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Prior research demonstrated that China's Outward FDI (OFDI) is aimed at sustaining long-term economic growth by promoting industrialization and technological upgrading in the country. However, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy remains scarce. This study intends to fill this gap by exploiting endogenous changes in industrial productivity stemming from OFDI to examine if China's new strategy to spur OFDI is economically beneficial for the industries involved.

The authors employed the two-step system-GMM and pooled mean group approaches on a panel dataset of 18 Chinese industries over the 2004–2017 period. The industrial sectors are further classified into the state dominated and non-state dominated ones to evaluate whether the productivity growth impact of OFDI varies by the level of ownership structure. Besides, the dataset is further decomposed into the ex ante and ex-post BRI era to test if this initiative has altered the underlying relationship.

The results provide robust evidence that China's OFDI through reverse spillover effects promotes productivity growth in the domestic industries, and such productivity gains are greater for the non-state dominated industries, and the OFDI in the BRI era. The findings suggest that OFDI can act as a catch-up strategy to release excess capacity and acquire technology and smart business practices.

This study is the first attempt to highlight the reverse productivity spillovers associated with OFDI at the industrial level. The study's findings guide the government officials and the practitioners of foreign investment to better understand the implications of their investment projects in terms of technology improvements and to optimize market opportunities.

The purpose of this study is to provide a textual approach to quantify the perception of uncertainty from management side and investigate how firms manage their overseas investment dynamics when perceiving an increase in economic policy uncertainty (EPU).

Using a textual analysis approach, the study evaluates firm-level perception of EPU. Based on the data from China's listed firms between 2007 and 2018, it examines the association between firm-level perception of EPU and overseas investment using probit model and fixed effects regression with robust standard error adjusted for heteroscedasticity and clustered by firm.

The study finds that the level of EPU perceived by individual firms is heterogeneous. Moreover, it finds that firm-level perception of EPU is positively associated with firms' overseas investment. When perceiving an increase in EPU, firms are more likely to invest abroad and their overseas investment is more diverse. Further analysis shows that the positive association between firm-level perception of EPU and overseas investment is weaker in firms with higher financing cost, investment irreversibility and management incentive but stronger in firms with more intensive industry competition. However, it does not find significant difference in the impact of firm-level perception of EPU on overseas investment of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). The results are robust to using alternative measures of primary variables and to endogeneity concerns.

First, although the data on outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) at the national and provincial levels are comprehensive, the data on OFDI at the firm level are still relatively scarce. As the firm-level OFDI data become available, future study could be extended to OFDI flow. Second, future study could use other information disclosed by firms to evaluate their perception of EPU from host countries and examine the impact of bilateral EPU on overseas investment. Third, by evaluating firm-level perception of uncertainty in terms of a particular type of economic policies, such as fiscal policy, monetary policy, trade policy and foreign investment policy, future study could probe the sources of EPU affecting firms' overseas investment.

First, although uncertainty increases the volatility of firms' investment activities, firms can recognize and seize investment opportunities in an uncertain economic environment and make profits through resource integration. Second, as the association between firm-level perception of EPU and overseas investment depends on firm and industry characteristics, firms with higher financing cost, investment irreversibility and management incentive should be more cautious when making overseas investment decisions during uncertainty times. Third, governments should increase the transparency and the stability of their economic policies to help firms plan their investment policies.

The study extends the literature related to EPU measurement by constructing a firm-level perception index of EPU based on firms' annual reports using a textual analysis approach. Moreover, it sheds some light on the mechanism of how firms modulate their overseas investment activities under uncertainty.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of controlling shareholders’ share pledging on goodwill impairment.

This study empirically investigates the effect of controlling shareholders’ share pledging on both the decision and amount of goodwill impairment for Chinese listed firms from 2007 to 2017.

This study finds that the proportion of controlling shareholders’ share pledging is negatively related to both impairment decisions and amounts; these negative relationships are intensified when firms face high stock price crash risks. In addition, the empirical results show that firms with larger share pledging are less likely to recognize goodwill impairment or are likely to record relatively smaller impairment amounts when they are followed by fewer financial analysts.

