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The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relation between financial leverage and investment opportunities of Chinese industrial firms, which operate in a vastly different financial environment than USA and Japanese firms.

Multivariate regression analysis is performed using four versions of debt‐equity ratio as dependent variable to extensive firm‐level data for the 2000‐2004 period.

The market total debt‐equity (MTDE) ratios of Chinese firms are significantly negatively related to their investment opportunities, indicating that Chinese firms with higher investment opportunities tend to borrow less. The results, however, reveal that the financing‐investment relation is sensitive to the approach used to measure financial leverage. The results further show that long‐term debt‐equity ratios of Chinese firms are not significantly related to their investment opportunities, suggesting that corporate long‐term debt has a minimal role in the leverage‐investment relation for Chinese firms.

The present study opens for a further research on the determinants of the negative relation between financial leverage and investment opportunities of Chinese firms documented in this study. For this line of future research, several unique features of Chinese markets including non‐tradable shares, domestic vs foreign shares, high degree of information asymmetry need to be taken into account.

The present study extends and updates the existing literature on the relation between financial leverage and investment opportunities of Chinese firms by providing new and concrete evidence from extensive data over a more recent period.

This study tests the signaling and tunneling models of dividend policies by examining the relationship between the ownership structure and the dividend payout in a setting where strong institutional governance and weak firm-level governance coexist.

Chinese American Depository Receipts (ADRs) listed in the US offer an excellent opportunity to study dividend policy where strong institutional governance and weak firm-level governance coexist. Using a sample of 161 Chinese ADRs from 2004 to 2018, this study examines the relationship between the firm's ownership structure and cash dividend policy.

This study shows that high levels of controlling shareholder ownership and high levels of state ownership are associated with high dividend payouts. A high level of controlling shareholder ownership has a negative effect on its firm value. Dividend payments in those firms mitigate the negative effect, consistent with the signaling (substitution) model. A high level of state ownership is beneficial to its firm value. However, high dividend payment in those firms decreases the benefit, supporting the tunneling model.

This study covers 161 Chinese ADRs listed in the US with a total market capitalization of over $2 trillion and reveals that dividend tunneling could occur in Chinese government controlled ADRs. Findings in this study would offer valuable insights for US investors and regulators.

This paper extends the tunneling hypothesis to the topic of dividend policy in a setting where strong institutional governance and weak firm-level governance coexist. This study shows that tunneling through dividends can happen among Chinese government controlled ADRs in the US. It also complements the literature by extending the examination of the dividend tunneling model from a relatively small universe of master limited partnership (Atanssov and Mandell, 2018) to a larger universe of Chinese ADRs listed in the US with a total market capitalization over $2 trillion US dollars.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on Chinese firms’ innovation processes that are induced by foreign direct investment abroad. The study uses a patent and citation analysis to examine the extent to which investments abroad contribute to enhancing these firms’ innovative capabilities. More specifically, this study focusses on the role of foreign location competitiveness as an asset to provide technological capabilities to Chinese affiliates.

Patents are good indicators of firms’ innovative capabilities. Moreover, patents allow to track the inter-firm knowledge transfer through the citations of patents on which they are based. The authors use an OECD patent database called “OECD REGPAT July 2013” that compiles patents registered with the European Patent Office (EPO) over the period from 1986 to 2013. The authors focus the analysis on patents registered by Chinese multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) based in Europe because the authors assume inter alia that innovations patented by Chinese affiliates in Europe are registered with the EPO. The sample comprises 3,010 patents involving 5,749 citations that the authors have individually examined.

The findings suggest that Chinese MNEs ability to generate innovation based on their own knowledge is low, with a self-citation rate of approximately 4 percent. Patents by Chinese MNEs are largely based on foreign patents, especially from developed economies (at least 90 percent). The citation analysis also suggests that 39.2 percent of citations represent domestic firms in the local recipient country. This subgroup of citations is categorized as follows: 1.04 percent are M&A linkages, 13.8 percent are cluster linkages, and 24.36 percent are localization linkages. The remaining 60.8 percent of the total sample demonstrates that firms do not necessarily need to be collocated in foreign locations with domestic firms to exchange assets.

