How does green entrepreneurship affect environmental improvement? Empirical findings from 293 enterprises

Enterprises tend to change their production and emission behaviours to foster green entrepreneurship under endogenous innovation development pressure and exogenous environmental regulation. This research innovatively establishes a theoretical framework on the dual dynamic linkage of environmental regulation and green entrepreneurship. Based on the sample data of 293 thermoelectric industry enterprises during 2017–2020, this empirical research first measures green entrepreneurship with the entropy method and finds that Zhejiang has cultivated green entrepreneurship at a primary level. Green entrepreneurship witnessed growth from 2016 to 2019. The dynamic regression identification then validates the stimulatory effect of environmental regulation on green entrepreneurship cultivation through internal competitiveness enhancement. Finally, with the application of the triple difference method (DDD), this research verifies that green entrepreneurship is positive in cultivating technological innovation and significantly facilitates environmental regulation to achieve better regulation effects through overall enterprise pollution emissions, total sulfur dioxide emissions, and total nitrogen oxide emissions. It is necessary to coordinate all aspects to cultivate green entrepreneurship and green growth in the future.

     

How does distributive justice affect work attitudes? The moderating effects of autonomy

Organizational justice has been a frequently used lens for understanding employee attitudes, particularly towards the fair distribution of rewards. This study of 184 New Zealand employees found distributive justice relating to pay, benefits, and rewards to be significantly linked to job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Further, job autonomy was found to significantly interact with these relationships. While employees with high job autonomy reported higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions when distributive justice was high, employees with little job autonomy registered significantly larger changes in work attitudes. The findings highlight the importance of felt independence and autonomy over work in the role that justice perceptions play in organizations.     

How do technological innovations affect corporate investment and hiring?

In this paper, we study the relation between technological advancement, and corporate investment and hiring. We build a corporate investment model with dynamic technology conditions, and we find the optimal investment and labor inputs increase in response to technological innovation shocks. Consistent with the model predictions, we empirically show that corporate investment and hiring increase following technological advancements, using various measures of technological innovation. Further, we find the effect is stronger for firms in more innovative industry, firms with higher capital intensity and firms with higher market-to-book ratio. Our findings provide evidence for the endogenous growth theory, i.e., firms with successful innovations tend to expand in capital investment and employment, suggesting technological innovations are, to some extent, Hicks-neutral.     

How does FinTech affect the development of the digital economy? Evidence from China

Financial Technology (FinTech) is key to the global ascendency of China's finance, and the digital economy is a new driving force in the sustainable development and high-quality growth of China's economy. So, what is the nature of the relationship between FinTech and the digital economy. Based on the CRITIC method, this study calculates the China's 31 provinces’ (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) FinTech indices from 2008 to 2018 and the digital economy development indices from 2012 to 2018, and analyzes the impact of FinTech on the digital economy and its underlying mechanism. The results show that FinTech stimulates the development of the digital economy in China by promoting technological innovation and weakening the financial decentralization of local governments. Further research indicates that local financial regulatory resources have a positive moderating effect on the impact of FinTech in promoting the development of the digital economy. Increased local financial regulatory resources will enable FinTech to promote the development of the digital economy, but this regulatory role is only significant in financially developed areas. The approach of the study is relatively novel.     

How does the economic policy uncertainty affect the relationship between financial slack and firm performance in emerging countries?

This study investigates the moderating effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the relationship between slack resources and firm performance in emerging countries. By using 47,523 firm-year observations from seven emerging market economies through the period of 2010–2018, the results show an inverse U-shaped relationship between slack resources and firm performance. The findings also demonstrate that EPU acts as a negative moderator for the slack–performance relationship. In high EPU environments, the marginal benefit from one additional unit of slack is smaller relative to low EPU environments. This study contributes to the slack resources-firm performance literature by emphasizing the role of the broader external environment as a moderator.     

