This study explores how bilateral media sentiment between China and host countries affects cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Drawing on data from Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) covering the period 2006-2022, we empirically examine how media sentiment influences both the propensity and value of cross-border transactions by Chinese firms. The results indicate that positive bilateral media sentiment significantly increases the likelihood of Chinese enterprises undertaking cross-border deals. However, consistent with sentiment-based theories, we find that bilateral media sentiment negatively affects transaction value when acquiring firms are non-state-owned enterprises, even though overall sentiment remains a positive driver of deal occurrence. These findings provide novel evidence on the role of media sentiment in shaping international investment behavior. The study advances existing research on media sentiment and strategic decision-making in cross-border deals and underscores the importance for Chinese firms recognizing contextual factors that may influence the success of their international expansion strategies.
In this article, we analyse which internal characteristics of firms lead to sanctions overcompliance and how this affects economic performance. The results are based on a 2003 survey of 610 SMEs (small and medium enterprises) affected by trade restrictions. The Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) technique was used to identify the factors driving firms' overcompliance and the adjustment strategies that minimised the costs of withdrawal from sanction-targeted areas. The findings show that the most important drivers of overcompliance are ethical in nature, including employee pressure and firms' internal moral and sustainability codes of conduct. Overcompliance was associated with poorer economic performance compared to pre-war levels, though its effects were mitigated by a combination of cost cutting and proactive adjustment strategies.
This paper examines how the organizational environment for Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) differs across organizational forms in the public and private sectors. The Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI) was administered to 682 respondents in the Republic of Serbia, which is institutionally and economically considered a valid representative of Southeastern European economies. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to assess how five dimensions-Management support, Rewards/Reinforcement, Work discretion/Autonomy, Time availability, and Organizational boundaries-affect the CE environment. Further, using a multi-group analysis algorithm, differences between models in the public and private sectors were explored. The results reveal significant differences in both the impact and values of the CEAI dimensions across organization types. These findings offer valuable insights for developing CE support strategies tailored to different organizations. The presented approach provides guidance to decision-makers seeking to avoid reliance on generic strategies largely shaped by private-sector experiences in developed countries.
In the context of rapid digital technology development and the pursuit of "dual carbon" goals, examining whether digital trade enhances corporate green investment efficiency is of critical importance. This study uses the implementation of China's Comprehensive Pilot Zone for Cross-Border E-Commerce policy as a quasi-natural experiment. Using panel data from A-share listed firms in heavily polluting industries and employing a staggered difference-in-differences approach, the study investigates the effect of digital trade on green investment efficiency. The empirical findings demonstrate that digital trade significantly improves firms' green investment efficiency. This positive effect operates primarily by increasing research and development (R&D) expenditure, promoting industrial structure upgrading, and strengthening digital platform development. Furthermore, the effect is more pronounced among firms with high media visibility and superior environmental performance. The study offers important policy implications for enhancing green investment efficiency and advancing high-quality economic development.
Sales growth represents a fundamental indicator of a company's business vitality and competitive capability, as it not only reflects success in meeting market demands but also provides essential resources for reinvestment, innovation, market expansion, and long-term business sustainability. It also reflects managers' ability to use available resources efficiently to expand the firm's capacity in the future. Effective resource utilization eliminates barriers to business growth and supports the achievement and maintenance of competitive advantage in the market. The purpose of this research is to explore which factors contribute to improving company performance, as indicated by the Sales Growth Rate (SGR). The sample consists of active companies in Serbia, identified based on the Serbian Business Registers Agency (SBRA)'s publication of the most successful firms. Data were collected over a five-year period (2019-2023), resulting in a sample of 375 observations. To address the research objective, statistical techniques, including correlation and panel regression analyses, were employed. The results indicate that firm size, liquidity, Return on Assets (ROA), and leverage have a positive and statistically significant impact on company growth, as measured by the SGR. In addition to these factors, company growth also depends on monetary and fiscal policy measures, incentive policies, and adequate institutional support.