Patent and citation analysis considers only a part of the inter-firm knowledge diffusion. Some innovations are not patented and tacit knowledge diffusion is not observable. Moreover, the analysis focusses only on Chinese outward foreign direct investment to Europe, but a large part of knowledge is accumulated in China thanks to inward foreign direct investment.

Many scholars have scrutinized emerging markets multinational enterprises’ strategic asset-seeking investments abroad that are designed to upgrade the companies’ technological capabilities (Cui and Jiang, 2009; Zhang and Filippov, 2009; Huang and Wang, 2013; Amighini et al., 2014; De Beule et al., 2014; Nicolas, 2014). However, few studies analyze the results of these strategies in terms of innovation output.

China has followed an unique transition from central planning to a market economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine how China's unique blend of capitalism and socialism has influenced Chinese firms’ market orientation.

Broadly speaking this paper's methodological approach can be described as a positivistic epistemology.

The paper provides insights into how Chinese institutions facilitate or hinder firms’ market orientation practices through direct effect, externality effect and indirect causal chains. The central theme is that, compared with other countries, China's unaltered political institutions and newly created market institutions have led to unique roles of coercive, normative and mimetic pressures in the diffusion of market orientation among Chinese firms. Especially, regulative institutions’ influence on other institutions is more salient in China than in many other countries.

A lack of primary data and empirical documentation and a lack of in‐depth treatment of some of the key issues are major limitations here.

The paper analyses institutional pressures facing firms operating in China and their variation across different types of firms. An understanding of these pressures is essential to devise market‐oriented approaches in the country. It also examines different institutional factors (e.g. Chinese professional associations) that influence a firm's capability to implement market‐oriented practices.

This paper's greatest value stems from the fact that it employs institutional theory as a lens to understand firms’ market orientation. The institutions‐market orientation nexus is a very important but highly underexamined subject.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether US regulatory actions around reverse mergers (RM) have exerted any spillover effects on the Chinese firms listed in China and whether Chinese firms have exhibited lower financial reporting quality than their US counterparts.

To test the possible spillover effect, this paper calculates three-day cumulative average abnormal returns (CAAR) and the aggregate CAAR for a series of US regulatory actions in 2010 and 2011. The study then compares the accrual quality, conditional conservatism, and information content of accruals of Chinese firms and US firms.

The paper documents a spillover effect of US actions around RM on Chinese stocks listed in China. Overall results do not support the perception that Chinese firms have lower financial reporting quality than their US counterparts.

While this study provides evidence consistent with investors perceiving poor financial reporting quality among Chinese firms, that perception is not justified by empirical evidence.

Investors need not be overly concerned about the financial reporting quality among the Chinese firms when they make asset allocation decisions.

A reality check is important given that perceptions may be outdated, biased, misleading, and costly.

This study puts the financial reporting quality of Chinese firms into perspective helping global investors assess information risk for optimal resource allocation.

There has been a surge of overseas investment from China, both to developing and developed countries. However, there is limited understanding of the impact the internationalization of these firms has on their value creation. This paper seeks to draw on the reconciled FSA/CSA framework with Dunning's four motives to differentiate two types of FDI: traditional FDI and strategic asset-seeking FDI. Further, the paper draws on Verbeke's FSA/CSA recombination process model to analyze the differentiated value creation of traditional FDI and strategic asset-seeking FDI for the Chinese MNEs.

The paper adopts event study methodology to measure the value created by Chinese MNE's FDI projects and hierarchical linear regression to test the hypotheses. The sample consists of 121 FDI projects publicly announced by Chinese listed companies during 2001-2009.

Both traditional and strategic asset-seeking FDI create value and traditional FDI creates more value than strategic asset-seeking FDI for Chinese MNEs. In addition, the paper empirically demonstrates that traditional FDI into developing countries creates more firm value than traditional FDI into developed countries or strategic asset-seeking FDI into developed countries.