Do retail mergers affect competition? Evidence from grocery retailing

This study estimates the price effects of horizontal mergers in the U.S. grocery retailing industry. We examine fourteen regions affected by mergers, including mergers in highly concentrated and relatively unconcentrated markets. We identify price effects by comparing markets affected by mergers to unaffected markets using difference‐in‐difference estimation with three different comparison groups, propensity score weights, and by using the synthetic control method. Our results are robust to the choice of control group and estimation technique. We find that mergers in highly concentrated markets are most frequently associated with price increases, and mergers in less concentrated markets are most often associated with price decreases.     

How does qualitative data collection modality affect disclosure of sensitive information and participant experience? Findings from a quasi-experimental study

Quality & Quantity - Focus groups (FGs) and individual interviews (IDIs) can be conducted in-person or in several different online contexts. We conducted a quasi-experimental study and assessed...     

How do services of owner-occupied housing affect income inequality and redistribution?

This paper aims at analyzing the redistributive impact that the inclusion of the imputed rental market value of owner-occupied housing would have if used for quantifying the ability to pay rather than imputation based on cadastral values. We consider the Spanish personal income tax as reference, due to the differential treatment that it provides for imputed income from owner-occupied housing, together with the exceptionally high percentages of home ownership in Spain. By means of micro-simulation we explore the consequences of alternative possibilities for dealing with implicit income from owner-occupied housing.     

Which factors affect the duration of hot topics on social media platforms?

Quality & Quantity - Hot topics, as a common phenomenon on social media platform, play a major role in public opinion. This paper aims to discuss the issues about the duration of hot topics:...     

How does stakeholder engagement through environmental,social, and governance affect eco-efficiency and profitability efficiency? Zooming into Apple Inc.'s counterparts

As global ecological degradation intensifies, a trade-off has arisen between environmental protection and production efficiency to achieve sustainable development for the environment, society, and the company itself. However, the potential reverse causality relationship between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and corporate efficiency may lead to confusion. This study estimates the eco-efficiency of Apple Incorporated's value-chain counterparts in the first stage and creates values and profitability in the second stage of efficiency evaluation. Results obtained from the (i) directional distance function in the two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA), (ii) additive efficiency decomposition two-stage network DEA model, and (iii) network slacks-based measure model are consistent. That is, Apple counterparts manage more efficient eco-efficiency than profitability efficiency, implying that eco-efficiency is their competitive advantage. We thus also run a regression analysis to examine how the ESG ratings of Apple counterparts explain their eco-efficiency and profitability efficiency. Although the overall ESG rating positively explains the efficiencies, we found that the individual governance rating shows no statistically significant effect. The regression results provide insight for practitioners on the importance of investing in the three aspects of a firm's collective conscientiousness for societal and environmental governance. This paper integrates companies' eco-efficiency and profitability efficiency to resolve the conflict between environmental issues and production efficiency. It also analyzes in depth the effects of ESG and its three individual factors on eco-, profitability, and average efficiencies. The diversity of research methods also provides new ideas for future research related to firm efficiency.     

Are we ‘sharing’ or ‘gig-ing’? A classification system for online platforms

There is a growing debate about the nature and extent of platform control over workers. Companies claim they are merely ‘matchmakers’ while labour advocates argue that these organisations exercise granular control over workers. Blending the fields of information science and labour relations, this article develops a classification system of sequential control to delineate between ‘high control’ and ‘low control’ platforms. In doing so, this article provides a theoretical method to distinguish ‘sharing’ versus ‘gig’ platforms and argues that worker autonomy—how platforms foreclose worker choice—can be used to understand platform control.     

