Group of Na Hao& Xiaoxue Liu: Anthropomorphic Robots, Job Insecurity and Customer Preference in Service Industry: Testing Uncanny Valley Curve in Restaurants

This paper focuses on how job insecurity affects consumers’ choice of anthropomorphic robots. As the degree of anthropomorphism of robots increases, the participants' preferences show a trend similar to the Uncanny Valley curve. The job insecurities brought by robots will lead people to resist anthropomorphic robots. They are more resistant to emotional anthropomorphic robots than appearance anthropomorphic robots. The job insecurities brought by robots make consumers resist restaurants with a mixture of humans and highly anthropomorphic robots, but they are willing to accept restaurants only with ordinary robots.

Group of  Feng Zhao: Corporate Climate Risk Disclosure and Institutional Investor Holdings

This study investigates the impact of corporate climate risk disclosure on institutional investor shareholdings. The empirical results show that the disclosure of climate risk increases institutional investor ownership. The economic mechanism behind this finding is that climate risk disclosure reduces stock price crash risk, improves stock performance and promotes corporate reputation. This study is among the first to provide market-wide empirical evidence in the emerging market on how institutional investor ownership is affected by corporate climate risk disclosure, which further contributes to the mixed findings of how the financial market perceives climate risk information.

Group of Jun Zhou: The sword of damocles: Debt and depression

This paper investigates the heterogeneous effects of formal and informal debt on mental health. We use unique data on Chinese households between 2014 and 2018 to examine the relationship between household debt obtained from different sources and the possibility of suffering from depression. Our main findings indicate that indebtedness is linked to depression and impairs borrowers’ mental health and other health conditions. Furthermore, we suggest that this negative impact is mainly due to borrowing from informal creditors, whereas debt obtained from formal sources has a negligible impact on depression.