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The authors investigate how foreign investment in securities market informs about the future firm performance in emerging markets.

The authors define the independent variable abnormal foreign investment (AFI) as the residuals of the foreign ownership equation. The authors regress foreign ownership on its first lag and factors and define the residuals as the AFI. The AFI is the over- or under-investment reflecting foreign conscious (clear-purpose) investment, thus better indicating how foreign investment affects firm performance. The dependent variable is Tobin’s q (Q), which represents the firm performance. Then, the authors regress the Tobin’s q next quarters (Qt + k) on the AFI current quarter (AFIt). The authors use a two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) and check endogeneity with the D-GMM model for the regression.

The results show that the current AFI is positively correlated with the firm performance in each of the next four quarters (the following one year). This positive relationship is pronounced for large firms, firms with no large foreign investors, liquid firms and firms listed in the active market. The results suggest that foreign investment might choose well-productive firms already. Also, the current AFI is significantly positively correlated with stock returns in each of the next three quarters. These results suggest that the AFI is informative up to one-year period.

The results suggest that foreign investors (most of them are small) in the Vietnamese market might choose well-productive firms already. However, if the large investors have long-term investment in tangible, intangible, human capital and so on, and lead to a significant increase in firms’ performance is still the limitation of this paper.

The results of this paper may guide investors whose portfolios are composed of stocks with foreign investment.

This paper adds to the literature to enrich the conclusion of a positive relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance.

The COVID-19 lockdown has forced many organizations and employees to work from home. In such uncertain and unprecedented context, it is crucial for organizations to stimulate their employees’ creativity to adapt to new working environment and thus to sustain and improve organizational performance. This paper aims to examine how to stimulate employees’ creativity by focusing on their online knowledge sharing (OKS) behaviors, their use of online platforms and their organizations’ innovation climate in a working from home (WFH) context because of the lockdown. For empirical analysis, this research uses data from Vietnam – a developing country in the Southeast Asia.

Data are collected from employees working in Ho Chi Minh City but WFH during the COVID-19 lockdown. Structural equation models are used for analyzing the data.

Online platform use and organizational innovation climate are positively associated with creativity directly and indirectly via the mediating roles of internal and external OKS.

This research provides policymakers, organizational leaders and managers with an important evidence on how to stimulate creativity by emphasizing the roles of knowledge sharing, online platforms and innovation climate. Accordingly, relevant practical implications are also drawn to sustain or improve organizational performance in the context of WFH context because of COVID-19 lockdown. This research also contributes to knowledge management literature by providing an evidence on the relationships between online platform use, organizational innovation climate, OKS and creativity.

This research is among the early attempts that explore the associations between employees’ use of online platforms, their organizations’ innovation climate, their internal and external OKS behaviors and their creativity in the context of WFH because of a lockdown.

This study aims to identify the level of political participation of local citizen in 208 districts representing for 63 provinces and cities in Vietnam and consider the effects of candidate's attributes, local political contextual factors and other local citizen’s demographic characteristics on the elections of local leaders in Vietnam.

By using Probit model and data about provincial governance and public administration performance index and self-survey about local leaders in the districts, this paper shows the different effects of candidates’ attributes, local political context and other local citizen’s characteristics on the first and second elections of local leaders in Vietnam.

The result indicates the probability of candidates being elected in the first term depends on their characteristics, local political context and local citizen. However, the reelection of local leaders for a second term depends much on their characteristics and local political context not on demographic characteristics of local citizen. The satisfaction rate of local citizen and being an incumbent for the first term are driving forces for the local citizen to elect their leader for the second term. Meanwhile, local political context such as local transparency, local official development assistance project and citizen satisfaction will increase the likelihood of local leaders being elected for the first and second terms.

The major limitation of this study is the data of the self-survey because it only provides basic but not complete characteristics of candidates and local contexts in some typical districts in 63 provinces and cities across the country.

This paper includes policy implications for candidates who want to be elected for both terms and local governance in Vietnam. The government needs to focus on building human resources for local administration to meet the requirements of building a clean, strong, modern and anticorruption administrative system.

This paper extends the analysis on examining the characteristics of candidates and local citizen as well as local political context influencing the elections of local leaders, getting involved in the Vietnam context, still underresearched, especially with reference to political participation of local citizen.

