CEO hometown identity and firm green innovation

Drawn on the upper echelons theory, this study investigates how chief executive officer (CEO) hometown identity drives firm green innovation. We propose that CEO hometown identity has a positive impact on a firm's green innovation performance. Furthermore, we explore the moderating role of managerial discretion determined by organizational and environmental factors (i.e., institutional ownership and market complexity). We propose that institutional ownership negatively moderates the positive relationship between CEO hometown identity and green innovation, but market complexity plays a positive moderating role. Using Chinese publicly listed firms from 2002 to 2016 in heavily polluting industries, our findings support these hypotheses. Our research contributes to the upper echelons theory and corporate social responsibility literature and has substantial practical implications.     

Dominant stockownership and profitability

Dominant stockholders can acquire variable amounts of control over a firm's performance. The amount of control depends largely on both the incentive and power to dominate the firm's decision-making process. Ceteris paribus, a dominant stockholder has more incentive and power to influence firm behavior when he owns larger amounts of the firm's stock. To capture properly the effects of the separation of ownership and control this study considers a continuous relation between stockownership and control. This formulation allows for variable degrees of stockholder control, and suggests a critical minimum percentage of stockownership necessary for constraining managerial behavior.     

Stock Options and Firm Performance: New Evidence from the French Market

This study investigates the effect of stock option‐based compensation on the short‐term and long‐term performance of French companies. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first empirical evidence describing the market reaction following initiations and renewals of Employee Stock Option (ESO) plans in France. We find that the French market reacts positively to initiations of ESO plans but does not consider their renewal as relevant information. Our results on the long‐term effect of ESO plans suggest that neither the size nor the value of the grants affect the firm's accounting and market performance. Similarly, corporate performance prior to the grant has no explanatory power of the size or value of the grant. This implies that, over our sample period, the relationship between option‐based compensation and corporate performance in France was inexistent, regardless of the direction considered.     

Political Tie Heterogeneity and the Impact of Adverse Shocks on Firm Value

Past research has recognized the contingent value of corporate political ties but largely neglects their heterogeneity. Drawing on the political embeddedness perspective and literature on emerging economy political institutions, we develop hypotheses regarding how political networks comprising managerial and government ownership ties may have different valuation effects in the face of adverse political shocks. Examining stock market responses to an unanticipated, high‐profile political event in China, we find a negative valuation effect of managerial ties to municipal government, but an insignificant effect of government ownership ties. Further, companies combining managerial and ownership ties experienced less post‐shock reduction in market value than those holding only managerial political ties. These findings shed light on the values of different configurations of corporate political ties and inform firms of potential ways to manage ubiquitous political hazards in emerging economies.     

Managerial Ownership and Earnings Management: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Japan

This paper examines the relationship between managerial ownership and opportunistic managerial behavior relating to earnings management. Economics theory identifies two apparently conflicting effects of managerial ownership on managers' incentives: the incentive alignment effect and the management entrenchment effect. We construct a theoretical model demonstrating the two effects. This model suggests that as managerial ownership increases, earnings management decreases for both high and low levels of managerial ownership, while it increases for intermediate levels of managerial ownership if the sensitivity of the probability of managerial dismissal to the corporate performance is high enough and/or the manager's private benefit derived from managerial position is high enough. In a sample of Japanese firms, we find a significant nonmonotonic relationship between managerial ownership and discretionary accruals, consistent with our model.     

Firm performance and board composition: Some new evidence

We investigate the effect of board composition on overall corporate performance while controlling for managerial ownership and other key variables. We recognize that both managerial ownership and board composition may be endogenous to performance, but our work differs from previous in two important respects. First, we measure performance using the market value to book value ratio of common stock equity rather than the more commonly used Tobin's q. Second, recognizing that overall estimates from the IV approach depend greatly on the choice of instruments, we perform sensitivity analysis by using a variety of instruments to proxy for board composition and managerial ownership. Both our OLS and IV estimates indicate a significant curvilinear relation between board composition and performance. However, we find that moderate differences in first-stage regressions, resulting in small changes to first-stage R²s, lead to widely differing overall results. Our results suggest that findings of studies using IV and similar techniques (e.g. two- and three-stage least squares) must be interpreted cautiously.     

