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While implementing green innovation-driven strategies when facing growing grim environmental problems and the realistic demands of achieving high-quality development is increasingly urgent, changing abruptly is inevitably detrimental to the smooth functioning of social and economic development. Restrained by resources, innovation-driven strategy is a huge strategy for an organization to shift from traditional technological innovation to green innovation. Supports and implementation in green technology investment would necessarily crowd out other business investment and lead to reduction of innovation outputs and mount of financial uncertainty. Under the guidance of harmonious balance, the equilibrium allocation between green research and non-green counterpart is badly needed to be addressed for decision-makers inside and outside the organizations. The differentiated inputs of them would lead to different effects on organizational performance in practice.

The authors first conducted a Hausman test on green research intensity (GRI) and innovation performance, economic performance, social performance, and environmental performance, respectively. Adopting the fixed effects model for estimation seems accurate, if there is no significant heteroscedasticity shown in the BP test. The authors then adopted the least square dummy variable method to handle individual heterogeneity (Xia et al., 2020). After controlling the industry effect and time effect simultaneously, the results were consistent with that of fixed effects model, thereby eliminating the impact of heteroscedasticity.

The authors construct a multi-dimensional performance system—innovation performance, economic performance, social performance, and environmental performance—to probe into the influence of GRI from the resource-based view and allocation theory. Different performance does not benefit equally from increasing the intensity of green research. Performance increase may squeeze out the quantity of total innovation but can compensate quality for knowledge spillovers of green technology. The organization's growth and long-term value may be beneficial from the increase, but not the short-term financial performance. While the relationship between GRI and social performance has the characteristic of reverse U-curve, there has to be some scale of green research to gain considerable and nonlinear environmental performance. Low level of green research may increase pollution until green research has cross over the inflection point. These relationships are intensely moderated by the environmental regulation.

Because of the focus of this study is on the organizational performance of green research, the analysis comes with some limitations that should be addressed in future research. Data were inter-professional, with large enterprises and small businesses innovating green technology at the same time. Though the hypotheses presented here were grounded in existing theoretical rationale, the generality of this study cannot be assumed. Multi-performance of green activities in small- and medium-sized businesses should be further explored. Additionally, concrete index of the corresponding evaluation system constructed here contribute more to practical activities of green innovation. Refinement of synergy performance index is the task for future work. Further, grounded in Chinese context, the authors' results could be compared with other scenario with institutional heterogeneity to provide detailed evidences for institutional theory. Future studies could also move forward to longitudinal case study to delicately investigate the performance differentiation of green research when in different development stage.

First, what and how the authors do is novel as the authors use listed Chinese manufacturing companies to probe into the complex relationship between GRI and multiple performance rather than discussing the performance of green innovation input from a single perspective merely. Second, the authors systematically define the performance as economic performance, environmental performance, social performance and innovation performance in depth, which consider adequately the tangible and intangible value as well as internal and external benefits of green research. And finally, in the context of environmental regulation, the study discusses the differentiation of the increase of green research intensity from the perspective of resource constraints, providing reference for optimizing the resource allocation in green and non-green research and solving the decoupling between earnest social appeal and sluggish or reluctant green behaviors.

Financial technologies, also known as “FinTech,” have brought disruptive changes to virtually every aspect of financial services and are becoming increasingly important in the world economic system. The purpose of this paper is to proffer a bird view of some recent studies in the key research areas of FinTech, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, crowdfunding and then to summarize the key contributions made by all the six papers in this special issue.

A literature review approach is adopted, and the summary shows that most types of FinTech innovations generate positive value to innovators, financial customers and the society. The current implications and future directions are explored based on theoretical and empirical analyses.

The benefits from and determinants of FinTech applications vary across different financial sectors. Together the summary of this special issue suggests that there is substantial value creation in further exploring the dynamics, mechanisms and social consequences of FinTech.

This study helps to extend knowledge by summarizing the current practices, proffering new insights and watching out emerging trends of financial technologies, and to shed light on a variety of subjects of interest to practitioners, academics and policy makers by suggesting for the future research topics.

Overconfidence as an important psychological factor can also affect CEO’s cognitive preferences, while there are few studies about the impact of CEO’ overconfidence on the international expansion of companies. This paper aims to fill this gap and further discuss the moderating role of CEO’s overseas experience, CEO duality and ownership.

The authors focus on the Chinese context, collect 2008–2016 data from China's manufacturing industry as sample, use fixed effect model to analyse the effect of CEO overconfidence on international expansion strategy of Chinese firms.

The empirical results show that: CEO overconfidence positively promotes the degree of firm internationalization. CEO foreign experience positively affects the internationalization degree, but can restrain overconfidence thus negatively regulate this impact relationship. When duality is present, both CEO power and managerial discretion are pronounced and they exhibit a stronger effect. Firm’s equity nature will affect the relationship between CEOs' overconfidence and the degree of internationalization. Compared with private enterprises, CEOs in state-owned enterprises have limited power, therefore, this influence relationship is weaker.

This study has emphasized the importance of top executives' psychological characteristics on firm internationalization, which is key application and complement of upper echelons theory and fills the research gap in the literature. In this paper, the authors found the advantages of overconfidence for firms, which helps to understand the complex meaning of overconfidence. The results of moderating effect further explore the application of overconfidence in different context, which has some implications for management practice.