NEOMA Business School

Accelerating the energy transition is pivotal to achieving sustainable economic development, yet localized environmental policies can profoundly reshape the spatial allocation of corporate capital. The impact of place-based energy transition policies on firms' cross-regional investment remains largely unexplored. Existing studies primarily examine the environmental and economic consequences of such policies, while paying limited attention to their influence on firms' geographic expansion strategies. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2006 to 2022, we examine whether and how the New Energy Demonstration City (NEDC) pilot policy affects corporate cross-regional investment (CORI). We find that the NEDC policy significantly increases firms' CORI, indicating that firms located in pilot cities expand more actively beyond their home provinces. This finding is consistent with the resource-based view. We further find that this effect is stronger for non-state-owned firms, non-heavy-polluting firms, and firms audited by the Big Four, and remains robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. Mechanism analyses show that the NEDC policy promotes CORI by reducing information asymmetry and lowering corporate risk-taking. These findings suggest that place-based energy transition policies reshape firms’ geographic allocation of resources and provide new evidence on how policy-induced environmental change affects corporate investment decisions.

This paper examines the consequences of adopting ASC 606, a new revenue recognition standard, on revenue uncertainty and debt contracting, using a quasi-natural experiment surrounding its adoption. We find that affected firms experience an increase in revenue uncertainty, as indicated by both higher analyst forecast dispersion and absolute analyst forecast error. Consequently, the cost of debt rises for affected firms, as covenants are used less in debt contracts reflecting a decreased effectiveness of earnings-based covenants. The effect is mitigated by relationship lending. We also show that the decreased use of earnings-based covenants as well as the increased cost of debt dissipate over time, while the increase in revenue uncertainty persists. Our analyses document a costly transition toward a more principles-based accounting standard but also suggest that some costs are transient.

In the context of growing sustainability awareness on social media, this research investigates the comparative effectiveness of brand official accounts versus mega-influencer accounts in green advertising. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), six primary studies, including one field study and five experiments, reveal that brand accounts are more effective in fostering favorable consumer attitudes toward green products. Brand accounts, perceived as credible and authoritative, are more likely to elicit central route processing, enabling deeper engagement with complex and technical information about products’ green attributes. In contrast, mega-influencer accounts primarily trigger peripheral route processing, relying on heuristic cues like charisma and popularity, which are less effective in conveying detailed sustainable claims. The research identifies elaboration and message understandability as sequential mediators, and shows that contextual factors—such as response timing, counter-persuasion, and psychological distance to environmental issues—moderate the relative effectiveness of account types. This research advances the theoretical understanding by clarifying the distinct roles of social media account types in green marketing and expanding the application of ELM in this domain. The findings offer practical implications not only for marketers, but also for policy-makers and consumer advocacy groups seeking in promote effective and credible environmental messaging on social media.

The crowded and competitive landscape of e-commerce has intensified the importance of product images in consumer decision making. Although prior work has considered how visual complexity and presentation shape consumer perceptions, background-foreground composition remains underexplored. Existing research suggests that backgrounds can either enhance or undermine product appeal, yet little attention has been given to the conditions under which these effects vary across product categories. This article addresses that gap by examining how product image backgrounds influence visual engagement, image appeal, product perception, and willingness to pay, with particular emphasis on high-and low-involvement complementary products. Grounded in the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, this article positions background-foreground composition as a visual stimulus that drives affective (image appeal) and cognitive (product perception) responses, thereby affecting consumer valuation (willingness to pay). An experimental approach integrated eye-tracking metrics (initial fixation and fixation duration) with survey data from 122 consumers to assess visual attention patterns, demonstrating that background presence, initial fixation, and fixation duration each significantly affect willingness to pay. However, the magnitude of these effects differs by product category, revealing that high-involvement products gain stronger benefits from contextual backgrounds than low-involvement complementary products. These findings contribute by bridging visual engagement data with theoretical perspectives on decision making to refine our understanding of how background-foreground composition in digital marketplaces shapes consumer valuation, thereby extending consumer behavior, e-commerce, and visual marketing scholarship and equipping e-commerce platforms with actionable strategies to optimize product presentation based on product involvement and decision-making processes.

Sustainability tensions in business have increasingly received attention in prior literature; yet, there is still a dearth of studies on how entrepreneurs in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises – and more specifically in sustainability‐driven enterprises – navigate these tensions. Building on the process orientation strand of the entrepreneurial cognition literature, we examine how sustainability‐driven entrepreneurs address sustainability tensions by using Weick's stages of the sensemaking process as an analytical lens. Undertaking a qualitative study of sustainability‐driven ventures, we identify two distinct strategies for managing tensions. Firstly, entrepreneurs employ linear sensemaking when dealing with straightforward sustainability tensions, utilizing clear and focussed strategies. Secondly, entrepreneurs engage in elaborate, open‐ended sensemaking for more ambiguous tensions, which requires more time and cognitive effort. These strategies consist of different patterns of scanning, interpreting and learning, highlighting the varied approaches entrepreneurs take to navigate sustainability tensions. As our theoretical contribution, we offer a finely grained process perspective to explain how the various combinations of the stages of the sensemaking process work together (or not) to create more aggregate cognitive concepts, like entrepreneurial motivation. We conclude by drawing out implications of our research for leveraging entrepreneurial decision‐making in the context of the considerable uncertainty that sustainability entails.