This article traces the history of the first Chinese life insurance company: the China United Assurance Society. China United was founded in Shanghai in 1912 as a purely Chinese-owned enterprise and became the first Chinese life insurer to survive past its eighth year. By 1935, it boasted insurance in force of over 20 million yuan. In adapting life insurance to Republican China, China United had to contend with a number of extraordinary challenges. It had to train a corps of Chinese technical experts in a country without a single accredited actuary. It had to cultivate demand for a product that was poorly understood and often distrusted. At the same time, the Society was forced to find a way to manage a nationwide sales network that could market insurance products to a country that hitherto had little knowledge of life insurance. In doing so, it was threatened by interethnic strife sparked by racist practices of the foreign manager. Finally, China United had to overcome increasingly fierce competition, high lapse rates, and excess mortality that combined to drive underwriting profits negative. The Society was able to survive as a going concern only through its investing prowess in Chinese capital markets. Using previously unmined sources from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, this article charts China United’s turbulent process of indigenization, and explores its lasting legacies in the contemporary Chinese life insurance industry.

This article explores the formation and early history of the American Institute of the City of New-York, which in the 1830s became the leading lobby association of “friends of industry” in the United States. More specifically, the article considers how the institute’s officers sought to overcome obstacles of collective mobilization that had plagued earlier pro-industry associations. Pre–Civil War interest groups is an understudied area, and historians typically depict the years following in the Compromise of 1833 as a period essentially devoid of pro-industry agitation. However, it was in precisely in these years that friends of industry for the first time managed to obtain the resources necessary for sustained mobilization. Key to the American Institute’s success, this article argues, was the development of annual manufacturing fairs, events that provided steady revenue, strengthened internal cohesion, attracted new members, facilitated coordination with like-minded groups, and provided opportunities to engage in popular politics in an ordered manner.

This article explores the powerful ways in which black business owners supported the Civil Rights movement. Business owners such as Leah Chase, Gus Courts, A. G. Gaston, and Amzie Moore, among others, contributed resources and organizational skills to the fight for racial justice. But the relationship between business owners and activists within the movement was at times characterized by tension. Although business owners sometimes found the approach of activists to be too radical and activists sometimes found the business owners’ approach to be too conservative, they found ways to compromise in order to work cooperatively toward racial justice.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved as a disruptive technology, impacting a wide range of human rights-related issues ranging from discrimination to supply chain due diligence. Given the increasing human rights obligations of companies and the intensifying discourse on AI and human rights, we shed light on the responsibilities of corporate actors in terms of human rights standards in the context of developing and using AI. What implications do human rights obligations have for companies developing and using AI? In our article, we discuss firstly whether AI inherently conflicts with human rights and human autonomy. Next, we discuss how AI might be linked to the beneficence criterion of AI ethics and how AI might be applied in human rights-related areas. Finally, we elaborate on individual aspects of what it means to conform to human rights, addressing AI-specific problem areas.

By integrating staggered interstate banking deregulation into a gravity model following Goetz, Laeven, and Levine (2013), (2016), we construct a time-varying, bank-specific instrument for geographic diversification and investigate its causal effect on corporate innovation via the lending channel. We find that bank geographic diversification spurs corporate innovation and enhances the economic value of innovation. We identify relaxing debt covenants and alleviating borrowers’ financial constraints as the two underlying mechanisms explaining the documented effects. Moreover, by offering lenient covenants, geographically diversified banks provide greater financial and operational flexibility to borrowing firms, enabling them to engage in future mergers and acquisitions.

There is still an ongoing debate regarding the firm performance implications of pay gaps between top executives and subordinate employees. This study integrates relative deprivation theory and tournament theory to investigate the potential nonlinear effects of pay gaps. We expect that at low levels of pay inequality, increased inequality hurts firm productivity, while at higher levels of pay inequality, increased inequality helps firm productivity. Our study of Chinese firms confirms that pay gaps have an approximately U-shaped relationship with firm performance. This nonlinear relationship is weaker in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than in non-SOEs, suggesting that state ownership is an important moderator in the association. Overall, this study explains previous mixed findings regarding consequences of pay gaps with meaningful implications for policymakers and entrepreneurs in China and other economies with similar cultural and institutional backgrounds.