Abstract This study develops an explainable machine learning model to predict cryptocurrency delistings using Binance data. It combines quantitative indicators (price, volume) with qualitative data from real‐time news and Reddit. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to extract topic trends and community reactions, which are transformed into time‐series features. XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost are compared, with SHAP applied for model interpretability. Results show that sharp price drops, repeated risk‐topic exposure, and Reddit responses strongly predict delisting. XGBoost achieves the best performance, offering practical insights for early warning systems and investor protection.

Abstract Bankruptcy law design has important implications for financial markets and economic growth. As bankruptcy law design interacts with local economic and political conditions, it is important to consider these factors when designing optimal bankruptcy law. This paper first describes major credit market frictions and how they interact with bankruptcy law design. After introducing important aspects of the Korean bankruptcy system, the paper discusses how economic, political, and cultural factors in Korea interact with bankruptcy law design. Based on this analysis, the paper derives implications for optimal bankruptcy design in Korea.

Abstract This study investigates the effect of a hybrid board structure that combines Anglo‐American principles with traditional Japanese practices on stock price crash risk. The 2015 amendment to Japan's Companies Act introduced the Audit and Supervisory Committee (ASC) structure, designed to strengthen outside directors' effectiveness through enhanced statutory authority, improved information access, and greater influence over board decisions. Using panel data from Japanese listed firms from 2013 to 2019 and employing a difference‐in‐differences approach, this study finds that ASC adoption significantly reduces future crash risk. This effect is more pronounced in firms with higher board independence and those with female outside directors, which benefit more from the institutional advantages of ASC adoption. However, the “unnatural selection” of outside directors weakens this relationship, indicating that formal compliance alone is insufficient to improve governance outcomes. Overall, the findings suggest that hybrid board structures can achieve broad acceptance while enhancing the effectiveness of outside directors when tailored to local institutional contexts, offering practical guidance for reforms in insider‐dominated economies.

Abstract We use the implied cost of capital as a proxy for future expected returns and investigate the existence of an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) premium in China's A‐share market. Our results show that high ESG stocks yield lower expected returns than low ESG stocks, with risk compensation being the primary driver of this negative ESG premium. Furthermore, we provide an explanation from a risk compensation mechanism of why ESG investment continues to grow despite the presence of a negative ESG premium.

This special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies contains several papers focusing on equity and debt issuance. Institutional practice and regulations vary across countries, and these regulations change. Regulators, who try to balance facilitating capital formation with investor protection, can learn from changes made elsewhere. Thus, although each paper in this special issue focuses on just one market, the findings have broader applicability. Although bonds also have initial public offerings (IPOs), both the media and academics have focused on equity IPOs, largely because of the extreme underpricing that frequently occurs. In many countries, including China, Indonesia, Korea, and Turkey, there are or were limits on the maximum allowable price change on the first day of trading of an IPO. In China, for example, during 2014–2019 almost all of the IPOs jumped by the maximum allowable increase of 44% on their first day of trading. This price limit has since been relaxed or eliminated. In Korea, the price limits have not been as binding. The first paper in this issue examines the effect of the June 2023 change in allowable first-day returns, when the maximum permitted price jump from the offer price increased from 160% to 300%. In Korea, as in China, orders for shares at the offer price frequently exceed the supply of shares offered by a factor of 1000. The paper finds, however, that the relaxation of the first-day price limit did not have a large effect on investor strategies. A second paper in this special issue examines the influence of cornerstone investors, a common practice in Hong Kong IPOs. Everywhere, information asymmetries are an important feature of IPOs. A cornerstone investor buys a pre-arranged large stake at the offer price and is locked up, providing certification to other investors and potentially allowing an issuer to set a higher offer price. In this regard, a PIPE (private investment in public equity) investor at the time of a merger between a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and an operating company serves a similar function. In recent years, SPACs have been common in the U.S. and Korea, showing how evidence from one market (Hong Kong) can provide useful insights in other markets. The third paper in this special issue focuses on the pricing of bond offers in the U.S., where issuers have a choice of private placements versus public offerings. As with equity IPOs, asymmetric information comes into play, but the speed of issuing also matters. The paper documents that a 2005 regulatory change largely eliminated the speed of issuance consideration. The market share of public issuance declined following this regulatory change, but issuers for which information asymmetries are important still have strong motives to issue privately using Rule 144A. Both the Hong Kong IPO paper and the U.S. bond issue paper demonstrate how large investors can be used to reduce problems created by information asymmetries.