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This paper aims to assess the impact of regulatory changes on corporate environmental disclosure practices in Europe. More specifically, the authors perform a difference-in-differences analysis to study the impact of the Paris agreement (United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21) and of the French Law 2015-992 on energy transition for green growth.

The sample consists of the listed companies belonging to the Euro Stoxx 50 index, and they are analysed over the 2010–2019 time horizon by means of an expert validated environmental disclosure dictionary and difference-in-differences analysis.

The main results show that both regulatory interventions contributed to improving corporate environmental disclosure. The authors also show that firms belonging to the most polluting sectors tend to provide more information on environmental matters, likely in an attempt to divert stakeholders’ attention.

By analysing an under-investigated topic, the paper calls for significant efforts by regulators to find the most suitable solutions to induce firms to increase their levels of transparency on the impact of environmental risks and on how these risks are managed.

This study examines whether different strategy archetypes deploy specific performance metrics to support their strategic goals and priorities. If so, does alignment of strategy and metrics positively impact organisational performance?

The conceptual framework and hypotheses are couched in Contingency Theory. The role of business strategy as a moderating variable is tested using MANOVA, followed by post hoc pairwise comparisons. The results are based on cross-sectional survey data from 372 manufacturing and service organisations in Italy.

The overall contingency effect of business strategy in selecting and deploying performance metrics and their effect on organisational performance is supported. However, the group-wise post hoc analyses show support only for Prospectors but not for Defenders and Analysers.

This research lends further support in favour of the Contingency Theory from a new geographic context (Italy) that there are no universally best performance metrics that drive organisational performance. However, more research is needed to understand why the theory only holds for certain strategic archetypes and not across all archetypes.

Managers can direct resources and effort towards designing and deploying the “right” type of performance metrics suitable for their strategic orientation and thus optimise organisational performance.

This is a rare study that tests the moderating role of business strategy using all four strategic archetypes of the Miles and Snow typology. It deploys both financial and non-financial measures and uses a very large sample of both manufacturing and service organisations from a relatively unexplored region of the world. The study provides additional evidence in favour of the Contingency Theory whilst advocating for more research to refine our understanding of why the contingency perspective is not so important for firms that are not the first-in.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between sales growth and profitability by exploring the direct and indirect effects of cost stickiness in the growth process. Cost stickiness refers to asymmetric variations of costs associated with increases and decreases in sales. Cost stickiness is analyzed as a strategic liability that negatively affects profitability because it contributes to organizational rigidity that causes opportunity costs.

The empirical design is based on a large sample of 65,599 French firms drawn from the Amadeus database and it covers the period 2010 to 2019. The authors take advantage of the presentation of expenses made by nature in Amadeus to calculate cost stickiness in a more direct way than what is commonly done in the literature. The authors use various regression models to test the hypotheses.

For firms that experience rapid growth in sales, cost stickiness has a positive moderating effect on the relation between sales growth and profitability because of a higher asset turnover efficiency. However, for firms that experience slow growth, no growth or a decrease in sales, cost stickiness plays a negative moderating effect on the relation between sales and profitability.

This work contributes to the discussion about the conditions under which high growth is associated with greater profitability and conceptualizes cost stickiness as a strategic liability. The empirical context, privately held firms, has been overlooked by previous research.

The study aims to examine the joint effects of foreign ownership (FO) and involvement in global value chains (GVCs) on the productivity performance of firms from a catching-up country (Poland) and a leader economy (Germany).

The authors use micro-level data on firms combined with several sector-level GVC participation measures. The authors investigate whether the link between productivity and the overall sectoral degree of involvement in global production structures depends on a firm's ownership. The authors verify the robustness of the obtained results by using an instrumental variables approach and weighted regression.

The results show that domestically owned firms are less productive than foreign ones, which is particularly true at low GVC participation levels. However, as GVC involvement increases, the FO productivity premium decreases, leading to productivity catching up between foreign and domestically owned firms. This mechanism is similar in Poland and Germany. However, in the leader country (Germany), the productivity performance of domestically owned firms is more stable along the distribution of GVC involvement.

