Financial Shared Service Centers, Natural Disasters and Corporate Risk Taking

The sample consists of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2019. Information on the establishment of FSSCs is hand-collected. We categorize natural disasters into earthquakes, storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, temperature extremes (Berrebi & Ostwald, 2011; Felbermayr & Gröschl, 2014). We collect natural disaster data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), the National Institute of Natural Hazards, the Global Disaster Data Platform, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Firm-level financial and accounting data are obtained from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database. We merge these datasets and apply the following screening procedures: (1) firms under special treatment (ST or *ST) are excluded; (2) financial firms are removed due to their distinct regulatory and accounting frameworks; (3) observations with missing values for key variables are deleted; and (4) all continuous variables are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles. After these procedures, the final sample consists of 12,688 firm-year observations.