Do strategic factors affect adoption of profit sharing? Longitudinal evidence from Canada

Despite the growing interest in strategic human resource management and strategic compensation, the firm's strategic context has rarely been examined as a possible predictor of profit sharing adoption, especially in longitudinal research, nor have all three possible strategic alignments (internal, horizontal, and vertical) been included in the same study. Based on three panels of longitudinal data from Canadian establishments drawn from three consecutive time periods, this paper finds strong support for internal (within compensation strategy) alignment, as a high-wage compensation policy is a significant predictor of profit sharing adoption in all three time periods. At the same time, significant support for a diffusion or institutional perspective on profit sharing adoption is also noted. These findings highlight the importance of including both strategic factors (particularly those that may be associated with internal alignment) and institutional factors in studies seeking to understand profit sharing adoption.     

How do natural resource endowment and institutional quality influence the nexus between external indebtedness and welfare in Africa?

Resource-rich African countries are often saddled with high external indebtedness. Yet, their management of resource endowment, a logical source of debt repayment, also remains a challenge, alongside their characteristic weak institutions. We investigate the relationship between external indebtedness and welfare whilst considering the pervasive influence of both natural resource rents and the quality of institutions. Using a two-stage analysis, we find that the quality of institutions, mineral- and oil-resource rents negatively affect indebtedness, while rents of aggregated natural resources, which include agricultural commodities, increase indebtedness. In the second stage, we find that welfare is enhanced by the quality of institutions, mineral- and oil-resource rents. These sets of results are interestingly conditional on the degree of resource endowment and the income level of countries, alongside the interesting effects of external indebtedness on welfare, both of which, importantly, nuance past results on the “resource curse”. Furthermore, the proxy for welfare matters: the human development index proxy reflects more the theoretical expectations of unsustainable indebtedness on welfare, than does the GDP per capita alternative. These and other results of our paper, which hold useful policy guides for African countries, are robust to alternative estimation techniques and other checks.     

How do “gatekeepers” affect credit risk?

This study investigates the relationship between auditor tenure and credit default swap (CDS) spreads of U.S. firms based on quantile regression. After allowing for common determinants of CDS spreads, auditor tenure exerts both statistically and economically significant additional impacts on the CDS market. Furthermore, there are differential effects of common CDS spread determinants and auditor tenure. While common determinants of CDS spreads (e.g., leverage, volatility, risk free rate, credit ratings, and earnings) have monotonically increasing impacts when CDS spreads (and their changes) are increasingly higher, auditor tenure primarily has the impact when CDS spreads are of low or median levels for less risky firms.     

How does perceived formality shape unheard challenging voices?

Abstract

It has been argued that upward challenge is important because it allows employees to have a say in organisational decision-making. Yet upward challenge may go unheard in organisations. Formal voice mechanisms are largely considered to be advantageous for encouraging employees to share their views and concerns. However, recent papers calling into question the distinction between formal and informal voice have prompted investigation into the value of formal voice mechanisms in encouraging upward challenge. This qualitative study attempted to understand in what ways formal voice mechanisms had the potential to create unheard voices by first establishing a working definition of formal voice mechanisms. Using a sample of 19 UK police officers, participants used a card sort to categorise formal and informal voice mechanisms. They subsequently identified, through semi-structured interviews, that formal voice mechanisms could be considered risky for upward challenge. The findings can be used by scholars and practitioners as a framework to identify where challenging voices may be going unheard.     

Rating and capital structure: How do the signs affect the speed of adjustment?

Standard and Poor's ratings can be modified by the addition of a plus (+) or minus (?) sign to show the relative standing within each major rating category. In this paper, we analyze the influence of these signs on the speed of leverage adjustment for listed European companies in the 2004–2014 period. Our results indicate that (a) when a qualification is accompanied by a minus sign, it adjusts more slowly than qualifications either with a plus sign or without a sign; (b) when a rating has a plus sign, the adjustment is slower than when it has no sign; and (c) when a qualification is BBB‐, the speed of its leverage adjustment is close to zero. These results suggest that companies with signs in their ratings decrease their speed of adjustment to the target leverage ratio. In addition, such companies are especially concerned about a credit rating downgrade when it implies a possible loss of the degree of investment (BBB‐).