Most of the relevant literature has focused on managers’ behaviors toward goodwill impairments, while less attention has been given to goodwill impairments from the perspective of controlling shareholders. In fact, controlling shareholders may have strong incentives to protect their control rights when they exercise disproportionate control rights, especially in China. Given the high ownership concentration, prior studies may not have adequately explained the agency problem of controlling shareholders in goodwill impairment. This study uses share pledging as a case to fill this gap. Specifically, it investigates whether both goodwill impairment decisions and amounts are affected by controlling shareholders’ share pledging.

Utilizing the expectation states theory in sociology, this study probes into the influence of the board's informal hierarchy on the quality of enterprise innovation, originating from the perspective of internal directorial interactions, while analyzing the boundary effects exhibited by the nature of property rights and the intensity of geo-culture.

The study selects China's A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2021 as the research sample, employing the Tobit regression analysis method to scrutinize the hypotheses presented in the text.

The regression results demonstrate a positive correlation between the board's informal hierarchy and the enterprise innovation quality (EIQ). Upon introducing variables specific to property rights and geographical culture, the authors found that in comparison to non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), the influence of the board's informal hierarchy on the quality of corporate innovation is diminished in SOEs. Conversely, the intensity of geo-culture across Chinese provinces enhances their mutual positive influence. In the additional analysis, the authors also found that the elevation of corporate risk tolerance is a significant pathway for the positive effect of the board's informal hierarchy on EIQ. Moreover, this positive influence is more profound in high-tech enterprises, businesses implementing equity incentive plans and companies that have subscribed to director and officer liability insurance.

The findings not only deepen the understanding of how the board's internal status characteristics influence corporate decision-making but also enrich the application scope of expectation states theory. Furthermore, this study offers valuable guidance for optimizing innovation decision-making by adjusting the personnel structures of corporate boards.

This study aims to investigate the influence of parent company personnel embedding on the stock price crash risk (SPCR) of listed companies, along with the moderating effect of disparate locations between parent and subsidiary companies and other major shareholders.

This research empirically tests hypotheses based on a sample of listed subsidiaries in China during the period between 2006 and 2021.

Our results demonstrate that personnel embeddedness in the parent company significantly alleviates SPCR in subsidiaries. This effect is even more substantial when the parent and subsidiary companies are in different places. However, other major shareholders in the subsidiary company weaken it. Our additional analysis indicates that, relative to executive embeddedness, director embeddedness exerts a stronger effect on the SPCR of the subsidiary. Mechanism examination reveals that the information asymmetry and the level of internal control (IC) within the subsidiary are significant channels through which the personnel embeddedness from the parent company influences the SPCR of the subsidiary.

This study expands the literature on how personnel arrangements in corporate groups within emerging countries influence SPCR. We have extended the traditional concept of interlocking directorates to corporate groups, thereby broadening the understanding of the governance effects of interlocking directors and executives from a group perspective.

The privatization of infrastructure promotes efficiency and service standards. While cross-border private participation infrastructure (PPI) projects hosted in emerging markets have become more prevalent in recent years, there have also been more failures. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how governance distance affects the survival of cross-border PPI projects.

The authors provide theoretical justification and empirical evidence to verify our views. The authors test the hypotheses on a sample of 4,678 cross-border PPI project investments made in emerging market countries between 1990 and 2016. Estimation techniques consist of a binary logistic regression model and a rare events logistic model.

The findings suggest that increased governance distance can lead to project failure. The study results show that governance distance is negatively correlated with the probability of project survival. Greenfield investment intensifies the negative effect of governance distance while competitive contracts mitigate the negative effect of governance distance.

The results reveal that transnational investment in infrastructure projects is susceptible to institutional differences between home and host countries. Therefore, both private enterprises and host government should pay attention to the impact of inter-country differences on negotiations and project operation. Competitive contracts mitigate this negative effect, but entering in the form of greenfield investment amplifies the negative effect of distance.

Transnational industrial engineering projects are easily affected by the differences in governance levels between the two countries. This study introduces governance distance into the field of infrastructure projects, focusing on the impact of differences between home and host countries on transnational projects. The findings on infrastructure projects that are closely related to host government contribute to the literature by broadening the research of institution and distance.

