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On the basis of labor economics theories, this study examines how adjustment in human capital accounts for labor cost stickiness.

This study makes use of employee education level as a measure of the quality of human capital and relies on data from Chinese public firms to conduct the empirical test. This study focuses on two important components of labor cost changes: one corresponding to the adjustment in the number of employees (capacity adjustment) and another corresponding to the adjustment in the mix of employee education levels (quality adjustment).

This study reveals that labor cost changes driven by the adjustment of employee education level are sticky. This stickiness cannot be explained by the standard adjustment cost theory. This further shows that firms that actively adjust their employee quality during downturns experience improved future performance. The findings are robust to alternative measures and specifications.

This study provides new evidence for and insights into the cost behavior literature. Previous studies treat input resources in a homogenous way and focus on the effect of capacity adjustment. This study considers the heterogeneity of resources and examines three dimensions of salary cost adjustment: capacity, structure, and unit cost. In line with the economic theory of sticky costs proposed by Banker et al. (2013a), the study’s evidence sheds light on the additional underlying economic mechanisms driving cost stickiness behavior. Specifically, managers asymmetrically adjust both employee structure and average salaries, in addition to employee number. This study also adds to the existing knowledge of the consequences of managers' actions regarding cost behavior.

This study aims to examine the effects of human capital, such as top managers and employees, on the relationship between export and firm innovation. Although the issue of how firms remain creative and competitive in international markets is important both in practice and in research, little attention has been devoted to the internal mechanism through which export affects innovation.

Using a hand-collected data set of human capital on the overseas experiences of managers and educational levels of employees as the basis, this study utilizes Chinese A-share listed firms from 2006 to 2015 to test the research questions through regression analyses.

First, export significantly enhances firm innovation. Second, different types of human capital exhibit different moderating and mediating effects. Specifically, returnee managers play positive moderating and mediating roles on the relationship between export and innovation, whereas highly educated employees exhibit negative moderating effects and no mediating effect. Third, to address potential endogeneity, the authors construct novel instrumental variables of export and human capital and use the two-stage least-squares method to identify causality.

This study provides direct policy implications by showing the roles of export and human capital in innovation, thereby guiding the management practices of firms and talent policies of governments.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of idiosyncratic risk on firm decisions.

By introducing managerial ownership as a key variable, the paper presents a parsimonious model to describe the consequences of idiosyncratic risk on firm decisions. Then the paper uses data from the Chinese stock market, in which the managerial ownership is very low (around 0.02 percent) to examine the model predictions.

The authors find that: first, the negative relation between idiosyncratic risk and firm investment, which is found in prior studies, tends to be insignificant when managerial ownership is very low; second, diversification, as an alternative firm decision to lower risk positively, relates to idiosyncratic risk despite lower managerial ownership; and third, this kind of positive relation is weaker for firms with more managerial incentives when diversification is endogenously modeled.

This paper provides new evidence to complement existing studies from developed markets, in which executives hold substantial stakes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relations of investment and stock prices (Tobin‐Q), the impact of asymmetric information on the investment sensitivity to stock price, and the impact of asymmetric information on the stock price sensitivity to investment.

Research was conducted with 313 listed companies and 1,878 firm‐year observations from Chinese stock market. Empirical studies were conducted based on two hypotheses by using R², information delay and scores of information disclosure as measures of asymmetric information and taking changes in book assets and capital expenditures scaled by book assets as measures of investment.

The key findings of the paper are: managers are learning from the market when they make investment decisions; the asymmetric information has a significant negative impact on the investment sensitivity to stock price; and the asymmetric information has a significant positive impact on the stock price sensitivity to investment.

The paper has a significant practical implication for regulation policy making in stock market.

The paper fills the research gap in two points. It studies the impact of asymmetric information on the investment sensitivity to stock price, and the impact of asymmetric information on the stock price sensitivity to investment in Chinese stock market for the first time.

Since illiquidity risk is one of the most important pricing factors of assets, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the suitability of proxies of illiquidity prevalent in the asset pricing literature and their explanatory power in asset pricing tests.

Using the available high‐frequency intra‐day data, the paper constructs some proxies of illiquidity as benchmarks and then evaluates proxies of illiquidity based on inter‐day data.

The empirical results provide convincing evidence that turnover is the most suitable proxy of illiquidity in the Chinese stock market. It is not only hghly related to intra‐day data‐based proxies of illiquidity but also completely superior to other measures of illiquidity in asset pricing tests.

First, the paper applies illiquidity measurements from microstructure theory and the available high‐frequency data, and examines the suitability of illiquidity proxies in asset pricing literature in the Chinese stock market. Rational basics are provided to test the applicability of illiquidity measures in the Chinese stock market. Second, the paper introduces illiquidity proxies into asset pricing models to extend their explanatory power. The paper's results may help researchers to select illiquidity proxies more cautiously.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of returnee managers on Chinese firms’ performances at overseas markets.