This paper examines the effects of managerial optimism on corporate cash holdings.

The authors construct a novel measure of managerial optimism based on the linguistic tone of annual reports by applying a Naïve Bayesian Machine Learning algorithm to non-numeric parts of Vietnamese listed firms' reports from 2010 to 2016. The paper employs firm and year fixed effects model and also uses the generalized method of moments estimation as robustness checks.

The authors find that the cash holding of firms managed by optimistic managers is higher than the cash holdings of firms managed by non-optimistic managers. Managerial optimism also influences corporate cash holdings through internal cash flows and the current year’s capital expenditures. Although the authors find no evidence that optimistic managers hold more cash to finance future growth opportunities in general, optimistic managers hold more cash for near future investment opportunities than non-optimistic managers do.

The novel measure proposed in this study is expected to provide great potential for future finance studies investigating the relation between managerial traits and corporate policies since it is applicable for any levels of financial market development. In addition, the findings highlight the important role, both direct and indirect, of managerial optimism on cash holdings. Related future research should take this psychological trait into account to gain a better understanding of corporate cash holding.

This paper helps to extend the literature on managerial optimism measurement by introducing a new measure of managerial optimism based on the linguistic tone of annual reports. Furthermore, this is among the first studies directly linking annual report linguistic tone to cash holding. The paper also provides new evidence regarding how managerial optimism affects the relationship between the firm's growth opportunities and cash holding, given that mispricing corrections are naturally uncertain.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of culture on the sense of self-efficacy in teaching English as a Foreign Language of a group of university teachers in Vietnam. Research exploring the relationship between culture and self-efficacy is extremely rare despite the acknowledged importance of culture in the formation of self-efficacy beliefs.

This study took the form of qualitative research with diverse, data collection instruments: individual interviews, focus group discussions, observations and journaling.

Findings indicate that certain features of the Vietnamese cultural context impacted on the way the study teachers constructed their sense of self-efficacy. Specifically, under the influence of a Vietnamese sense of belonging, the study teachers tended to rely more on efficacy-building information from other people rather than from themselves. The perception of inequality in power may have heightened negative emotional arousal, thus contributing to a negative sense of self-efficacy among the teachers. The Vietnamese concept of face and the high status of teachers in the social hierarchy in part mediated teachers’ sense of self-efficacy.

The perceived burden of performing both parenting and teaching roles and responsibilities may have diminished the self-efficacy in teaching of female teachers.

The contribution and implications of the study are discussed.

Vietnam’s 11th National Party Congress prioritised integration, modernisation and industrialisation as the new key orientations for Vietnam. It outlined Vietnam’s integration with the world, not only economically, but also in terms of the social, cultural, educational, scientific and technological areas that can support social and economic development and sustainability. Vocational education has been recognised as pivotal to the nation’s sustainable workforce development and transformational changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how foreign approaches and practices have been filtered and appropriated to bring about sustainable development and transformational changes for Vietnamese vocational education.

The paper is derived from a study that involves documentary analysis, observation and semi-structured interviews with vocational learners and staff across three different vocational education and training (VET) sites in Vietnam. The overall study includes three vocational education providers and 22 participants altogether, but this paper involves observation and semi-structured interviews with eight participants, including one leader, two teachers and five students. It focusses on a Germany-funded vocational college in the northern central area of Vietnam that came under the management of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, and the local province where the college located.

The findings of the study show a critical need to develop a new “Vietnamese VET pedagogy” that filters international influences and flexibly and creatively combines them with the existing local pedagogy. To meet the local and global demands and bring transnational changes for Vietnamese vocational education, new VET pedagogies need to align with both Vietnamese historical and political situations, especially the emergent demands of the open market socialist economy and to capitalise on international influences – Confucian, French, Soviet and Western. Such a balance will ensure Vietnam makes use of both international forces and local strengths for sustainable development and transformational changes rather than passive dependence on foreign practices.

The research provides valuable insights into the appropriation of foreign practices and principles in Vietnamese vocational education. However, it focusses only on three vocational education sites in central Vietnam. Further studies with larger scale of participants and across a variety of vocational education settings including public and private institutions, community centres and family workshops will offer broader findings related to this important topic.

