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Although the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) advocate, through SDG 4 and SDG 10, equitable quality education and the reduction of inequalities within and between countries, respectively, few studies have examined how inequalities in regional sustainability influence higher education. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between regional sustainability and higher education in China using fixed-effects panel modelling. A systematic force framework showing how regional sustainability drives higher education was constructed from economic, social, and environmental perspectives, and the endogeneity in the process of how regional sustainability affects higher education was explored by introducing one-year lagged values as instrumental variables. Our results show that regional sustainability has a significant impact on higher educational attainment in China, with differing effects in the eastern, central, and western regions, respectively. In central China, economic sustainability plays a significant positive role in higher educational attainment; in the western region, economic and social sustainability have stronger positive effects, while environmental sustainability has significantly negative effects. In terms of policy implications, our findings can be used to support regional development policies to promote regional higher education.

Environmental pollution damages public health and affects economic development. Environmental regulation is the main way for the government to solve environmental pollution. So what type of environmental regulation works better for public health and economic development? Can environmental regulation have an influence on economic development through public health? To solve these problems, this research uses China’s provincial panel data from 2013 to 2017 to divide environmental regulation into command-control policy tools and economic incentive policy tools and uses the mediating effect model to examine the relationship among environmental regulation, public health and economic development. The results show that: (1) There is a positive correlation between economic incentive policy tools and economic development; while no significant relationship between command-control policy tools and economic development is founded; (2) The relationship between command-control policy tools and public health is not significant, while the relationship between economic incentive policy tools and public health is positive; (3) Public health does not play a mediating role between command-control policy tools and economic development but plays a partial mediating role between economic incentive policy tools and economic development. Therefore, the government should strengthen the use of economic incentive policy tools to promote public health and sustainable economic development.

In this study, we investigate whether outbound foreign direct investment (OFDI) either augments or impedes domestic public and private investment, incorporating the role of institutional quality into the context of developed and emerging countries. To this end, we apply a cross-sectional-autoregressive-distributed lag (CS-ARDL) approach to analyze panel data from the period 1996–2017. Our empirical findings suggest that OFDI augments private capital formation for developed countries. Institutional quality (IQ) is found to be a driving factor that promotes private capital formation in the established economies of developed countries. However, OFDI has a negative association with the public capital formation in the established economies of developed countries, while IQ has a positive association with it. In the context of emerging economies, OFDI is found to be too insignificant to have an effect on private and public capital formation. Interestingly, IQ has a detrimental effect on both private and public capital formation in emerging economies. Our findings are robust. The empirical findings of this study imply that institutional quality should continue to be improved in developed countries, while it should surpass a certain threshold for emerging economies to promote domestic capital formation.

Household leverage ratio is an important factor affecting family stability. Digital finance has changed the means of payment and consumption frequency, but the relationship between digital finance and household leverage ratio is still unclear. The existence of household debt is defined as the existence of leverage. The higher the household debt, the greater the household leverage. Based on the matching data of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) 2019 and the China Digital Inclusive Finance Index, this paper studies the impact of digital finance on household leverage ratio and explores its mechanism theoretically and empirically. This research finds that digital finance can significantly promote the household leverage ratio and this conclusion is still valid after instrumental variable method and robustness test. The mechanism analysis shows that digital finance can promote household over-consumption and further expand household leverage ratio. Digital finance can also reduce household leverage ratio by increasing household income. The heterogeneity analysis suggests that the role of digital finance in expanding leverage ratio is stronger for urban areas and households with low educational level. For households with higher assets, digital finance helps to reduce leverage ratio. Therefore, the government should guide residents to consume rationally and give full play to the entrepreneurship-facilitating and income-increasing effect of digital finance. Meanwhile, the residents themselves should speed up the cultivation of digital financial literacy, which is of vital significance for lowering household leverage ratio and systemic financial risks. China’s development level of digital finance ranks among the top in the world. Studying the role of digital finance in China is helpful to provide experience reference for countries around the world.