By hand collecting two data set containing managers’ foreign experiences and firms’ principal customers, this study empirically examines the relationship between returnee managers and overseas customers.

The author shows that firms with returnee managers: have higher probability of gaining overseas customers and proportion of overseas sales; and are more likely to conduct international M&A, adopt international Big 4 auditors and list overseas. In addition, returnee executives who came back from individualistic culture with overseas working experience, when entering the overseas market where they have experienced, are more effectively in helping firms to perform well.

The findings in this study suggest that firms with returnee managers are better able to develop relationships with overseas customers and expand overseas markets than those firms without returnee managers.

For policy makers, this study justifies government policies that aim to attract and encourage more returnees to come back. Furthermore, the author shows that returnees with different foreign experiences, national culture of different countries, whether doing business with their familiar foreign country, and their positions in current organizations have different effects on overseas customers. Firms can utilize all these information to choose the “right” returnees to increase their success in overseas markets.

This study is among the first to examine the role of returnee managers in an emerging economy on firm’s probability of gaining overseas customers and expanding overseas sales.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of female directors on the dividend policies of 96 ASEAN-5 listed commercial banks between 2015 and 2020.

This paper developed an econometric model to assess the impact of female directors on the banks’ dividend policies. This paper regressed the payout variable on the female director, legal (institutional environment) variables and several control variables. This paper also considered the interaction between the female and legal variables to assess the moderating impact of the institutional environment.

This paper found that female directors positively affected dividend policy and that banks with female directors tended to pay dividends to balance stakeholders’ interests, especially for the minority. This paper also found that the influence of female directors was weaker in countries with strong institutional environments because greater legal protection for shareholders reinforced or replaced corporate governance mechanisms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate gender diversity and its impact on dividend policy using data from ASEAN-5 countries.

Despite numerous evidence of policy trade-off in financial inclusion-stability nexus, little is known about the role of governance quality to align policy goals and maximizing the social benefits. Therefore, to fill the gap, this study focuses to investigate the moderating effect of country governance (CG) in the interplay between financial-inclusion (FI) and financial-stability (FS), using a large panel of 84 economies covering the years 2004–2017.

For attaining this objective, the study constructs several indexes for FI, FS and CG using principal component analysis (PCA) and examines how FI influences FS at different CG levels applying advanced econometrics.

The results show that CG plays a very crucial role in eradicating the trade-off and strengthens the synergy between FI and FS. The findings are insensitive to several robustness validations and could be constructive for policymakers to devise policies and to ensure financial stability.

As far as the authors are aware, this is the only paper that empirically explains CG's role in FI-FS nexus.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles of earnings and book value (BV) in equity valuation.

The authors apply model’s explanatory power to analyze the roles of accounting data and test the hypotheses empirically with a sample of Chinese listed companies between 2004 and 2010.

The authors find that impact of accounting data on equity value is also dependent on profitability, but the behavior is non-monotonic. In the intermediate-profitability range, explanatory power of both earnings capitalization model and balance sheet model reach the peak, there are no significant differences between them. In the low-profitability range (small or negative profitability), explanatory power of balance sheet model is larger than earnings capitalization model. In the high-profitability range, explanatory power of balance sheet model is less than earnings capitalization model.

The results support that the role of BV is more stable in equity valuation. Moreover, this outcome provides reference for improving existing valuation model and setting accounting standard, and provides some empirical evidence for the practical application of BV in equity valuation.

Existing studies treat earnings as main variable of equity valuation, and BV is only added as a supplement. This paper compares roles of accounting earnings and BV in equity valuation, especially investigates the influence of BV in equity valuation, and fills up the deficiency in the related literature.

Empirical studies, to date, show that financial inclusion (FI) enhances financial stability (FS) by promoting a large deposit base, reducing information asymmetry, and strengthening market power on the one hand, and leads to financial fragility by expanding credit without proper screening, increasing operational costs, and provoking borrowers' moral hazard on the other. Thus, the most important issue is to maintain FS while extending formal financial services to the impoverished and disadvantaged segments of society. Therefore, this paper investigates the efficacy of macroprudential regulations (MPRs) to align these policy divergences.

To accomplish the objective and facilitate policy implications, the authors use aggregated and disaggregated measures of both FI and MPRs, employ advanced econometric models that minimize endogeneity and ensure robustness, and investigate their joint effectiveness in upholding FS using data of 138 countries spanning the 2004–2017 years.

The findings indicate that the effectiveness of MPRs is instrument specific. Some MPRs that obstruct access to formal financial services, in particular, moderate the advantage of FI in achieving FS, while others boost the effect of inclusion in attaining financial sector stability. Therefore, prudence should be emphasized while designing MPRs as a tool for aligning the policy trade-off between FI and FS.

To the best of the authors knowledge, this paper extends previous empirical research by investigating the conditioning impact of MPRs in the FI-FS nexus.