A paper co-authored by Professor Gu Zhihui and Lecturer Zhang Hanyu of Nankai Business School and Professor Hao Liang of Singapore Management University, titled “Shaped by Confucius: The Cultural Origin of Corporate Behavior,” has been published online in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA), a leading international finance journal, and one of the FT 50 business school journals published by Cambridge University Press. The study finds that Confucian culture, as an informal institution, shapes corporate behavior by promoting relational contracts as a substitute for formal legal frameworks: firms in regions with stronger Confucian influence invest more in stakeholder relationships, while this effect weakens where formal institutions are stronger, highlighting the enduring role of culture in trust-based governance.