Research in International Business and Finance最新文献

Firms operating in foreign markets often engage in nonmarket activity for various benefits, such as gaining legitimacy, reducing uncertainty and enhancing performance. This is particularly true for emerging markets multinationals corporations (EMNCs) in advanced countries, as they commonly experience liabilities and challenges due to their origin. Leveraging institutional theory, we conceptualize board gender diversity as a nonmarket strategy, and investigate its impact on the performance of EMNCs. Using data from a sample of Chinese and Indian foreign subsidiaries, we find that board gender diversity improves performance. This effect is stronger for firms having public relations functions and also for firms operating in foreign countries with high institutional gender parity. These findings, besides significantly adding to the literature, have practical and managerial implications.

As the demand for sustainable production grows across Chinese society, heightened attention is being paid to new energy enterprises with superior green innovation capabilities in the current environment. Given the considerable importance of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance to business operations, we use a sample of 192 Chinese A-share listed new energy enterprises from 2009 to 2022 to investigate the impact of ESG performance on green innovation from the institutional environment perspective. The empirical findings indicate that ESG performance and the institutional environment significantly contribute to facilitating new energy enterprises’ green innovation and the institutional environment can strengthen the promoting effect of ESG performance on green innovation. In addition, ESG performance and the institutional environment can have a significant influence on promoting green innovation in non-state-owned enterprises and new energy enterprises of all sizes, while the moderating effect of the institutional environment only has a positive influence on non-state-owned and large new energy enterprises. Finally, comparing the discrepancy between new energy enterprises’ substantive and strategic green innovation, ESG performance, institutional environment and its optimisation effect tend towards the former.

This study assesses the impact of market-oriented reforms of the Chinese initial public offering (IPO) system on investor speculation. The empirical results reveal that the registration-based IPO system reform expedites the release of investor sentiment and curbs speculation in the post-IPO period. The registration reform in the Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR market) is more effective than that in the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM), and the long-term effects surpass the short-term effects. Further tests indicate that greater institutional (individual) investor participation is the reason for higher (lower) reform efficiency; as investor sentiment increases, the dampening effect of the registration system reform on speculation decreases. Our study confirms the importance of market-oriented reform and provides implications for implementing efficient reforms in emerging markets with high levels of manipulation and speculation.

We examine the relationship between corporate misconduct and pharmaceutical firm innovation and performance. Pharmaceutical firms obtain significantly fewer new product approvals by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following corporate regulatory violations, lawsuits, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulatory enforcement actions. We also examine the potential reasons why innovative capacity is reduced for culpable firms. Following instances of misconduct, pharmaceutical firms are 50 percent less likely to engage in business expansions, engage in significantly fewer new strategic alliances and partnerships, and are awarded fewer government R&D grants. We attribute these results to the reputational loss associated with public knowledge of corporate misconduct. In support of this hypothesis, we find pharmaceutical firms experience negative cumulative abnormal stock returns (CARs) surrounding SEC enforcement announcements, and misconduct incidents increase the probability of analyst concerns. Overall, our results are consistent with the reputational loss associated with corporate misconduct being an important factor in future reductions in pharmaceutical firm innovative capacity.

The external business environment in which enterprises operate is often subject to constant change. This paper explores how the business environment affects firms’ labor income share. Utilizing a micro-level dataset of China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020, we find that an optimal business environment enhances the labor income share. Mechanism tests reveal that a better business environment contributes to the increase in labor income share by fostering human capital upgrading and improving labor dispute resolution. Further analysis demonstrates that the positive effect is more pronounced for firms with lower labor intensity and non-state ownership, and also for firms with coastal locations and higher institutional investor shareholdings. These findings contribute to existing literature on factors influencing labor income share and also provide valuable policy implications for promoting the development of a better business environment.

Our study provides practical insights into the impact of greenwashing on Corporate Financial Performance (CFP) and investment efficiency. We delve into the moderating influences of family-owned firms, technological innovation, and economic policy uncertainty in the nexus between greenwashing and CFP. Using a Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) model and conducting robustness tests, our results suggest that in G8 nations, family-oriented stakeholders struggle to discern greenwashing due to low information asymmetry. However, technological innovation and reduced economic policy uncertainty enhance the identification of greenwashing. Greenwashing enhances firm value by improving disclosure quality, addressing stakeholder concerns, and easing financing constraints. Notably, heavily polluting and mandatory disclosure firms experience more significant economic performance from greenwashing. This study provides practical implications for firms, policymakers, and stakeholders, fostering sustainable development in G8 nations.