Do institutional investors monitor management? Evidence from the relationship between institutional ownership and capital structure

We examine the dynamic relations between institutional ownership and a firm's capital structure. We find that a firm's leverage decreases when institutional ownership increases. This result implies that a firm reduces its debt level as institutional investors substitute for the monitoring role of debt. More importantly, we find that a firm's suboptimal leverage decreases when the institutional ownership increases, and institutional ownership decreases when a firm's suboptimal leverage increases. This finding shows that institutions not only effectively monitor a firm's capital structure but they also passively sell their shares when dissatisfied with it. In addition, we find that the monitoring evidence on a firm's leverage and suboptimal leverage are more pronounced when the institutional investors are less likely to have business relationships with a firm or the information asymmetry is high in the market.     

Liquidity and firm value in an emerging market: Nonlinearity,political connections and corporate ownership

This study re-examines the relationship between liquidity and firm value in the emerging stock market of Malaysia, exploring the issues of nonlinearity and moderating variables. Using data for all non-financial firms traded on Bursa Malaysia over the sample period of 2000–2015, the results from the baseline quadratic model suggest stocks must be traded higher than the threshold liquidity level before reaping the benefit of larger firm value. Our key finding of a nonlinear relationship remains robust to alternative liquidity measures and estimation methods, as well as passing a series of endogeneity checks. Using an ideal candidate of lot size reduction for Malaysian stocks in May 2003 as exogenous liquidity shock, we establish the causal effect from liquidity to firm value. Further interaction analyses uncover three important moderating variables in the liquidity-firm value relationship, in which the value impact demands a more liquid market for Malaysian public firms with political connections, higher foreign nominee ownership and higher foreign institutional ownership.     

Corporate Ownership and Environmental Proactivity

The present paper advances knowledge of the drivers of firms' proactive environmental strategies. In particular, it explores the relationship between different corporate ownership structures and firms' green proactivity, in order to see whether some types of shareholder act as a stimulating driver for firms' proactive environmental behaviors. The study examines the explanatory power of corporate governance issues, such as a firm's ownership structure, as potential determinants of companies' environmental proactivity. Attention is focused on the European firms included into the Carbon Disclosure Project questionnaire 2012. The results show that ownership structure matters in firms' environmental proactivity. In particular, firms with a higher percentage of state ownership present superior green proactivity, while ownership concentration appears negatively related to proactive environmental strategy. The paper offers theoretical and practical implications. It focuses attention on a still underdeveloped research area, namely organizations and their relationship with the natural environment, including corporate ownership as a driver of a company's proactive environmental strategy. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Disclosure, Corporate Governance and Foreign Share Ownership on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange

We investigate the association of foreign share ownership with firm‐level disclosure and corporate governance structures in Zimbabwe, a developing country in Southern Africa. Our motivation for the study derives from the literature, which suggests that foreign investors: (1) generally have a preference for companies in which they are well informed and where their investments are more likely to be protected, and (2) avoid companies in developing countries because of weak corporate governance structures and low disclosure. Using data drawn from companies listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, we examine the effect of disclosure and corporate governance on foreign share ownership. We find that disclosure, proportion of non‐executive directors, institutional share ownership and audit committee independence are all positively and significantly associated with foreign share ownership. Our results also demonstrate that market capitalization, return on equity and liquidity ratios are significantly associated with foreign share ownership. These results are consistent with the notion that foreign investors have a preference for companies with effective corporate governance structures, companies with less information asymmetry, as well as companies with healthy cash positions. The results have implications for policy‐makers in developing countries in their endeavour to improve liquidity on stock markets through the participation of foreign investors. The results are also useful to managers in developing countries who are keen to increase the market value of their company, thereby reducing their cost of capital.     

