high contract intensity for products exported under processing trade, and for capital goods. We also find that deaths and lockdowns in previous months tend to increase current imports from China, partially offsetting the contemporaneous trade loss, suggesting that trade is not simply "destroyed," but partially "postponed". JEL-Codes: F140.

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Using a gravity-like approach, we study how Covid-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries' imports from China during 2020. We find that a country's own Covid-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its imports from China, suggesting that the negative demand effects prevailed over the negative supply effects of the pandemic. On the other hand, Covid-19 deaths in the main trading partners of a country (excluding China) induces more imports from China, partially offsetting countries' own effects. The net effect of moving from the pre-pandemic situation to another where the main variables are evaluated at their 2020 mean is, on average, a reduction of nearly 10% in imports from China. There is also significant heterogeneity. For example, the negative own effects of the pandemic vanish when we restrict the sample to medical goods and are significantly mitigated for products with a high "work-from-home" share or a high contract intensity for products exported under processing trade, and for capital goods. We also find that deaths and lockdowns in previous months tend to increase current imports from China, partially offsetting the contemporaneous trade loss, suggesting that trade is not simply "destroyed," but partially "postponed."

This paper investigates the effect of the quality of environmental information disclosure of firms on their bank financing and further examines the moderating effect of formal and informal institutions on this effect using China as a laboratory. We find that the quality of environmental information disclosure is positively (negatively) related to the scale (cost) of bank financing. Furthermore, the formal institution (proxied by the official issuance of the Green Credit Guidelines) strengthens the above relationship. Moreover, the informal institution (proxied by bank connection) weakens the association between the quality of environmental information disclosure and bank financing. Our results are valid after addressing the potential endogeneity between environmental information disclosure and bank financing and remain unchanged in various robustness tests. Our findings affirm the decision usefulness of corporate environmental information disclosure that can be used by companies as an effective strategy for obtaining bank financing and the ethical integrity of borrowers to banks as an important group of capital market participants.

(1) Background: in early 2020, COVID-19 broke out. Driven by people’s psychology of conformity, panic, group polarization, etc., various rumors appeared and spread wildly, and the Internet became a hotbed of rumors. (2) Methods: the study selected Weibo as the research media, using topic models, time series analysis, sentiment analysis, and Granger causality testing methods to analyze the social media texts related to COVID-19 rumors. (3) Results: in study 1, we obtained 21 topics related to “COVID-19 rumors” and “outbreak rumors” after conducting topic model analysis on Weibo texts; in study 2, we explored the emotional changes of netizens before and after rumor dispelling information was released and found people’s positive emotions first declined and then rose; in study 3, we also explored the emotional changes of netizens before and after the “Wuhan lockdown” event and found positive sentiment of people in non-Wuhan areas increased, while negative sentiment of people in Wuhan increased; in study 4, we studied the relationship between rumor spread and emotional polarity and found negative sentiment and rumor spread was causally interrelated. (4) Conclusion: These findings could help us to intuitively understand the impact of rumors spread on people’s emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic and help the government take measures to reduce panic.