Taxation and income shifting: Empirical evidence from a quasi-experiment in China

China's new Corporate Income Tax Law was passed in March 2007 and took effect on January 1, 2008. It terminated the dual corporate income tax regime by removing the preferential tax treatments offered to foreign investment enterprises (FIEs) and unifying the corporate income tax regime for FIEs and Chinese domestic enterprises (DEs). This article uses a difference-in-differences approach to determine whether FIEs responded to the law by shifting income out of China. Employing the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database from 2002 to 2008 to implement the analysis, we find that FIEs have responded to the law by shifting income out of China; the treatment effect for Hong Kong-Macau-Taiwan (HMT) investment enterprises is less negative than that for other FIEs, which implies that HMT investment enterprises might be less capable of shifting income across countries than other FIEs. The treatment effect by restricting the control group to State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) is less negative than that by restricting the control group to Private-Owned Enterprises (POEs), which is consistent with the perception that SOEs might enjoy more favorable treatment from the Chinese government than POEs. All three findings are consistent with tax-induced income shifting, and hence we conclude that taxation plays an important role in income shifting activities.     

The effect of mergers and acquisitions on environmental,social and governance performance and market value: Evidence from EU acquirers

This study explores the effect of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance on market value and performance in the context of mergers and acquisitions. We examine whether acquisition of targets with better ESG performance can help acquirers to increase their own ESG performance and whether the market values the increased ESG performance positively. Moreover, we explore whether the acquisition of targets with better ESG performance affects the market value of acquirers. For this study, we utilize a sample of 100 European mergers and acquisitions between 2003 and 2017, for which matching data on the ESG performance of both the target and acquiring firms are available. Our results show that the postmerger ESG performance of the acquirer increases following the acquisition of a target that has higher ESG performance than that of the acquirer in the premerger stage, whereas the postmerger market value of the acquirer increases following an increase in the acquirer's postmerger ESG performance in relation to its premerger ESG performance. Finally, we provide partial evidence of a positive relationship between the postmerger market value of the acquirer and the acquisition of a target with higher ESG performance than itself in the premerger stage.     

Why SMEs invest in environmental measures: sustainability evidence from small and medium‐sized printing firms

Why do SMEs invest in environmental measures? From the literature we know that most SMEs are rather slow in adopting these sustainable measures, but then the following question arises: why are other SMEs fast in this respect? From our research, it becomes clear that improving the working conditions is the most important reason why these fast‐going SMEs invest in environmental measures, as this probably improves their employees' motivation and performance. This explanation connects ‘planet’ and ‘people’ with each other, and does not exclude ‘profit’, which completes the traditional sustainability circle. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The moderating effect of innovation on the relationship between environmental and financial performance: Evidence from high emitters in Australia

This study examines whether environmental-related innovation moderates the association between environmental and financial performance measured respectively as carbon emissions and return on assets (ROA). The sample comprises 119 companies subject to Australia's National Greenhouse Energy Reporting Act (NGER) for the period 2009–2017. The results show that environmental innovation positively moderates the relationship between environmental performance and financial performance. The findings also imply that the impact of environmental innovation in improving environmental performance is observable with a 1-year lag. The results are robust to the alternative financial performance measures of Tobin's Q and Altman's Z score. The findings have important implications for company managers and policymakers and provide useful information on innovation's role in enhancing environmental and financial performance.     

The pandemic and SME supply chains: Learning from early experiences of SME suppliers in the U.S. defense industry

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been disrupting supply chains in an unprecedented fashion, one type of firms that has been particularly affected are small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We focus on these SMEs, specifically on SME suppliers to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and investigate the impact that the pandemic has had on these suppliers, as well as the effectiveness of various government procurement efforts to alleviate the challenges. In doing so, we rely on survey data collected by the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA) during the early stages of the pandemic in March and April 2020 to assess initial government responses and SME supplier receptions. To derive more granular insight, we scrutinize the results across firm size, dependence on the DoD, whether the SME is a first-tier supplier or not, and industry. Through this investigation, we for instance find that the weakest suppliers are the very small SMEs (1–49 employees), and that most government measures were judged to not be that effective—at least in these early stages of the pandemic. Overall, our study leverages insight from one of the few large-scale surveys conducted on the impact of the pandemic on SME suppliers and their relationship with government agencies in the very early phases of the pandemic.     

The fluctuation correlation between investor sentiment and stock index using VMD-LSTM: Evidence from China stock market

The impact of the investor sentiment on China’s capital market price volatility is concerned under the perspective of the behavioral finance. Firstly, in terms of the existing methods of establishing the investor sentiment index, the composite investor sentiment index which include six indicators (five objective indicators and a subjective indicator) are obtained. Secondly, VMD-LSTM (Variational Mode Decomposition and Long Short Term Memory) hybrid neural network model is used to decompose and restructure the investor sentiment index and the Shanghai Security Exchange Composite Index (SSEC) into the short-term, medium-term and long-term trend. Each trend is trained to obtain the forecasting results in three different time scales, and then to achieve the final predicting results by superimposing the output of each trend. Furthermore, compare with other prediction methods, the model can indeed improve the overall predicting accuracy. Finally, GARCH model and the co-integration error regression model are used to discuss the fluctuation correlation and VAR (Vector Auto-regression) models are established to analyze the causality between the stock market indices and the investor sentiment index.