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This study explores whether and how Buddhism impacts corporate cash holdings. Buddhist culture affects investors' perception of how cash is deployed and then influences corporate cash holdings. This study first examines the impact of Buddhism on corporate cash holdings and then investigates whether formal governance mechanisms such as legal institutions and institutional ownership influence the relationship between Buddhism and corporate cash holdings.

The authors conduct empirical tests with data on Chinese listed companies between 2006 and 2019. Buddhism is measured with the natural logarithm of the number of Buddhist temples within a radius of a certain distance around a firm's headquarters. The authors adopt the OLS method to regress and take the 2SLS method, Heckman selection model and FEVD approach to address the endogeneity issue.

The results show a positive relationship between Buddhism and corporate cash holdings. This positive relation is more prominent for firms located in regions with weak legal institutions and for firms with low institutional ownership. Further analysis shows that Buddhism works through the channel of alleviating agency problems and finally improves the value of cash to investors.

The authors’ findings have important implications. First, this study provides inspiration for incorporating the ethical values of traditional cultures, such as Buddhism, into the corporate governance system. Second, the findings imply that informal institutions can influence corporate financial decisions beyond the effect of formal institutions, suggesting that informal systems should be emphasized when dealing with business affairs in countries where legal institutions are relatively weak. Third, the results suggest the significance of encouraging research on religious culture to explore its active role in corporate governance.

This study illustrates the positive value of religious culture in advancing corporate governance by relating Buddhism to corporate cash holdings based on the explanation of investors' perception. It makes a marginal contribution to the literature that investigates the determinants of cash policies and explores the firm-level consequences of religious culture, adding to the research area of culture and corporate finance.

For the past years, the population of firms in China has increased fast. However, the financial research has always fallen behind the financial practice. Also, the Western financial theory may not be completely consistent with China’s context. In addition, appearing internet technology with big data and its applications to business bring some challenges not only to financial practice but also to the financial literature. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review historical development of research in corporate finance, discuss the current issues and propose 16 key research topics in China context.

This paper surveys Western classical literature and some important literature by Chinese scholars in the field of corporate finance. On this basis, the authors point out the shortcomings of existing research and opportunities for future research.

The authors propose 16 key research topics in the near future considering the current reforms on economic development strategy, financial and taxation system and SOE’s property right under the institutional background in China.

This paper makes a contribution to corporate finance research by exploring frontier topics for future research according to the China context and the global trend. These topics represent the demand from enterprises in China and are challenges for the academic world. It is of practical significance and great theoretical value to implement these studies. It will help the management to solve their financial problems and provide a fundamental basis for constructing the financial management theory with Chinese characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether religion or national culture can explain previously observed cross-country variation in trade credit.

Using the firm-level SME data from 35 European countries, religion and cultural factors of Hofstede and Schwartz, the authors provide new evidence on the determinants of the cross-country variation in trade credit.

The results indicate that religion and national culture are associated with trade credit. The authors find that the levels of trade credit are higher in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones and that peoples’ religiousness has an impact on trade credit only in Catholic countries. The authors also find that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, such as power distance and uncertainty avoidance, are positively associated with trade credit.

Overall, authors’ findings indicate that religion and national culture are important determinants of trade credit management, and that the association between commonly used cultural values and trade credit depends on the religious, legal, and financial environment.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to research the relationship between national culture and trade credit.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) dominated by Chinese enterprises have become increasingly conspicuous and prevalent in recent years. However, many of them were obstructed by foreign governments on the ground of “Threating National Security”. Overseas acquisition is a crucial step of Chinese Government’s “Going-Out” strategy, so analyzing the attribution of its success and failure is very important.

This paper adopts empirical study method to analyze the factors from political and cultural perspectives based on a sample of 327 cross-border M&A transactions made by all listed companies in China from 1997 to 2010.

The result shows higher failure rate for those acquisition targets which could be classified as political sensitive assets; meanwhile, positive diplomatic relations and higher bilateral trust between China and the host country will facilitate the M&A transaction.

This paper offers a new research angle on cross-border M&As, which is the impact of culture factors, as well as diplomatic relationship, bilateral trust and war history between China and the host country on M&A transactions. This paper also constructs several ways of measuring the diplomatic relationship between countries.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) is certainly one of the latest buzzwords and is the subject of great interest and also great controversy. Organizations need to shake themselves out of complacency to close competitive gaps and achieve superior performance standards ‐ the reason why many have embarked on huge BPR projects. In view of the high risks associated with radical change, there are, however, many problems associated with BPR. For some BPR is going off the rails before it is properly understood, and many BPR exercises are not delivering the goods. Sometimes, organizations are expecting “quick fixes”, thus displaying their lack of understanding of a complex system. It is unreasonable to expect quick results when so much change is involved, especially when these business processes involve not only machines, but also people. Many believe, such as Mumford, that the management of change is the largest task in re‐engineering. Many people perceive re‐engineering as a threat to both their methods and their jobs. Owing to this recognition, many authors concentrate on the need to take account of the human side of re‐engineering, in particular the management of organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legitimacy of the Equator Principles as a form of private governance of the investment banking industry.

