期望落差下的组织搜索:长期债务融资及其价值再造

企业在何种状态下采取长期负债经营策略以及这种策略将对企业未来的发展产生何种影响,是一个重要的理论问题。本文将企业的长期债务融资视为组织搜索行为,构建了一个绩效反馈的权变模型,探讨期望落差与长期债务融资之间的理论关系及制约因素。本文基于2007—2018年中国上市企业数据的检验结果表明:期望落差将对企业长期债务融资产生直接影响。在企业管理者搜索动机与搜索成本的共同作用下,企业的长期债务融资与期望落差程度呈非线性关系,即在临近期望值的状态下企业管理者表现出局部搜索动机,倾向于通过增加债务来解决企业的期望落差问题;而在远离期望值的状态下表现出非局部搜索动机,倾向于减少长期债务融资。环境不确定性是制约期望落差下企业长期债务融资策略的重要因素,市场与政策环境的不确定性越高,则越有可能导致处于落差状态下的企业减少长期债务融资。期望落差状态下的长期债务融资与企业价值再造能力之间存在着先升后降的“倒U型”关系,即落差状态下适度的长期债务融资提高了企业的价值能力,但超过临界点后将对价值再造起到遏制作用。本文在一定程度上丰富了期望落差下组织搜索的过程机制,为深入理解企业长期负债经营的前因提供了新的视角。     

Corporate social performance,analyst stock recommendations,and firm future returns

This study posits that security analysts heed corporate social performance information and factor it into their recommendations to general investors. In particular, as corporate social performance is often uncertain and ambiguous to general investors, analysts may serve as the informational pathway connecting corporate social performance to firm stock returns. Thus, we argue that analyst recommendations mediate the relationship between corporate social performance and firm stock returns. On the basis of not only a qualitative study with literature searches and interviews of stock analysts but also a quantitative study with two longitudinal samples of large firms, we find support for these arguments. Our findings uncover an information‐based underlying mechanism for the link between corporate social performance and financial performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Environmental Performance and the Market for Corporate Assets

Research summary : Scholars and policy‐makers have tended to assume that asset sales have a negative effect on stakeholders, but quantitative evidence to inform the debate has been scarce. In our research, we explored one way such sales could be beneficial: by facilitating the transfer of specialized capabilities used for environmental improvement. Employing quantitative data from a longitudinal sample of U.S. manufacturers, we find evidence consistent with the transfer of capabilities to or from acquired assets. Our results inform theories of ownership change and the conditional flow of capabilities among operations. They provide evidence as well of the existence of environmental capabilities. For policy‐makers they provide needed evidence and insight on the merits of regulations designed to limit asset sales. Managerial summary : It is often assumed that acquisitions harm environmental performance‐‐acquisition leads to greater emphasis on efficiency, while focusing on environmental performance is driven by managerial discretion. We propose instead that acquisitions might lead to improvement in environmental outcomes; the key is in knowing where to look for improvement. We studied thousands of facility‐level acquisitions and find that when a clean firm buys a facility from a dirtier firm, that facility's environmental performance improved. When a dirtier firm buys from a cleaner one, however, it is the dirtier firm's other facilities in the same industry of the target that improved. These results, along with extensions we undertook, suggest that managers and policy‐makers should view acquisitions as conduits rather than impediments in transferring environmental capabilities. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

业绩期望落差、股权集中度和企业环保投入

基于企业行为理论，以 2011~2015 年重污染上市公司为研究样本，本文理论分析并实证检验了业绩期望落差与企业环保投入的关系，并进一步考察了股权集中度的调节作用。研究结果表明：（1）当企业实际绩效低于渴望水平时，业绩期望落差与环保投入呈 U 型关系，即业绩期望落差存在一个阈值，低于该阈值时，业绩期望落差与环保投入负相关，高于该阈值时，业绩期望落差与环保投入正相关；（2）与股权集中度低的企业相比，股权集中度高的业绩期望落差与环保投入之间的 U 型关系将减弱。     

Technology and Corporate Scope: Firm and Rival Innovation as Antecedents of Corporate Transactions