This study focuses on boycotts driven by geopolitical crises, exemplified by the backlash against French retailer Leroy Merlin in Poland during Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It examines the cognitive processes underlying consumers' decisions to boycott specific companies during crises and the factors influencing shifts in participation over time. It also explores how corporate crisis management and communication strategies affect boycott dynamics. Using a temporal perspective, results show that perceived company errors can exacerbate actions, while transparency and consistency help ease tensions in polarized contexts. Additionally, the study demonstrates that enhancing value propositions (e.g., quality, services, price) can reduce boycott participation.
This study examines how financial constraints affect the sticky behavior of Research and Development (R&D) expenditures, with particular emphasis on the moderating role of green innovation. While maintaining R&D investment during sales declines is critical for sustainable innovation, the convex nature of R&D investment and its dependence on internal funding often cause constrained firms to exhibit reduced stickiness, or anti-stickiness. Using large-sample empirical evidence, we confirm a significant negative relationship between financial constraints and R&D cost stickiness. Crucially, we demonstrate that green innovation strategies mitigate this effect by alleviating financing frictions through enhanced investor confidence, which incentivizes managers to retain idle R&D resources. Robustness tests that extending to Selling, General and Administrative Expenses (SG&A) validate this dual mechanism. These findings highlight green innovation's strategic value as a resilience lever, advancing environmental goals while strengthening firms' financial flexibility in the face of resource constraints.
Drawing on real options theory, this study examines the impact of firms' climate policy uncertainty (CPU) perception on green investments. Unlike prior studies that treat CPU as a homogeneous macro-level factor, this paper conceptualizes it as an individualized firm-level perception and hypothesizes that rising CPU perception increases the value of the option to wait, thereby prompting firms to delay green investments. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2012 to 2022, we employ the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to capture firm-level CPU perception, and our findings reveal that if CPU perception increases by 1%, firms' green investments would decrease by 0.123. Moderation analysis reveals that Confucian culture strengthens the adverse effect of CPU perception on green investments, whereas Western culture mitigates it. Additionally, the study shows that the impact of CPU perception on green investments exhibits a non-linear pattern with increasing marginal effects, such that the adverse effect is more pronounced at higher levels of CPU perception. Moreover, we observe an asymmetric impact, indicating that an increase in CPU perception significantly reduces green investments, whereas a decrease has no significant impact on green investments.
This systematic review examines how senior women's leadership relates to junior women's workplace loneliness, using the queen bee syndrome (QBS) perspective to explain when leadership practices intensify or reduce isolation. Guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocols, this study synthesizes 30 studies published from 2013 to 2024 across Scopus, Web of Science, Emerald, Wiley, and Google Scholar. The evidence maps antecedents and outcomes of loneliness under female leadership and shows that distancing, withheld mentorship, and tokenism weaken supportive relationships and increase the risk of isolation. The study illustrates how senior women leaders may unintentionally affect the emotional well-being and social connectedness of female subordinates. This effect becomes clearer when QBS arguments are integrated with social support theory, which explains how female leadership behaviors can either foster or undermine the social resources that women rely on at work. The findings provide actionable insights for corporations and managers, highlighting the need to cultivate meaningful support networks and inclusive environments that protect employees from loneliness associated with female leadership. By synthesizing empirical findings, identifying theoretical and methodological gaps, and outlining a future research agenda, this study advances understanding of how female leadership and workplace loneliness are intertwined.
This study investigates how managers communicate with shareholders, balancing impartiality and transparency against their vested interests. We examine management communication behaviour through the lens of information asymmetry in Slovenia, exploring how information overload and complexity in disclosures may influence shareholder decision making. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with top managers and a textual readability analysis of annual report letters to shareholders, we find that managers often introduce high levels of complexity in communications, sometimes deliberately, to safeguard their own interests. This observed 'complexity effect' provides new insight into information asymmetries in modern organizations, highlighting how excessive complexity can undermine transparent and effective shareholder communication.