The study suggests practical implications for institutions to deal with the challenges associated with the adaptation of international forces into the vocational education context in Vietnam. It outlines the transformational changes in pedagogical practices related to the increased requirement to move from the traditional didactic teaching to more self-directed learning, to meet the requirements of a modern vocational education system.

This study provides unique insights into the practices and challenges of filtering foreign VET practices and principles to bring about transformational changes in Vietnamese vocational education. It, therefore, responds to the paucity of literature in this area. In addition, it examines internationalisation in Vietnamese VET, an under-researched area in the field of internationalisation of education as most of the literature in this field concentrates on the higher education sector.

Over the past 20 years, external auditing activities and practices in Vietnam have developed quickly. An important milestone is the first Law on External Audit No. 67/2011/QH12 which has been passed by the National Assembly of Vietnam on 29 March 2011. The purpose of this paper is to understand the perceived motivations in regard to the introduction of the Law on External Audit, through the eyes of various key stakeholders. There has been genuine public interest concerns regarding audit quality in Vietnam as prior academic research has indicated, and this is the first study to examine whether the new audit reforms where introduced specifically to deal with those concerns.

Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with 45 key stakeholders during 2014 in both Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

The study finds that the Law on External Audit was introduced because it holds the highest form of regulatory authority in Vietnam, and the lower level Decrees that existed before the law did not even detail the audit firms’ responsibilities resulting in low audit quality. Also, the new Law was introduced to add more credibility and trust in the external audit function in Vietnam, and to reduce unfair price competition. However, some of our findings indicate that the Governments’ motivations were not all purely public interest related. A theoretical framework is developed to evaluate whether these reforms are substantive enough in nature to effect public confidence in reported financial data and audits.

External auditing plays a crucial role in any market-based economy. In a developing economy, audit quality is often perceived to be lower than in a developed economy. Therefore, it is not uncommon to observe governments in developing economies producing tighter regulations for the auditing and assurance market to help attract more foreign investment and to establish credibility and more trust. In Vietnamese context, the current study conveys that the new audit reforms not only were introduced with genuine public interest concerns but also were a mechanism to protect the government’s interests.

This article traces the transformation of hát bội, a form of traditional opera in Southern Vietnam, from its primary role as entertainment into a religious activity after the Reform (Đổi Mới) were enacted in 1986.

This research is based on ethnological fieldwork complemented by a review of historical documents and of the available literature on hát bội, cultural policies and on data collected from interviews with artists and spectators at the festival at the shrine to the Lady of the Realm.

Before 1986, hát bội was performed either as a stand-alone entertainment during the fair portion of community festivals or as part of religious ceremonies. The Reform and the accompanying relaxation of state control over religion and culture promoted the resurgence of popular religious fairs across the nation. New opportunities for hát bội to revive opened, artists left state-sponsored troupes to join private companies that catered to religious festivals. But almost exclusive involvement in religious rites has led to artistic stasis for private hát bội troupes.

This research constitutes novel insights of how the Reform in Vietnam affects the transformation of a traditional performance form.

The demand for clean vegetables has rapidly increased, many farmers gradually turn to vegetable cultivation to increase income; therefore, agricultural cooperative mobilized farmers group to facilitate them access to technical training and enhance compliance with the Vietnamese Good Agricultural Practices (VietGAP) standards. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of the participation on farmer’s income as well as the major factors that affect the participation in cooperatives by the vegetable farmers in Vietnam.

The study used primary data collected from vegetable farmers in Vietnam. This study utilized propensity score matching to avoid initial selection bias. The differences between participants and nonparticipants will be adjusted by matching each membership individual to a nonmember based on similar observable characteristics by summarizing the conditional probability of a member given pretreatment characteristics.

This study demonstrates that participation in cooperatives is significantly affected by ethnicity, age of household head, labor involving vegetable production and extension service access. The results of this study also confirm that agricultural cooperatives have positive effects on member farmers to enhance income and that participants – on average – have a higher income than nonparticipants.

The method cannot rule out the possibility of selection bias due to unobserved differences between participants and even an appropriate comparison group.

This study contributes to an improved understanding about impacts of cooperatives on farmers’ income in developing and emerging economies. Moreover, research also upgrades knowledge regarding the effectiveness of agricultural cooperatives in Vietnam, as well as guides policymakers in supporting the cooperatives in expanding the market and other necessary changes.