This paper studies the role of technological innovation as an antecedent of changes in corporate scope. It argues that technological innovations prompt the firm to reconfigure its corporate portfolio—to redeploy resources to areas of new opportunity while it divests out of marginal businesses. Results from a cross‐industry sample of U.S. manufacturing firms show successful innovation by a firm is followed by both expansion into new areas through complementary resource seeking acquisitions and divestment out of existing noncore businesses. This relationship is found to be moderated by the level of investible resources available to the firm, and supports the notion of scarce resources as a constraint on firm scope. In addition, firms are found to change their corporate scope in response to rival innovation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Corporate environmental responsibility (CER) weakness,media coverage,and corporate philanthropy: Evidence from China

This study investigates the hidden connection between corporate philanthropy and corporate environmental responsibility (CER) weakness. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms in polluting industries and hand-collected data on corporate environmental performance and corporate philanthropy, we show that CER weakness is significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropy, suggesting that corporate philanthropy may be used by environmentally unfriendly firms to mitigate the negative influence of CER weakness and offset pressures from stakeholders. This finding also implies that Chinese enterprises in polluting industries are inclined to engage in greenwashing via the conduit of corporate philanthropy. In addition, media coverage reinforces the positive association between CER weakness and corporate philanthropy. Above results are still valid after controlling for the potential endogeneity between CER weakness and corporate philanthropy.     

Government's green grip: Multifaceted state influence on corporate environmental actions in China

Research summary: Emerging economies such as China enjoy economic expansion, but also face dramatic environmental challenges. China's government is a central actor in both stimulating economic activities and pursuing environmental protection. Drawing on panel data and in‐depth interviews, we examined the influence of the Chinese state at multiple levels on the environmental actions of publicly listed firms. The results show that corporate environmental actions follow an inverted U‐shape as control of environmental practices moves from the central government to the most decentral administrative level. This curvilinear relationship is positively moderated by the stringency of environmental regulation and negatively moderated by environmental monitoring capacity. We conclude that state influence on corporate environmental actions in China is multifaceted and subject to “policy‐policy decoupling.” Managerial summary: As China's environmental awareness is growing, the country's government is increasingly concerned with the question as to how it can improve the environmental performance of the firms it controls. Our evidence shows the concurrence of two contravening government influences on corporate environmental practices: a performance‐enhancing effect of the regulatory pressure by multiple authorities and a performance‐diminishing effect of the autonomy enjoyed by local governments. Both the most centrally and the most decentrally controlled firms in China show significantly weaker environmental performance than those controlled by intermediary levels of government. The stringency of sectorial environmental regulation and environmental monitoring capacity affect the strength of the Chinese government's green grip.     

Acquisitions of private vs. public firms: Private information,target selection,and acquirer returns

The acquisition of privately held firms is a prevalent phenomenon that has received little attention in mergers and acquisitions research. In this study, we examine three questions: (1) What drives the acquirer's choice between public and private targets? (2) Do acquisitions of private targets elicit a more positive stock market reaction than acquisitions of public targets, which, on average, destroy value for acquirers' shareholders? (3) Do acquirers gain when their selection of a public or private target fits the theory? In this paper, we argue that the lack of information on private targets limits the breadth of the acquirer's search and increases its risk of not evaluating properly the assets of private targets. At the same time, less information on private targets creates more value‐creating opportunities for exploiting private information, whereas the market of corporate control for public targets already serves as an information‐processing and asset valuation mechanism for all potential bidders. Using an event study and survey data, we find that: (1) acquirers favor private targets in familiar industries and turn to public targets to enter new business domains or industries with a high level of intangible assets; (2) acquirers of private targets perform better than acquirers of public targets on merger announcement, after controlling for endogeneity bias; (3) acquirers of private firms perform better than if they had acquired a public firm, and acquirers of public firms perform better than if they had acquired a private firm. These results support the expectation that acquirer returns from their target choice (private/public) are not universal but depend on the acquirer's type of search and on the merging firms' attributes. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does experience imply learning?