This study investigates how resource orchestration mechanisms shape green technology innovation (GTI) in emerging markets. Drawing on data from 308 manufacturing companies in high-tech zones in China, we employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to uncover the complex configurations of resources, capabilities, and contextual forces that jointly influence GTI. The empirical strategy includes fuzzy-set calibration, necessary condition analysis, truth table construction, and sufficiency assessment of multiple configurations. The results identify five minimized configurations associated with high GTI and four configurations associated with non-high GTI. The high-GTI configurations show that theoretically relevant antecedents are not indispensable in every successful path, whereas the non-high-GTI configurations reveal resource-capability mismatches, including weak resource configuration despite learning or green capability, resource configuration without effective leveraging, and GTL without sufficient learning and green capability. These findings highlight the contingent nature of resource orchestration in emerging markets and offer policy implications for enhancing firms' green transformations.
This paper investigates the effect of board interlock networks on financial statement comparability (FSC), using a sample of U.S. publicly traded firms from 1996 to 2023. While prior studies suggest that well-connected boards may enhance certain aspects of financial reporting quality, other evidence highlights the potential for negative spillovers and conformity pressures within interlocked networks. Addressing this tension, we find that firms with more well-connected boards exhibit lower comparability in their financial statements, with degree, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality showing statistically significant negative associations under the primary comparability specification (CompIND). Results for closeness centrality are consistently signed but statistically weaker. Evidence across cash-flow and accrual comparability is broadly consistent with the main findings, though the direction and significance of individual centrality measures vary across cash-flow comparability specifications. Our findings contribute to the literature by identifying board network centrality as a novel and influential determinant of financial reporting comparability.
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into human resource (HR) systems is reshaping organizational practices, yet its effects on culture, climate, and work attitudes remain underexplored in emerging economies. This study investigates how AI-driven HR practices influence the three dimensions of the Organizational Social Context (OSC) in Saudi Arabia's higher education sector and whether employee perceptions mediate these relationships. Using survey data from 869 university professionals and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the results indicate that AI-based HR practices significantly affect all three outcomes. Employee perceptions mediate the effects on climate and work attitudes but not on culture. The findings suggest that transparent communication, inclusive implementation, and trust-building are essential to maximize AI's organizational benefits. For practitioners, employee acceptance and perceptions of AI are critical for enhancing climate and engagement. For scholars, the study identifies employee perception as a key mediator linking AI to organizational outcomes, providing a foundation for future research on AI in HR across industries and cultures.
Drawing on the attention-based view (ABV), this study explores the effects of digital business orientation and digital technology orientation on digital product innovation performance and the mediating roles of organizational beliefs unlearning and organizational routines unlearning, and investigates the moderating effect of the firm network's digital atmosphere on the relationships between digital business/technology orientations and organizational beliefs/routines unlearning. Using Smart PLS 3.3.9, data collected from 422 effective online survey responses from enterprises undertaking digitalization in China were analyzed. The results show, first, that both digital business orientation and digital technology orientation positively impact organizational beliefs unlearning and organizational routines unlearning, which in turn enhance digital product innovation performance. Moreover, digital technology orientation has greater effects on both types of unlearning than digital business orientation. Second, both organizational beliefs unlearning and organizational routines unlearning partially mediate the relationships between digital business/technology orientations and digital product innovation performance. Third, the firm network's digital atmosphere positively moderates the relationship between digital business/technology orientations and organizational routines unlearning but does not significantly moderate the relationship between digital business/technology orientations and organizational beliefs unlearning. These findings not only enrich the research on the relationship between digital orientation and organizational unlearning but also offer practical insights for enterprises seeking to foster digital innovation.
