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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.

On the basis of labor economics theories, this study examines how adjustment in human capital accounts for labor cost stickiness.

This study makes use of employee education level as a measure of the quality of human capital and relies on data from Chinese public firms to conduct the empirical test. This study focuses on two important components of labor cost changes: one corresponding to the adjustment in the number of employees (capacity adjustment) and another corresponding to the adjustment in the mix of employee education levels (quality adjustment).

This study reveals that labor cost changes driven by the adjustment of employee education level are sticky. This stickiness cannot be explained by the standard adjustment cost theory. This further shows that firms that actively adjust their employee quality during downturns experience improved future performance. The findings are robust to alternative measures and specifications.

This study provides new evidence for and insights into the cost behavior literature. Previous studies treat input resources in a homogenous way and focus on the effect of capacity adjustment. This study considers the heterogeneity of resources and examines three dimensions of salary cost adjustment: capacity, structure, and unit cost. In line with the economic theory of sticky costs proposed by Banker et al. (2013a), the study’s evidence sheds light on the additional underlying economic mechanisms driving cost stickiness behavior. Specifically, managers asymmetrically adjust both employee structure and average salaries, in addition to employee number. This study also adds to the existing knowledge of the consequences of managers' actions regarding cost behavior.

This study aims to investigate the influence of digital transformation on the overall financial performance of firms, with a specific focus on Chinese-listed companies from 2010 to 2021. It seeks to understand the impacts on various accounting and financial indicators in emerging economies such as China.

This study employs a text-mining approach to construct a digital transformation index based on the data sample of 11,814 firm-year observations from China’s A-share listed companies. This index serves as a proxy to measure the extent of digital transformation and its impact on financial performance and health.

The findings indicate that digital transformation significantly enhances overall financial performance and health, as evidenced by increased profitability, reduced operational costs, and lowered financial risks. The study reveals a time-lagged effect, where the benefits of digital transformation become more apparent after about one year. Further analysis shows that the value of digital transformation is more evident in a firm’s asset items. This raises the possibility of recognising the by-product, such as data resources, in the digital transformation process.

This research offers a unique contribution by linking digital transformation to financial performance using a large dataset from China's A-share listed firms. Doing so enhances our understanding of the tangible effects of digital transformation on corporate performance. Furthermore, this research provides valuable insights for the advancement of future accounting practices and the development of standards.

This study examines the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and managers' ex ante strategic choice on firms’ fixed and variable costs structure, i.e. cost rigidity and the moderating effect of government contracts and political connections.

Using a sample of 4,162 US firms during 2003–2019 and EPU measure from Baker et al. (2016), the authors examine the association between EPU and cost rigidity using multivariate regression analysis. The authors also examine the moderating effects of government customers and political connections using the subsampling method.

This study finds that increases in EPU leads to higher cost rigidity, suggesting that managers tend to look ahead and make an ex ante commitment to invest more in fixed costs to avoid congestion costs in anticipation of future product demand during EPU. The study also finds that the presence of government customers and political connections moderates the need for adopting greater cost rigidity.

This study measures firms' cost rigidity based on archival data. Future studies could utilize managers' cost structure choices using firms' internal management cost structure forecasts data to measure cost rigidity to examine the relationship between cost rigidity and EPU.

This study demonstrates that managers tend to make a proactive commitment to invest in fixed inputs when facing demand uncertainty from EPU to avoid congestion costs. This study also highlights the value of having government contracts and political connections by demonstrating that managers are less concerned about the congestion costs, hence weakening the impact of EPU on cost rigidity when they have government as major customers and/or political connections.

This study extends the management accounting literature by documenting that cost rigidity is related to EPU and that the relationship between cost rigidity and EPU also depends on whether the firm has government as major customers and/or political connections or not.

Research on the effect of executive equity incentives is equivocal. Based on agency theory, some scholars take the convergence of interest logic to highlight the benefits of executive equity incentives. In contrast, others adopt the entrenchment logic to emphasize the increased agency costs. This study attempts to reconcile the debate on executive equity incentives and integrates the opposing views to unveil how executive equity incentives impact corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance.

Using the panel dataset of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2006 to 2022, this study integrates the convergence of interest and entrenchment logic to examine how executive equity incentives affect CSR performance.

We find that the relationship between executive equity incentives and CSR performance follows an inverted U-shaped form. According to the convergence of interest logic, executive equity incentives reduce agency costs when allocating resources to engage in CSR activities and enable firms to increase their CSR investments, ultimately realizing increased CSR performance. After a threshold, however, the accumulation of extensive equity incentives causes the entrenchment effect, resulting in declined CSR performance. Our empirical results also shed new light on its contingent perspective – the inverted U-shaped relationship is attenuated when firms’ stock liquidity is high.

This study attempts to reconcile the debate on executive equity incentives and integrates the opposing views to unveil the inverted U-shaped relationship between executive equity incentives and CSR performance. Our study opens promising avenues for further research on corporate governance and CSR strategies.

Trust is the glue that holds cooperative relationships together and often exists in an asymmetric manner. The purpose of this study is to explore how to mitigate the issue of losses or increased transaction costs caused by opportunistic behavior in a soft environment where trust asymmetry is quite common and difficult to avoid.

This study focuses on examining asymmetric trust between the government and the private sector in public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Drawing upon both project realities and relevant literature, the primary conditional variables influencing asymmetric trust are identified. These variables encompass power perception asymmetry, information asymmetry, interaction behavior, risk perception differences and government-side control. Subsequently, through the use of a survey questionnaire, binary-matched data from both the government and the private sector are collected. The study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational analysis, aiming to investigate the causal pathways that trigger asymmetric trust.