This paper aims to study the impact of external fairness of executive compensation on M&A premium, and examine the moderate role of institutional investors. The high M&A premium is the main factors that induce the huge impairment of listed companies’ goodwill and the plummeting performance. Executives are the decision-makers of M&As, and their decision-making process is inevitably affected by the psychological factors. In recent years, institutional investors have become an important external force that can affect the governance of listed companies.

The authors use M&A data of listed companies from 2008 to 2018 and use OLS regression to test the relationship between executive compensation fairness and M&A premium.

The results show that the lower the external fairness of executive compensation, the greater the M&A premium. Institutional investors can effectively reduce the impact of external compensation unfairness on M&A premiums. The mechanism tests show that executives' psychological perception of fairness induced by external unfairness reduces their motivation to work and prompts them to use high premium to seek alternative compensation incentives. Further examinations of executive characteristics and corporate characteristics show that the role of external unfairness in executive compensation in driving M&A premiums is more pronounced in companies with longer executive tenure, weaker executive reputation incentives and private property.

This paper enriches the research on the pre-factors of M&A premiums from the perspective of executives’ psychological perception of fairness, provides evidence that institutional investors play a positive governance role and provides decision-making references for companies to take corresponding measures to reduce M&A premium risks.

This study aims to explore why Chinese consumers pay for digital content products by investigating the experiences of Chinese consumers living in first-tier and second-tier cities regarding paid digital knowledge products.

A total of 19 in-depth interviews were conducted to collect data, and the phenomenological reduction was adopted to analyze data.

This study reveals that Chinese consumers use paid digital knowledge products to alleviate stress and anxiety stemming from real-life competition and the fear of falling behind. While consumers acknowledge the limited assistance that paid knowledge products can offer, their acceptance and expectations of paid digital knowledge products remain positive.

Paid digital knowledge represents an innovative phenomenon, with few scholars outside China having studied it. This study contributes a conceptual framework to understand the motivations of Chinese consumers with high purchasing power residing in first-tier and second-tier cities to invest in digital content.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the policy instruments used by the China's Government on prefabricated construction (PC) development, with the aim to clarify the pattern and discover the focus of the policy instruments using the methods of bibliometric analysis and content analysis.

Through a thorough screening by all researchers, 25 policies were identified from 1995 to 2021 were selected and analysed. The external attribute analysis clarified the issuing year, organisation, and the format of each policy. The content analysis was adopted firstly to analyse the policy instrument. An analysis framework including environmental instruments, supply instruments and demand instruments was applied in categorising and counting of each policy instrument. The bibliometric analysis was then carried out to extract keywords of the policy instruments, construct a co-word network and complete the cluster analysis.

The results indicate that the policies lack consistency and had relatively low authority. The results of content analysis show that the policy system relies heavily on environmental and supply instruments, whilst the use of demand instruments seems to be grossly inadequate. The results of the bibliometric analysis identify the core ideas of each policy instrument category, discuss the existing problems and then put forward the corresponding countermeasures.

This study comprehensively and systematically analysed the policy instruments on facilitating the development of PC in China which broaden the research perspectives of the PC development by introducing the methods of political science. The research findings afford helpful information for future policy adjustments and elucidate the effective delivery of policies to facilitate PC development for developing countries.

This study provides an in-depth understanding of policy instruments used by China's Government on PC development. By integrating the policy instrument analysis framework into the mixed methods of content analysis and bibliometric analysis, this study provides an innovative way to conduct policy instrument analysis.

This paper examines the different features of China's economic development in different stages of economic globalization. The study finds that the investment- and export-based growth model drove China's high-speed economic growth between 2000 and 2007, which came into existence around 2000 when China plugged into the global production network.

This paper also finds that China slowed down to the New Normal because of the disruption to the socio-economic underpinnings of this growth model. As China adapts to and steers the New Normal, supply-side structural reforms can channel excess capacity to the construction of underground pipe networks in rural areas of central China and fix capital while advance rural revitalization.

At the same time, enterprises must strive to build a key component development platform for key component innovation and the standard-setting power in global manufacturing.

The establishment of a domestic production network integrating the integrated innovation-driven core enterprises and modular producers at different levels can satisfy the dynamic demand structure of China in which standardized demands and personalized demands coexist.