This study examines how green credit policies (GCP) influence corporate social responsibility (CSR) in pollution-intensive firms in China, using China's 2012 "Green Credit Guidelines" as a quasi-natural experiment. Through a difference-in-differences (DID) model analyzing 3627 publicly listed Chinese companies from 2010 to 2020, we identify key challenges in aligning financial incentives with environmental goals. Our findings reveal that financial constraints and differences in total factor productivity (TFP) may limit the effectiveness of GCP in promoting CSR initiatives among highly polluting firms. However, this inhibitory effect decreases once TFP surpasses a threshold, suggesting that greater productivity can mitigate these disincentives. Interestingly, we find that GCP have a negative impact on CSR in highly polluting firms, underscoring the need for more refined green credit policies to encourage sustainable corporate practices. These insights have significant implications for transition economies facing similar environmental challenges and contribute to broader global sustainability strategies.
Drawing on a sample of merger and acquisition events involving non-financial A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2009 to 2023, this study explores the impact of cost stickiness on merger performance through the lens of managerial characteristics. The findings reveal a significant negative correlation between cost stickiness and post-merger performance. Moreover, managerial traits-such as managerial overconfidence, the proportion of female executives, and the average age of the management team-exert moderating effects, manifested respectively as an aggravating influence, a U-shaped pattern, and an inverted U-shaped effect. Cost stickiness impairs merger outcomes primarily by increasing absorbed slack and diminishing the quality of accounting information. Further analysis suggests that industry competition intensity, ESG performance, internal controls, and ownership concentration can alleviate the adverse relationship. Conversely, this negative effect becomes more pronounced in the context of unrelated mergers, cross-border transactions, and non-cash payment arrangements.
This study integrates the attention-based view (ABV), resource orchestration theory (ROT), and the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to investigate how government digital initiatives influence enterprise digital transformation (EDT) through top management teams' (TMTs) attention allocation and resource orchestration capability. Using panel data from 182 listed pharmaceutical companies in China's Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets between 2012 and 2021, this research empirically tests the proposed theoretical model. Results show that government digital initiatives have a significant positive impact on EDT, with TMTs' attention allocation and resource orchestration capability playing partial mediating roles. Notably, our findings resonate with digital transformation dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where governments similarly play a pivotal role in driving digital adoption, albeit within distinct institutional contexts. China's centralized approach emphasizes top-down infrastructure development and strategic alignment, whereas CEE economies rely on European Union (EU)-driven frameworks and often face challenges in translating government support into widespread digital adoption. Despite these differences, the core mechanisms-government stimuli shaping managerial attention and resource allocation-are generalizable to emerging and transitional economies, including those in CEE. Overall, this study highlights that effective digital transformation requires both policy clarity to guide TMTs' attention and targeted support for resource orchestration, offering insights for CEE contexts navigating EU digital mandates alongside local institutional constraints.
In this study, we use manufacturing firms listed on the Chinese stock exchange to demonstrate the effects of gender on research and development investment. The results show that male leaders have a stronger incentive to take risks, whereas female leaders are more risk-averse. However, female leaders are better recognized by the market for their monitoring roles. The results show that male chairpersons and female general managers are an effective combination. Additionally, the shares held by the chairperson and general manager reduce Research and Development Investment (R&D) over investment when both positions are held by males. However, since female managers are prudential and efficient in research decision-making, the shares held by chairpersons and general managers increase female managers' research investment, indicating that they are confident in their research decisions. We contribute to the current literature by separating the roles of the chairperson and general manager functions in business operations within a gender-effect analytical framework. The results may provide both theoretical and practical value for management.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, investors' growing focus on sustainable management has increased substantially, drawing greater attention to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. This study examines the effect of abnormal ESG investment, defined as ESG activities exceeding the level predicted by firm-specific financial and economic characteristics, on firm value and assesses the moderating role of voluntary carbon emission disclosure. Based on agency theory, the empirical results indicate that abnormal ESG investment is associated with lower firm value, suggesting potential inefficiencies. However, voluntary carbon emission disclosure mitigates this negative relationship by improving transparency, demonstrating environmental accountability, and strengthening investor confidence. By distinguishing economically justified ESG investment from abnormal levels and evaluating the role of voluntary disclosure, this research offers evidence regarding how ESG strategies can be aligned with firm value enhancement in an environment of increasing sustainability expectations.
