Does employee stock ownership plan have monitoring and incentive effects? --An analysis based on the perspective of corporate risk taking.

This study uses sample data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006 to 2022 and employs methods such as propensity score matching (PSM), difference-in-differences (DID), and instrumental variables (IV) to study the supervisory incentive effect of ESOPs from the perspective of corporate risk-taking. The results indicate that ESOPs significantly increase corporate risk-taking. The specific mechanism is that ESOPs reduce the dual agency costs between shareholders and managers, as well as between managers and employees, thereby alleviating corporate financing constraints and enhancing the level of corporate risk-taking. The enhancement of corporate risk-taking through ESOPs was also found to be of high quality. This is because ESOPs promote R&D investment that benefits the growth of corporate value and also reduce overinvestment and excessive debt that are detrimental to corporate value, thus leading to a higher quality of corporate risk-taking and stronger value effects. In addition, the design differences of ESOPs have different effects on corporate risk-taking: leverage, high discount, longer lock-up and tenure periods, and plans managed by third-party institutions have a stronger promotion effect on corporate risk-taking; employee subscription is more effective than executive subscription in promoting corporate risk-taking; in China, ESOPs do not have a "free-rider" problem, and the larger the proportion of ESOP issuance, the more participants, and the larger the scale of funds, the better the implementation effect.

Coculture, An Efficient Biotechnology for Mining the Biosynthesis Potential of Macrofungi via Interspecies Interactions.

Macrofungi, which are also known as mushrooms, can produce various bioactive constituents and have become promising resources as lead drugs and foods rich in nutritional value. However, the production of these bioactive constituents under standard laboratory conditions is inefficiency due to the silent expression of their relevant genes. Coculture, as an important activation strategy that simulates the natural living conditions of macrofungi, can activate silent genes or clusters through interspecific interactions. Coculturing not only can trigger the biosynthesis of diverse secondary metabolites and enzymes of macrofungi, but is also useful for uncovering the mechanisms of fungal interspecific interactions and novel gene functions. In this paper, coculturing among macrofungi or between macrofungi and other microorganisms, the triggering and upregulation of secondary metabolites and enzymes, the potential medicinal applications, and the fungal-fungal interaction mechanisms are reviewed. Finally, future challenges and perspectives in further advancing coculture systems are discussed.