Corporate governance, moral hazard, and financialization

Corporate governance, by mitigating managers' moral hazard problems and affecting firms' operational efficiency, significantly influences firms' allocation of funds between investing in internal projects and financial investments. We develop a model for how better corporate governance influences firms' financialization through increasing managerial efforts and sup-pressing extravagant consumption and tunneling behavior. We then manually collect data on China's non-financial firms' financialization including investing in entrusted loans and wealth management products (WMPs) to empirically test the effects of corporate governance. The results show that enhanced corporate governance can suppress non-financial firms' financialization.