Research summary : Research traditionally uses experiential learning arguments to explain the existence of a positive relationship between repetition of an activity and performance. We propose an additional interpretation of this relationship in the context of discrete corporate development activities. We argue that firms choose to repeat successful activities, thereby accumulating high experience with them. Data on 437 aircraft projects introduced through three governance modes show that the positive performance effect of the firm's experience with the focal mode becomes insignificant after accounting for experience endogeneity. We suggest that in a general case, experience with corporate development activities may be tinged with both learning and selection effects. Therefore, omitting to account for experience endogeneity may lead to incorrect conclusions from an “empirically observed” positive experience–performance relationship. Managerial summary : This paper emphasizes that firms generally choose to undertake the corporate development activities (new product introductions, diversification moves, international expansions, alliances, acquisitions, etc.) with which they have been the most successful in the past and that they expect to be the most successful in the future. Hence, if a firm possesses certain capabilities, it will repeatedly engage in certain activities corresponding to those capabilities, thereby simultaneously achieving high levels of activity experience as well as superior activity performance. This view suggests that an “empirically observed” positive experience–performance relationship may not be due solely to learning‐based enhanced capabilities but may also be driven by astute self‐selection. Overall, we provide a new interpretation of the relationship between experience and performance in the context of infrequent, heterogeneous, and causally‐ambiguous corporate development activities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Media Coverage of Corporate Social Irresponsibility Increases Financial Risk

Research summary: This article explores the relationship between corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and financial risk. We posit that media coverage of CSI generates risk by providing conditions that increase the potential for stakeholder sanctions. Through analyzing an international panel of 539 firms during 2008–2013, we find that firms receiving higher CSI coverage face higher financial risk. We show that the reach of the reporting media outlet is a critical condition for this relationship. Once the outlet has a high reach, the severity of CSI coverage is a boundary condition that further reinforces the effect. Our findings complement existing theory about the risk‐mitigating effect of corporate social responsibility by illuminating the risk‐generating effect of CSI coverage. For executives, these insights suggest complementary strategies for corporate risk management. Managerial summary: This article examines the effect of negative news on financial risk. It shows that negative media articles regarding environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues increase a firm's credit risk. It also provides a detailed analysis of the impact of an article's reach and severity, i.e., how many readers are exposed to the article and how harshly it criticizes the firm. The results allow to quantitatively assess the risk that emanates from negative ESG news. For executives, three strategies are derived for limiting a firm's exposure to this risk: balancing corporate social responsibility programs with operational safety programs, reporting suboptimal environmental and social performance transparently and proactively, and avoiding acquisition targets and markets with a legacy of negative news. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Incubation of an industry: Heterogeneous knowledge bases and modes of value capture

Research summary : We examine firms' technological investments during an industry's incubation stage—the period between a technological breakthrough and the first instance of its commercialization. Using the agricultural biotechnology context, we develop stylized findings regarding the understudied knowledge evolution preceding product evolution in an industry's life cycle, the trend and diversity of firms undertaking technological investments in anticipation of industry emergence, their leverage of markets for technology and corporate control, and their use of alternative modes of value capture. We juxtapose these stylized findings with existing literature to identify new theoretical insights, and set the stage for future scholarly work to develop and test new theories for the incubation period, examine its existence in other industries, and study its impact on subsequent firm and industry evolution. M anagerial summary : New technological breakthroughs present managers of existing firms and aspiring entrepreneurs with opportunities to create altogether new industries. During the vibrant incubation period, we find that multiple firms capitalize on diverse knowledge bases to shape the industry's knowledge evolution and also capture economic value in diverse ways. Existing firms in the obsolescing industry are more likely to become targets in acquisitions given their complementary knowledge. Science‐based start‐ups are more likely to engage in acquisitions and collaborations with established firms. Diversifying firms are more likely to commercialize products after leveraging of internal development, acquisitions, and alliances. Our study highlights the importance for managers to think about “success” and “failure” across multiple yardsticks of performance, rather than only as product commercialization as the sole goal. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How firms respond to being rated