The Influence of Managerial Ownership on Bank Market Value,Performance, and Risk: Evidence from Banks Listed on the Stoxx Global Index

We follow agency theory to assess the influence of managerial ownership on the market value, performance, and risk of 123 listed banks in 23 countries included in the STOXX Global Index in 2007 and 2010. After controlling for bank characteristics, regulatory restrictions, and macroeconomic conditions, our findings show a positive relation between managerial ownership and both market value (Tobin's Q) and performance (ROA and ROE). Moreover, we find a negative relation between managerial ownership and risk (EDF, NPL/L, and Z‐SCORE). Bank market value and performance is a non‐linear, inverse U‐shaped function of managerial ownership. The negative relation between managerial ownership and bank risk is also non‐linear and U‐shaped. Our results remain robust to reverse causality. In their effort to immunize the global financial system from systemic risks, central banks and practitioners should find our results relevant for regulation purposes.     

Price versus quantity in a duopoly with network externalities under active and passive expectations

This study examines the endogenous choice of strategic contracts in a duopoly composed of firms that produce goods with network externalities with some sort of compatibility. We adopt two types of expectations—active and passive—as consumers' expectations for each firm's equilibrium market share. In addition, we take into account the managerial case and entrepreneurial case with and without separation between ownership and management, as firms' internal structures. We derive the properties in the Cournot competition and the Bertrand competition as the equilibrium market structures under both passive and active expectations under imperfectly compatibility of networks.     

事务所规模、制度环境与企业税收激进

选取2008—2016年间我国沪、深A股上市公司为研究样本，考察会计师事务所规模与企业税收激进的关系及外部制度环境对两者的调节作用。研究结果显示，大规模事务所（国内“十大”所）与企业税收激进程度显著负相关，这说明国内大型事务所的审计对企业税收激进行为具有抑制作用。进一步按制度环境指数（法治水平、政府干预程度）检验的结果表明，法治水平高、政府干预低能够强化事务所规模对企业税收激进的抑制作用，反映了当下我国的法治水平提升和政府干预减弱都能强化独立审计的监督作用。     

The effects of employee stock ownership on stock liquidity: Evidence from the Korean market

This study investigates the relationship between the level of employee stock ownership (ESO) and stock liquidity. Using Korean ESO data, we find that ESO is positively associated with various liquidity measures. Stock-owning employees tend to mitigate information asymmetry to increase their benefits from the transparent market. We also find stronger effects when the firm is not an affiliate of a chaebol family group, and is less monitored by financial analysts, foreign investors, and outside directors. Furthermore, we employ various robustness tests to mitigate potential endogeneity concerns.     

Publication trends in the Journal of International Financial Management and Accounting: A retrospective review

This study uses bibliometric analysis to assess Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting (JIFMA's) evolution between 1989 and 2021. In this retrospective review, we investigate the journal's performance, authorship trends, and intellectual structure. The journal's international focus is primarily on cross-country studies and the effects of country-level factors on various accounting and finance outcomes. The collaborative network of JIFMA's authors has also grown substantially consistent with rise in research collaboration in general across the world. We identify nine major themes making up JIFMA's knowledge structure: (1) value relevance of accounting information relating to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards, (2) voluntary corporate disclosure, (3) corporate use of financial derivatives, (4) corporate governance, (5) equity valuation, (6) stock return seasonalities, foreign equity ownership, and cost of capital, (7) earnings announcements and pecking order behavior, (8) triple-bottom-line disclosures, and (9) managerial ownership and earnings management. Our findings will likely benefit JIFMA's editorial board and other journal stakeholders including future researchers.     