This study contributes to the foreign direct investment (FDI)–productivity literature by comparing the catching-up and developed countries' perspectives and incorporating the productivity–GVC relationship into the FDI analysis. The authors show that the FO premium is not confined to the developing context but is also present in a leader country. Moreover, the link between productivity and the overall sectoral degree of involvement in global production structures depends on a firm's ownership.

Prior studies suggest that, in an industry in which several public firms operate (i.e. greater public firm presence), uncertainty about business operations within the industry is reduced due to greater analyst coverage and quality of information disclosure. In this study, the authors examine how UK private firms respond to investment opportunities in fixed intangible assets (FIAs) in an environment characterised by greater public firm presence (PFP).

Using data from 61,278 (1,358) private (public) UK firms operating in ten sectors spanning from 2006 to 2016, the authors conduct this analysis by using panel econometric techniques.

The authors observe that private firms are more responsive to their FIA investment opportunities when they operate in industries with more PFP. Also, the authors find that firms in industries with better information quality use more debt and have longer debt maturity security but less internal cash flow. Overall, the findings indicate that PFP generates positive externalities for private firms by lessening industry uncertainty and enhancing more efficient FIA investment. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns.

A key limitation of the study is that it focuses on a single country (the UK) and therefore there is a likelihood that the results found are specific to this setting but not others, particularly developing and emerging economies. Thus, future studies could explore these ideas from the viewpoint of multiple countries.

Overall, the study demonstrates the importance of information disclosure in driving investment decisions of firms.

While this paper builds on the information disclosure and corporate investment literature, it is one of the first attempts, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to explore how private UK firms respond to investment in FIAs in an environment characterised by greater PFP.

This study examines investigating the relationship between cash flows, working capital ratios and firm performance during the global financial crisis.

To examine the relationship between cash flow, working capital ratios and firm performance for EU-28 or Western European Countries (Norway, Turkey and Switzerland) listed firms, both panel and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model are used to analyze the data obtained from sample.

The study empirical findings suggest that global financial crisis has negative effect on firm performance for all sample. In addition, our interaction term result shows that cash flows variables such as cash holding level (CHL) × Crisis, cash interactive effect (CIE) × Crisis and gross working capital ratio (GWC) × Crisis not contributed to firm performance for EU-28 listed firms. However, the authors find that net working capital ratio (NWC) × Crisis have statistically significant and positive effects on firm performance with return on assets (ROA).

The findings of the study provide evidence for managers that listed firms have reduced working capital expenditures to increase cash holdings level during the financial crisis. The authors find that cash flow variables with CHL have positive effect on firm performance with return on equity (ROE) in Western European Countries and these results are consistent with Opler et al. (1999)'s empirical results, while CIE have a negative impact on firm performance such as ROE and earnings before interest tax margin (EBITM).

Global financial crisis emphasizes the importance of working capital and liquidity that suggests an efficient cash holdings policy in response to the uncertainty following the crisis.

The paper aims to investigate the dynamic relationship between working capital management and firm profitability for a sample of firms from eight European Union (EU) countries for the period 2006–2015.

The panel regression model is used in the study. Firm profitability is measured using the return on assets (ROA) ratio, whilst cash conversation cycle, financial leverage, size, tangibility and cash flow ratio are used as independent variables. The novelty of this study is the use of cash flow ratio to develop the analysis firms by dividing them as healthy and nonhealthy.

The paper reveals that working capital management affects firm profitability, and a positive relationship exists between them. The paper shows differences of working capital management and firm profitability across countries. The striking result of this study is that an inverted U-shape relationship exists between working capital management and firm profitability. Whereas the findings suggest that firms should be as close as possible to the optimal length of cash cycle to increase profitability, and managers should give a priority to working capital optimization.

The authors consider results of this study relevant to both researchers and business policymakers in the field of working capital management policies.

This paper aims to review the literature extensively by analysing recent work and providing a guide for models, data sets and research findings.

This paper reviews the literature extensively by analysing recent work and providing a guide for models, data sets and research findings within the context of capital market imperfections. The authors further break down the literature into closer-in-nature categories for reader’s convenience and comprehension. Finally, the authors address gaps in the existing literature and propose government policies that can tone down the potential effect of credit rationing on employment.

This paper provides a map of the literature so as to help future researchers in the relevant literature and give a short insight of what has been explored so far.

This paper is original and is the result of a thorough review of an extensive literature.