Green economic development is a worldwide concern. This paper not only contributes to the advancement of studies pertaining to green development but also offers policy recommendations for China to achieve a green and low-carbon economic transformation from the perspective of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and industrial structure. A mechanism for the effects of OFDI and industrial structure upgrading on green total factor productivity (GTFP) is proposed in this study. Based on measurement and analysis of the evolution characteristics of GTFP and industrial structure level of 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) in China from 2004 to 2019, the spatial Durbin model is applied to test their spatial effects. The findings demonstrate that (1) the overall trend of China’s GTFP and industrial structure level is upward, with obvious regional non-equilibrium and spatial dependence; (2) both OFDI and industrial structure upgrading can promote green development independently, with the spatial spillover effect of Industrial structure advancement being more evident; (3) the synergistic effect between OFDI and industrial structure advancement is greater than that between OFDI and industrial structure rationalization, and the spatial spillover effect on regions with comparable economic development is greater than that of surrounding regions; (4) in view of the different levels of openness between regions, the independent and synergistic effects in coastal regions and non-coastal regions are heterogeneous. Therefore, China should optimize OFDI, promote the efficiency of resource allocation, maximize the technology spillover, and strengthen interregional cooperation in order to transform towards a green economy.

The difference in wages between executives and employees reflects the class conflict in corporate governance. To investigate the political factors within the practice of corporate governance related to employees, this paper empirically tests the relationship among political connections, ownership and within-firm pay gaps. We take the A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange as the example, design hypothesis tests and examine the effects of political connections on the pay gap in two distinctive groups of companies, the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the non-stated-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). The overall result indicates that political connections increase the average salary of executives and decrease the average salary of employees, thereby expanding the within-firm pay gap. Pay gaps in companies with political connections are 16% higher than companies without political connections. The further test results of distinguishing property rights show that in non-SOEs, political connections increase the executives’ compensation and decrease the average compensation of employees, resulting in an increase of the within-firm pay gap. Similar relationships appear in SOEs but without statistical significance. These findings expand the research on income distribution effects of political connections theoretically, and provide useful insights for SOEs’ reform and income distribution system reform in practice.

Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is an important indicator reflecting the satisfaction of residents’ lives and social welfare. As a prevalent technique, machine learning is playing a more significant role in various domains. However, few studies have used machine learning techniques to study SWB. This paper puts forward a stacking model based on ANN, XGBoost, LR, CatBoost, and LightGBM to predict the SWB of Chinese residents, using the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) datasets from 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. Furthermore, the feature importance index of tree models is used to reveal the changes in the important factors affecting SWB. The results show that the stacking model proposed in this paper is superior to traditional models such as LR or other single machine learning models. The results also show some common features that have contributed to SWB in different years. The methods used in this study are effective and the results provide support for making society more harmonious.

Nowadays, public health issues are increasingly in the spotlight, and the role played by foreign direct investment (FDI) cannot be ignored, especially in developing countries. Scholars have discussed the influencing mechanism of FDI on public health from both positive and negative aspects, but there is little literature focused on the impact of FDI’s green technology spillovers. This paper explores the impact of spontaneous green technology progress induced by FDI, i.e., FDI’s green technology spillover effect, on the public health status of China. It constructs a theoretical model based on the cost discovery theory and uses the Global Malmquist–Luenberger Method to calculate the green technology spillover index; then, it empirically researches the impact of this spillover effect on public health based on the Grossman health product function, using Chinese provincial data from 2007 to 2019. After a series of robustness tests, this paper also discusses the regional heterogeneity and the influencing mechanism. The main conclusions are as follows: Firstly, there is a significant negative correlation between FDI’s green technology spillover and infant mortality, indicating that the spillover effect significantly promotes China’s public health. Secondly, the results of regional heterogeneity show that the spillover effect of green technology presents a decreasing trend from east to west regions. The threshold effect test results also show that, when the level of economic development is extremely low or exceeds a specific threshold, FDI’s green technology spillover will have a positive impact on public health. Finally, FDI’s green technology spillover improves public health by controlling environmental pollution and optimizing industrial activities, but it does not worsen public health by increasing income inequality. The conclusions of this paper provide empirical support and policy suggestions for rationally and effectively utilizing FDI to promote China’s public health in the future.