The project finance industry is first described, followed by a consideration of the theories of private governance and legitimacy. The governance of project finance by the Equator Principles is then examined against the backdrop of private governance and legitimacy theory. Cases regarding project finance and the Equator Principles are discussed.

The moral legitimacy of the governance of the Equator Principles is highly questionable, a serious issue for private governance schemes. There are large gaps in the governance structure, and the processes and content of much of the Principles are left to each bank, with little mandated transparency or accountability, particularly at the level of individual deals.

The Equator Principles have legitimacy problems arising from their governance structure. These issues are examined at some length, and specific suggestions are offered for repairing certain of the flaws in the system.

Private governance is increasingly important in international arenas, attempting to enforce standards that individual governments often leave to the private sector. This paper examines the legitimacy and governance issues in one system, and makes recommendations to increase the value and structure of the Equator Principles.

As real estate departments and workplace organisations devote more attention to strategic planning, most of the work has focused on improving performance metrics and developing dashboards to communicate this information clearly and concisely. Yet these steps will take these organisations only part of the way. Once they have this information, they need to devote more time to developing strategies and plans. This review examines one of these activities ‐ developing high‐level occupancy plans. Representatives of the strategy and planning groups at ten leading corporations and the occupancy planning experts at seven service providers and system developers were interviewed for this survey. It was found that most firms continue to complete high‐level occupancy plans with tedious and time‐consuming data‐collection processes and spreadsheet analyses. These organisations could improve efficiency and the success of their plans in two ways: better analysis approaches and better data collection and organisation. This review summarises the best practices identified in these areas.

Defines environmental entrepreneurship as entrepreneurial activity that benefits the environment. Building on this definition, presents two related conceptual schema that may be used to study environmental enterprises. Presents an environmental classification scheme that can be used to categorize the mission or market strategy for different environmental enterprises. Applies the Dynamic System Planning Model, an open systems model of organization effectiveness, to explore the ways in which an environmental market strategy focus may impact other management issues. Presents qualitative data gathered from interviews and case materials from four small environmental enterprises. The environmental focus influenced the management approach to resource acquisition in three of the four companies. Environmental entrepreneurs also shared the common characteristic of taking a proactive stance relative to government sanctions and incentives boosting their respective industries. Points out a few practical implications and suggestions for future research based on the findings. One of these implications relates to the basic premiss of environmental entrepreneurship: Is it healthy for a business to focus the entire business on the environmental sector? Suggests not, recommending instead that a company may reduce its risk and thus potentially prolong its existence by diversifying into both environmental and non‐environmental industry segments, as long as both are linked to the company’s core competences. Urges further study of corporate strategic issues of this type. Recommends directions for future research.

In this study, the author examines the effect of managers’ perception of product market competition on accruals and real earnings management.

The author develops a new text-based measure of the emphasis managers place on product market competition by conducting a textual analysis of firms’ 10-K filings. Using this measure, the author conducts a battery of econometric analyses and robustness checks to investigate the impact of this measure of product market competition on measures of accruals and real earnings management.

This study finds robust evidence that when management perceives more competitive threats, they are more likely to engage in accruals-based earnings manipulation but are less likely to engage in real earnings management activity. The author argues that these findings are due to managers’ career concerns enticing them to manage earnings via accrual when competition is high, but that greater product market competition discourages real earning management activity as it can diminish firms’ competitiveness.

The findings of this paper have important policy and practical implications since it signals that managers’ perceptions of product market competition is able to affect accounting choices, information environments and economic outcomes in firms.

This study develops a new text-based measure of managers’ perception of product market competition with the aid of GPT-4. The author then using this measure provides firm-level evidence on how this relates to earnings management.

The extant literature provides substantial evidence that various facets of national culture play a significant role in corporate financial decision making. We systematically review the role of national culture on the various thematic domains of corporate financial decision making to outline what have been studies thus far and what needs to be studied.

Keywords such as national culture, organizational culture, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, risk aversion and individualism for a search in the prominent academic literature databases are used. The studies related to the corporate financial decision making that is tied with these keywords are identified and selected for the systematic review.

The review of extant literature suggests strong evidence that national culture has a significant role in influencing corporate cash holding, corporate risk-taking, individual behaviour of the financial managers and initial public offering by the corporations. The review also indicates, although extant studies have examined the role of national culture in the key corporate financial decisions, evidence on the role of national culture in the firm's investment efficiency aspects is rather scarce. Also, what explains the role of national culture in corporate financial decision making has not been empirically exploited through causal mechanisms.

The findings of the studies help advance our understanding of the current research status concerning the role played by the national culture in shaping corporate financial decisions and raise important future calls.

To best of our knowledge, no prior study has systematically reviewed the role of national culture in the thematic domains of corporate financial decision making.