This research makes the following original contributions: it contributes to the growing body of literature on internationalization of Chinese firms by investigating whether international expansion creates firm value and how the alignment between types of FDI and location strategies influences firm value creation; the study contributes to the literature by providing insights into the performance implications of emerging economy enterprises (EEEs); and the research contributes to FDI theory building by incorporating learning concepts in internationalization theories and by extending the context of internationalization theories to that of EEEs.

Introduction It has been said that “the human resource is probably the last great cost that is relatively unmanaged”. Since this article was written in 1982, we are aware of the recognition for, and the implementation of, management and planning for this resource. The new emphasis on the human resource is probably a result of a change in attitude on the part of management.

Recent legislation in Europe and North America encourages women’s participation in corporate boards based on the belief that gender-diversified boards contribute positively to firm performance and increased competitiveness. Contrary to the West, the women’s participation rate in business has been traditionally high in China. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether gender-diverse corporate boards of Chinese automotive firms perform better financially than gender-homogeneous boards.

By drawing on data from the Chinese Government and Bloomberg, the authors compare and analyze the differences in financial performance (return on equity, asset growth, sales growth) and risk behavior (debt risk, R&D expenditure) of Chinese automotive firms with and without women on their corporate board.

There is significant evidence that firms with women on the board perform better across all three categories, with the exception of return on equity, for which they found no significant differences among the analyzed firms.

While women’s participation in corporate boards in China is low, the results of this study suggest to policy makers and firms alike to implement measures that support gender-diversified boards in order to take advantage of their potential to increase corporate performance.

So far, the performance of corporate boards of countries with a traditionally high share of female participation in the workforce has rarely been analyzed. Research focusing on the Chinese automotive industry is new and underrepresented, although China is the largest automotive market worldwide and a key industry of the domestic economy. This investigation contributes to the literature stream on board diversity in as well as to industry-related studies. With the example of the Chinese automotive industry, it provides empirical evidence of better performance of firms with gender-diversified boards within the categories tested.

This paper aims to consolidate prior research from policy and management domains to identify stages in China's technological learning within the imitation paradigm during 1949‐2001, focusing on changes in the government's strategic priorities and policies and the nature, mode and sources of technological learning, then to contrast the firm and institutional features that have emerged under the imitation paradigm with those defining the emerging creation paradigm. The analysis leads to clear implications for both policy and management for the Chinese firms to make this transition and compete in higher value‐added global industries.

An overview and conceptual paper based on observations and literature review.

This paper derives a parsimonious set of four dimensions to demarcate five stages in the evolution of China's technological learning: the government's strategic priority, nature of technology, the mode and the source of learning. It identifies six factors acting as significant impediments to Chinese firms' transition from imitation to creation.

In the first place, this paper provides managerial implications which are of great interest to Chinese practicing managers to manage their firms' transition from imitation to creation; second, the policy imperatives highlighted by this paper will help Chinese policymakers to design appropriate incentive mechanisms to enable Chinese firms to build up their competitiveness within the creation paradigm and thereby become global competitors. Meanwhile, this paper provides a systematic analysis on the evolution of China's technology development. This five stage‐based framework will help practicing managers in China understand whether, which and when Chinese firms can make the transition necessary to compete based on the creation of proprietary resources and capabilities.

This paper aims to quest the strategies and paths of Chinese automobile firms for being world class. It analyzes their strengths and potentials in comparison with the development experience of the global examples and provides policy recommendations for cultivating world-class automobile firms.

The authors apply the analytic hierarchy process method to evaluate the competitiveness of automobile firms with multiple indicators.

The evaluation results suggest that Chinese automobile firms still lagged behind their world-class peers. Especially, Chinese domestic firms developed unevenly so that they could not make progress in the core parametric dimensions. Nevertheless, Chinese firms could achieve world class, at least in some niche segments, supported by its accumulated technological capacity and tremendous market size.

This research is the first scholarly work to evaluate the competitiveness of Chinese automobile firms and provides insightful comments on its industrial policies in the automobile industry. This may be valuable for policymaking in the automobile sector of China and other developing economies.