Mindfulness,socioemotional wealth,and environmental strategy of family businesses

The study advances knowledge in the field of business strategy and the environment by incorporating mindfulness theory into the research on socioemotional wealth (SEW) and its environmental consequences in family businesses. Using an integrative model, the paper investigates the relationship between mindfulness SEW dimensions and family firms' environmental strategies, specifically in developing sustainable products and processes. This study also proposes the firm's capabilities as a mediator in this relationship, while market turbulence is a moderator in the relationship between the firm's capabilities and sustainable products and processes. The empirical results show that in protecting SEW, specifically in the identification of family members with the firm and binding social ties, mindfulness provides a rich endowment that develops appropriate capabilities to produce sustainable products and processes. While the moderating role of market turbulence is insignificant, we can infer that irrespective of how turbulent (or not) the market is, the firm's capabilities are a key determinant of sustainable products and processes. Our findings offer theoretical and managerial implications for sustainable practices in the family business context.     

Creating social and environmental value through integrated thinking: International evidence

Integrated thinking (IT) is a managerial mindset increasingly discussed in the context of value creation. Through the lens of systems theory, this study examines how the degree to which IT is embedded in a firm's strategy and day-to-day business processes is associated with the firm's social and environmental value creation. Using a broad international dataset, we find strong evidence that our measure of IT is positively related to a firm's sustainability performance (SP), which we use to operationalize social and environmental value creation (or erosion). Our results also reveal that the increase in a firm's SP might come at the cost of a short-term decrease in financial performance (FP). We find no indication, however, that IT induces a trade-off between SP and long-term FP. Integrated thinking appears to stipulate long-term financial value creation instead. We further explore moderating factors within the organizational and institutional context of our sample firms and highlight implications for society, corporate practice, and policymaking.     

Corporate sustainability and financial performance: Collective reputation as moderator of the relationship between environmental performance and firm market value

Markets value superior corporate sustainability performance in part because investors use a firm's environmental performance as a signal of desirable but difficult-to-observe attributes, such as the firm's integrity capacity. Yet a signaling conflict can arise when a firm belongs to an organizational form that has a collective reputation for being unethical. In such circumstances, the firm's environmental performance may no longer credibly signal its underlying integrity capacity, leading markets to adjust downward the value they would otherwise place on the firm's environmental performance. Using longitudinal data on South Korean firms, we find that improvements in firm environmental performance lead to smaller increases in market values for firms belonging to a poorly reputed organizational form. However, firms can partially recover lost value by adopting firm features that reduce the signaling conflict, thereby restoring the notion of corporate sustainability performance driving firm market values.     

Board gender diversity and corporate environmental performance: The moderating role of family and dual‐class majority ownership structures

While prior work has investigated the impact of (a) ownership structure and (b) board gender diversity separately on corporate environmental performance, researchers have not studied the potentially important relationship between ownership control and female board diversity in influencing corporate environmental performance jointly. We do so in the context of majority ownership in family‐controlled and dual‐class firms whose motives and influence are theoretically different from that of the firm's minority shareholders. Drawing on resource dependency, socioemotional wealth theory, and secondary agency theory, we hypothesize that majority family owners and dual‐class owners likely choose women directors to help advance their personal preferences for environmental corporate social responsibility. Our empirical tests utilizing 2,755 U.S. firm years over the 2010–2015 show that, as hypothesized, these two majority ownership types interact with board gender diversity to positively influence corporate environmental performance.     

Corporate takeovers,stockholder returns and executive rewards

Various motives for making corporate acquisitions have been forwarded in the managerial economics literature. Two that have received a lot of attention are the maximization of stockholder wealth and the maximization of senior management's utility. These two alternative views can lead to different acquisition decisions. The paper examines the returns to senior management and the returns to stockholders following corporate takeovers in the United Kingdom. The evidence suggests that if shareholders profit from takeovers then so do the senior' management. Of more interest, however, is the finding that if acquisitions result in a reduction in stock market value for the acquiring firm, their senior management appear to gain. In particular, senior management remuneration increases substantially after an acquisition. This evidence is consistent with the maximization of senior management's utility being an important motive in many corporate-acquisition decisions.