While many rating systems seek to help buyers overcome information asymmetries when making purchasing decisions, we investigate how these ratings also influence the companies being rated. We hypothesize that ratings are particularly likely to spur responses from firms that receive poor ratings, and especially those that face lower‐cost opportunities to improve or that anticipate greater benefits from doing do. We test our hypotheses in the context of corporate environmental ratings that guide investors to select ‘socially responsible,’ and avoid ‘socially irresponsible,’ companies. We examine how several hundred firms responded to corporate environmental ratings issued by a prominent independent social rating agency, and take advantage of an exogenous shock that occurred when the agency expanded the scope of its ratings. Our study is among the first to theorize about the impact of ratings on subsequent performance, and we introduce important contingencies that influence firm response. These theoretical advances inform stakeholder theory, institutional theory, and economic theory. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Resources,environmental change,and survival: asymmetric paths of young independent and subsidiary organizations

Using an evolutionary model and a sample of 7,166 firms in the manufacturing and technology sectors of Sweden, we find that surviving organizations founded independent of a parent organization have lower long‐term failure rates than their protected subsidiary counterparts. Specifically, we find that subsidiary organizations have low mortality rates when compared to independent organizations, but that their mortality rates increase more rapidly during a severe economic downturn. We also find evidence that surviving independent organizations are more capable than subsidiary organizations of using their resources to reduce mortality rates during an environmental jolt. Overall, our findings strengthen the notion that organizational adaptation is linked not only to ecological and strategic processes but also to organizational structure. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deliberate learning in corporate acquisitions: post‐acquisition strategies and integration capability in U.S. bank mergers

This paper introduces a knowledge‐based view of corporate acquisitions and tests the post‐acquisition consequences on performance of integration decisions and capability‐building mechanisms. In our model, the acquiring firm decides both how much to integrate the acquired firm and the extent to which it replaces this firm's top management team. It can also learn to manage the post‐acquisition integration process by tacitly accumulating acquisition experience and explicitly codifying it in manuals, systems, and other acquisition‐specific tools. Using a sample of 228 acquisitions in the U.S. banking industry, we find that knowledge codification strongly and positively influences acquisition performance, while experience accumulation does not. Furthermore, increasing levels of post‐acquisition integration strengthen the positive effect of codification. Finally, the level of integration between the two merged firms significantly enhances performance, while replacing top managers in the acquired firm negatively impacts performance, all else being equal. Implications are drawn for both organizational learning theory and a knowledge‐based approach to corporate strategy research. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance: The Role of Executive Compensation

This article examines the relationship between corporate governance and corporate sustainability by focusing on an essential component of companies' governance structure: executive compensation programs. We propose an original empirical strategy based on a large set of the biggest capitalizations in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over the period 2004–2018, with explicit measures of how companies integrate into executive managers' remuneration precise criteria of corporate social responsibility, an incentive scheme called corporate social responsibility (CSR) contracting. Our results show that proposing executive compensation programs including CSR criteria has a negative impact on financial performance, and a large positive impact on extra-financial performance based on the following dimensions: relationship with customers and suppliers, and community involvement. Second, we explore the moderating role of the corporate governance model by distinguishing the impact between firms with a shareholder or stakeholder corporate governance model and reveal significant differences in the impact of CSR contracting. For firms with a stakeholder corporate governance model, CSR contracting is no longer associated with a fall of financial performance and has a large positive impact on human resources, environmental, and human rights performance. On the other hand, CSR contracting has a negative impact on financial performance but no impact on extra-financial performance for firms with a shareholder corporate governance model.     