The upsurge and domination of platform-based businesses have led scholars to examine different aspects of this digitally-enabled economy. However, a comprehensive review of the prevailing literature on platform economy is still missing. In this paper, we conduct a bibliometric analysis to better understand the state-of-the-art of the platform economy research. We examine a total of 1775 articles and 71,185 corresponding cited references indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database using citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, and social network analysis. These separate yet complementary analytical tools provide us with interesting insights into patterns of platform economy studies. Our analysis reveals four distinct research clusters that illustrate the intellectual structure of the platform economy field. We also examine and discuss in detail the integration of ethics into platform literature. Our research portrays and categorizes the key ethical issues associated with digital platforms into four ethical dimensions that demand urgent attention.

The acceleration of economic digitalisation has been immense in recent years and coupled with the rapid development of technology-augmented finance. However, less understood is how such technology-augmented finance has impacted access to credit within rural contexts of developing economies. Using household-level survey data, our results provide novel evidence of a negative relationship, on average, between rural households’ access to credit as measured by loan approvals, and internet access. More specifically, use of internet in rural areas of the countries under analysis reduces the chance of accessing credit by up to 65%. Moreover, when we further investigate loan terms, our findings indicate that internet users get six-month shorter loan durations and have a lower interest cost of borrowing of up to 1.2%. The results for loan approval rates are persistent for formal loans and for nations at a lower stage of economic development, i.e., only within the less developed Vietnamese rural context. Our findings provide richer insights into the impact of information and telecommunication technologies (ITC) on access to finance in developing countries characterised by significant proportions of rural areas affected by severe information asymmetry-related issues that may be amplified or reduced by increased internet connectivity. Our results carry important policy implications. On the demand side, they highlight the need to ensure that government initiatives should aim to better educate rural borrowers in relation to financial literacy and credit choices. On the supply side, our findings urge the need to introduce policies for formal lenders targeted towards the reduction of the information asymmetries pervasive in rural areas.

Research on the effect of changing staffing levels (i.e. resizing) on organisational innovation has generated mixed and often contradictory results. Recent research has attempted to reconcile such inconsistencies by showing that this effect on innovation depends on the firm’s staffing level prior to downsizing. Since firms seek to downsize as well as upsize their staffing levels, the effect of resizing (downsizing and upsizing) on innovation and the magnitude of such effect is still unknown. Using a longitudinal dataset of UK firms, we examine the effect of resizing on innovation outputs and its magnitude in resource-rich and resource-constrained firms. Our results suggest that upsizing in resource-constrained firms and downsizing in resource-rich firms is helpful for innovation, whereas upsizing in resource-rich and downsizing in resource-constrained firms have the reverse effect. Compared with resource-rich firms, the effect of resizing on innovation outputs is more pronounced in resource-constrained firms. These results have several practical managerial implications.

This paper investigates the dynamics of a switch in the lead venture capital (VC) caused by a low degree of match between the entrepreneur and VC in the previous round of investing through theoretical and empirical analysis using a large sample from the Chinese venture capital market. The results show that the lower the degree of match is, the higher the likelihood that entrepreneurial firms will switch the lead VC. The rematching of firms and VCs is also a dynamic process of switching lead VCs in the venture capital market. Especially, in multiple rounds, for both subsamples of rising startup quality and rising VC quality, we find that the lower the matching degree in the previous round, the more likely a lead VC switch occurs. However, there is no significant difference in the effect of the matching degree in the previous round on the lead VC switch in the following round in both subsamples. We also show that a lead VC switch is more likely when startups are in the growth stage, mature stage, and high-tech industries. In addition, we confirm that a lead VC switch improves the success of startups. Specifically, whether the quality of a startup rises or falls, only lead VC switches at the early stage are conducive to the VC exits and the startup’s success. In the early stage, the lead VC switch is a great shot in the arm for the company’s success, whereas, in the later stage, the lead VC switch is only the icing on the cake.