The Stock Performance of Green Bond Issuers During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of China

The green bond (GB) is a new financial product in the green finance field that has recently become a corporate social responsibility (CSR) tool for organizations. Previous studies show that high-CSR firms receive more trust from shareholders during a financial crisis. This paper aims to assess the stock performance of publicly listed Chinese companies that issued GBs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bond sample covers 2016–2019 and consists of 67 listed issuers. The paper uses the event study method based on the market and Fama-French (1993) three-factor models. Our results show that GB issuers exhibited significantly positive cumulative abnormal stock returns on the official announcement dates of the COVID-19 outbreak. The positive cumulative abnormal returns are mainly driven by non-financial GB issuers rather than financial GB issuers. The results reflect the attitudes of investors toward GB-issuing companies primarily in the context of the crisis and contribute to the development of green finance policies.

The Stock Performance of Green Bond Issuers During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of China

The green bond (GB) is a new financial product in the green finance field that has recently become a corporate social responsibility (CSR) tool for organizations. Previous studies show that high-CSR firms receive more trust from shareholders during a financial crisis. This paper aims to assess the stock performance of publicly listed Chinese companies that issued GBs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bond sample covers 2016–2019 and consists of 67 listed issuers. The paper uses the event study method based on the market and Fama-French (1993) three-factor models. Our results show that GB issuers exhibited significantly positive cumulative abnormal stock returns on the official announcement dates of the COVID-19 outbreak. The positive cumulative abnormal returns are mainly driven by non-financial GB issuers rather than financial GB issuers. The results reflect the attitudes of investors toward GB-issuing companies primarily in the context of the crisis and contribute to the development of green finance policies.

A protein-protein interaction map reveals that the Coxiella burnetii effector CirB inhibits host proteasome activity.

Coxiella burnetii is the etiological agent of the zoonotic disease Q fever, which is featured by its ability to replicate in acid vacuoles resembling the lysosomal network. One key virulence determinant of C. burnetii is the Dot/Icm system that transfers more than 150 effector proteins into host cells. These effectors function to construct the lysosome-like compartment permissive for bacterial replication, but the functions of most of these effectors remain elusive. In this study, we used an affinity tag purification mass spectrometry (AP-MS) approach to generate a C. burnetii-human protein-protein interaction (PPI) map involving 53 C. burnetii effectors and 3480 host proteins. This PPI map revealed that the C. burnetii effector CBU0425 (designated CirB) interacts with most subunits of the 20S core proteasome. We found that ectopically expressed CirB inhibits hydrolytic activity of the proteasome. In addition, overexpression of CirB in C. burnetii caused dramatic inhibition of proteasome activity in host cells, while knocking down CirB expression alleviated such inhibitory effects. Moreover, we showed that a region of CirB that spans residues 91-120 binds to the proteasome subunit PSMB5 (beta 5). Finally, PSMB5 knockdown promotes C. burnetii virulence, highlighting the importance of proteasome activity modulation during the course of C. burnetii infection.

The Impact of Covid-19 on the Performance of Chinese Online-Educational Industry

At the firm level, the COVID-19 outbreak might affect the stock market (Iyke, 2020a;Liu et al., 2020;Narayan, 2020), firm performance in the energy industry (Fu and Shen, 2020), and other aspects (Hagerty and Williams, 2020). The outbreak of COVID-19 promoted the development of the online education industry to a great extent from several areas, including the supply of interconnection products combining software and hardware;Supply of communication equipment, T.V. network, terminal, and other equipment;Display equipment manufacturers newly increased the construction of distance education platform;Office video conference solution supplier, extending to education classroom;Software technology, system integration, and cloud service provider provide applications in the education industry;Many offline education companies and institutions were transforming to online education, Etc. According to The Ministry of Education, a "School's Out, But Class's On" campaign was announced during the postponed period, aiming to provide students with learning resources and a learning support service1 (Zhou et al., 2020). [...]the demand for online courses increased rapidly, and the user number of EdTech companies has surged.

The Impact of COVID-19 on the E-commerce Companies in China

[...]it has a positive effect. Because the buyers and sellers do not need to meet face-to-face and are carried out in the open Internet network environment, various business activities of e-commerce have incredibly played its advantages. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is reflected in the daily increase in cases and deaths. [...]this paper attempts to solve the problems of what is the overall impact of Covid-19 on Chinese e-commerce companies in 2020. According to Nakhete and Jain (2020), 205 countries and their economies and politics have been infected with the virus. According to the survey, 52% of consumers avoid shopping in physical stores, and 36% of them do not go to the physical stores before they are vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine, which means that the short run of the fundamental business is declining.

Discovery and Full Genome Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 in Stool Specimen from a Recovered Patient, China.

SARS-CoV-2 was found in a recovered patient's stool specimen by combining quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) and genome sequencing. The patient was virus positive in stool specimens for at least an additional 15 days after he was recovered, whereas respiratory tract specimens were negative. The discovery of the complete genome of SARS-CoV-2 in the stool sample of the recovered patient demonstrates a cautionary warning that the potential mode of the virus transmission cannot be excluded through the fecal-oral route after viral clearance in the respiratory tract.