Corporate Governance and returns on information technology investment: evidence from an emerging market

Prior studies have reported mixed findings on the impact of corporate information technology (IT) investment on firm performance. This study investigates the effect of corporate governance, an important management control mechanism, on the relation between IT investment and firm performance in the Taiwanese electronics industry. Specifically, we explore board independence and foreign ownership, which have increasingly become salient factors concerning corporate governance in emerging markets. We address their roles across firms of different sizes and in industries where degrees of competitiveness run a wide gamut. Our results show a positive moderating effect of board independence on the IT investment‐firm performance relation, especially when competition intensifies. Furthermore, we find that the greater the foreign ownership in small firms, the more positive the IT investment‐firm performance relation, suggesting that foreign investors may bring IT expertise to help small firms reap the benefits of using IT. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stakeholder Orientation and Acquisition Performance

Research summary : In this article, we study how a firm's stakeholder orientation affects the performance of its corporate acquisitions. We depart from prior literature and suggest that orientations toward employees, customers, suppliers, and local communities will affect long‐term acquisition performance both directly and through its interactions with process characteristics, such as preacquisition relatedness and postacquisition integration. Analyses of data on a sample of 1884 acquisitions show overall a positive association between acquirers' stakeholder orientation and acquisition performance. In addition, we find support for a positive moderation of business relatedness on the performance impacts of stakeholder orientation. Structural integration has a similarly positive moderation effect only for some of the stakeholder categories. Managerial summary : Does collaboration with stakeholders during an acquisition pay off in terms of performance? The results of this research show that it is worth engaging stakeholders during the M&A process, but that the efficacy of involvement practices may depend on the type of stakeholders and the characteristics of the acquisition. While acquiring firms that take account of suppliers and local communities consistently overperform in their acquisitions, the inclusion of employees might be not beneficial (and even harmful) when the target firm operates in a dissimilar business or when managers do not plan to maintain it as a separate entity. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mergers,acquisitions and control of telecommunications firms in Europe

New evidence is presented about 12 large acquisitions by telecommunications firms in Europe. The average effect on acquirers’ shareholder value is not significantly different from zero, which confirms a paradox found by previous studies: bidding firms’ shareholders do not benefit from takeovers. There is high dispersion in the results. This suggests that detailed studies may uncover important aspects of the constraints that exist in the corporate control market of telecommunications firms. A case study of the Spanish firm Telefonica suggests that corporate governance problems and political intervention are significant components of these “agency” constraints.     

Corporate sexual equality and firm performance

Research summary: Previous studies have mixed findings on the relation between corporate socially responsible policies and firm performance. This paper focuses on a specific type of corporate social responsibility—corporate sexual equality, measuring how a firm treats its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees, consumers, and investors—and examines whether and how it relates to firm performance. Using a longitudinal dataset of public firms in the U.S. during the period of 2002–2006, we demonstrate that firms with a higher degree of corporate sexual equality have higher stock returns and higher market valuation. We also identify one of the mediating channels, the labor market channel, that brings higher productivity to firms that embrace sexual equality. Managerial summary: Corporate sexual equality measures how a company treats its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees, consumers, and investors. It is an important dimension of corporate social responsibility policies and diversity management. Using a longitudinal dataset of public firms in the U.S. during the period of 2002–2006, we demonstrate that firms with a higher degree of corporate sexual equality have higher stock returns, higher market valuation, and higher labor productivity. Our findings suggest that discriminatory hiring behaviors based on sexual orientation hurt employers and shareholders financially and that implementing corporate sexual equality policies can enhance firms' financial performance, generating competitive advantages in labor markets and mutual benefits between employers and employees. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions by Chinese listed companies: A principal–principal perspective

Chinese listed firms have gained the world’s attention with several ambitious, high-profile cross-border mergers and acquisitions. In most of these deals, the Chinese government is the largest shareholder of the acquiring firms. As such, it may be the case that the Chinese government pushes through such deals even though they are not in the best interests of minority shareholders, giving rise to principal–principal conflicts. Along these lines, we hypothesize that increased government ownership in the acquiring firm will be associated with investors viewing a cross-border merger deal in less favorable terms. In addition, we hypothesize that environmental complexity will moderate this negative relationship. We test our hypotheses with a sample of cross-border mergers and acquisitions involving Chinese firms from 2000 to 2008. We find support for the main hypothesis, that is, that investors are indeed skeptical of cross-border mergers and acquisitions deals when the government is the majority owner (i.e., principal–principal conflicts). However, we find no support for the moderating effect. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and practitioners and suggest future research directions.