No single conditional variable is a necessary condition for the emergence of trust asymmetry. The pathways leading to a high degree of trust asymmetry can be categorized into two types: those dominated by power perception and those involving a combination of multiple factors. Differences in power perception play a crucial role in the occurrence of high trust asymmetry, yet the influence of other conditional variables in triggering trust asymmetry should not be overlooked.

The findings can contribute to advancing the study of trust relationships in the field of Chinese PPP projects. Furthermore, they hold practical value in facilitating the enhancement of trust relationships between the government and the private sector.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of asymmetric trust on construction project management performance in China's construction industry. Moreover, the authors explore the mediating role of two types of knowledge sharing (explicit knowledge sharing and tacit knowledge sharing) in explaining the association between asymmetric trust and project management performance.

A theoretical model based on the research hypotheses proposed in this study was developed and a questionnaire survey was conducted with 271 professionals. The data collected was analyzed by the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

The results of this study indicate that there is a significant and negative association between asymmetric trust and project management performance. Moreover, two types of knowledge sharing (explicit knowledge sharing and tacit knowledge sharing) have different degrees of impact on improving project management performance. In addition, tacit knowledge sharing is a mediator between asymmetric trust and project management performance.

The data used in this study is from Chinese scenarios, so the research conclusions and application effects based on this are bound to have certain regional limitations. Besides, there are many factors that affect project management performance improving, and the relationships among them are so complex. The theoretical model proposed in this study may not be fully considered. Therefore, follow-up researchers can consider bringing more suitable variables into their researches, so that the theoretical researches can be more in line with the actual project management practice, and the specific mechanism for improving project management performance can be explained more deeply.

This research's value is as follows: Firstly, this paper contributes to the trust and relational governance literature by expanding the research perspective of mutual trust to asymmetric trust. Specially, this research designs a measurement scale for asymmetric trust and then reveals the impact mechanism of it on project management performance, which will certainly promote research paradigm change of trust. Secondly, this research is beneficial to knowledge sharing literature in the construction management field by expanding the research scope of knowledge sharing from a cross-organizational perspective.

This study aims to investigate the importance and effect of asymmetric technological collaborations’ key success factors in developing countries. The number of collaborations between large enterprises and SMEs, known as asymmetric technological collaborations (ATC) is growing considerably. But this asymmetry in itself can increase the number and intensity of collaboration challenges. So far, limited studies have been conducted on the stability of ATCs, and most of them have been in the context of developed countries. Meanwhile, studying the strength and stability of collaboration in the nano industry with growing market value and increasing newcomers is of particular importance.

Here, with bionic engineering approach, we used chemistry for the first time to identify the main stability factors of ATCs and build our hypotheses and research model. To this end, we introduced the factors affecting the stability of the dative chemical bond as a bionic counterpart of corporate venture capital (CVC), which is a type of ATC, and proposed 4 hypotheses. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) method to examine the hypothesized relationships.

The analysis of survey questionnaire data from 26 asymmetric collaborations in Iran’s nanotechnology industry shows that “learning of the acceptor company” with a negative effect, “network ties” and “development of the collaboration host region” with a positive effect and “diversity in the collaboration portfolio” with an inverted U-shaped effect are the most influential factors in the stability and continuity of CVCs, respectively.

The findings of this research can be the beginning of a broad path leading to exploring and getting inspiration from chemistry to analyze management issues.

This paper aims to test the empirical validity of the dynamic trade-off theory in its symmetric and asymmetric versions in explaining the capital structure of a panel of publicly listed US industrial firms over the period from 2013 to 2019. It analyzes the existence of an adjustment of leverage toward its target level and whether the speed of this adjustment is influenced by the debt measure, the model specification or/and the fact that the actual debt ratio is higher or lower than its long-term target level.

This paper uses a quantitative research methodology using panel data analysis under the partial adjustment model and the error correction model using the generalized moment method in first differences and in systems to explore the dynamic nature of firms’ capital structure behavior.

The results show that the effects of the conventional determinants of leverage are globally consistent with the trade-off theory predictions. The dynamic versions confirm that firms exhibit leverage-targeting behavior. Although this speed of adjustment (SOA) depends on the debt and model specifications, it is around 60% on average. The estimated SOA is higher for the market leverage measure compared to the book leverage. The asymmetric adjustment model reveals that firms are more sensitive to reducing leverage than increasing it when they are away from their target; overleveraged firms exhibit approximately 5% faster adjustment than underleveraged firms when book leverage is used.

The originality of this research paper lies in its development and test of an asymmetric model to allow the leverage adjustment speed to vary depending on whether the firm’s debt ratio is above or below its target level and the methodological approach as well as the different model specifications used and the insights generated through the application of rigorous econometric techniques.

This paper studies the optimal decision-making and coordination problem of a dual-channel fresh agricultural product (FAP) supply chain. The purpose is to analyze the impact of information sharing on optimal decisions and propose a coordination mechanism to encourage supply chain members to share information.

The two-echelon dual-channel FAP supply chain includes a manufacturer and a retailer. By using the Stackelberg game theory and the backward induction method, the optimal decisions are obtained under information symmetry and asymmetry and the coordination contract is designed.

The results show that supply chain members should comprehensively evaluate the specific situation of product attributes, coefficient of freshness-keeping cost and network operating costs to make decisions. Asymmetric information can exacerbate the deviation of optimal decisions among supply chain members and information sharing is always beneficial to manufacturers but not to retailers. The improved revenue-sharing and cost-sharing contract is an effective coordination mechanism.

The conclusions can provide theoretical guidance for supply chain managers to deal with information asymmetry and improve the competitiveness of the supply chain.

This paper combines the three characteristics that are most closely related to the reality of supply chains, including horizontal and vertical competition of different channels, the perishable characteristics of FAPs and the uncertainty generated by asymmetric demand information.