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For Chinese companies that cross-list in Chinese A share and Hong Kong (H share) markets, the H share price has been consistently lower than the A share price by an average of 85% in recent years. This is puzzling because most institutional differences between the two markets have been eliminated since 2007. The purpose of this study is to explain the puzzle of the price difference of A+H companies.

Using all A and H share Chinese firms in the period 2007–2013 and a simultaneous equations approach, this study identifies three new explanations for the recent price difference.

First, utilizing a unique earning quality measure that is directly related to non-persistent components of fair value accounting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), this study finds that the lower the earnings quality, the lower the H share price relative to the A share price, and hence the greater the price difference. Second, the higher the myopic investor ownership in A share firms, the larger the A share price relative to the H share price. Third, the short-selling mechanism introduced to the A share market since 2010 helps reduce the price difference.

First, this study identifies three new explanations for the puzzle of the AH price difference which remains substantial even after the institutional and accounting standards differences between the two markets were eliminated. Second, we examine the impact of the implementation of fair value accounting under IFRS in an emerging market on the pricing difference of cross-listed shares and reveal that it can induce an unintended negative consequence on the pricing difference of cross-listed shares. Third, this study contributes to the literature on short sales by providing its mitigating role in pricing differences across two different markets. Finally, this study makes improvements in research design, which utilizes a unique measure of earnings quality that is directly related to the implementation of IFRS and a simultaneous equations approach that minimizes endogeneity concern.

In recent years, the quality and environment of global corporate governance have drawn attention from researchers and practitioners. Based on the public information of Chinese listed companies (CLCs), the Evaluation Research Group of China Academy of Corporate Governance at Nankai University developed the first corporate governance index system that includes six dimensions to evaluate the status of the governance of CLCs.

This paper reports the findings of the annual evaluation in 2017.

The authors found that five of the six dimensions of CLC governance index increased, except for shareholder governance index. Management-level governance and information disclosure index increased most significantly.

Through the evaluation, the authors discovered some governance problems of CLCs and proposed some corresponding suggestions to improve the effectiveness of corporate governance of these companies.

The way to measure the value of an enterprise’s R&D investments remains elusive for theoretical and empirical study on innovation economics. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper expands the asset-value model pioneered by Griliches (1981) and applies it for the first time to the Chinese stock market to calculate the value of R&D investment instilled by Chinese manufacturing listed companies (CMLCs) from 2003 to 2014.

The authors find that: the assets-value model can better explain the enterprise value composition of CMLCs; with equal input, the value of R&D is higher than that of tangible assets, and lower than that of organizational assets; compared with the developed countries, the R&D value of CMLCs is lower; and the R&D value of CMLCs saw a downward trend from 2007 to 2014.

Furthermore, by rationally estimating the value of organizational assets and non-tradable shares, and innovatively introducing semi-annual momentum indicators from the perspective of behavioral finance to control the influence of investor sentiment on enterprise value, this paper tries to develop the asset-value model and provides a feasible solution to the problem of measuring the value of Chinese enterprises’ R&D investment.

In a state capitalist country such as China, an important influence on company reporting is the government, which can influence company decision-making. The nature and impact of how the Chinese government uses its symbolic power to promote corporate environmental reporting (CER) have been under-studied, and therefore, this paper aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating the various strategies the Chinese government uses to influence CER and how political ideology plays a key role.

This study uses discourse analysis to examine the annual reports and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports from seven Chinese companies between 2007 and 2011. And the data analysis presented is informed by Bourdieu's conceptualisation of symbolic power.

The Chinese government, through exercising the symbolic power, manages to build consensus, so that the Chinese government's political ideology becomes the habitus which is deeply embedded in the companies' perception of practices. In China, the government dominates the field and owns the economic capital. In order to accumulate symbolic capital, companies must adhere to political ideology, which helps them maintain and improve their social position and ultimately reward them with more economic capital. The findings show that the CER provided by Chinese companies is a symbolic product of this process.

The paper provides contributions around the themes of symbolic power wielded by the government that influence not only state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but also firms in the private sector. This paper also provides an important contribution to understanding, in the context of a strong ideologically based political system (such as China), how political ideology influences companies' decision-making in the field of CER.

This paper examines the comparative corporate performance of logistics companies in Korea, China and Japan. Based on the annual data from the listed companies, the growth rate of Chinese companies has surpassed that of Korean and Japanese companies and has labeled China as the fastest growing economy. How ever, labor efficiency of Chinese firms when calculated by total revenue per employee is the lowest of the three countries. In addition, the profitability of Chinese multimodal logistics companies and sea transport companies is also lower than that of Korea and Japan.

Using Data Envelop Analysis(DEA), the primary results regarding corporate efficiency among Korean, Chinese and Japanese logistic companies are as follows: In the multimodal industries, Japanese firms have revealed the highest level of efficiency, with Korean firms coming in second, and Chinese firms ranking third with distinctly inferior performance. This trend has also been examined in the maritime industries, in which the efficiency levels have been deteriorating continuously. However, in the air transportation industry Chinese companies revealed the highest level of efficiency, which resulted from the business characteristics of the government supported conglomerate companies.

This paper aims to examine the effect of dividend regulation on cost stickiness (i.e. the asymmetric change in firm expense between sales increase and sales decrease) and explore the underlying mechanism.

Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the Guideline for Dividend Policy of Listed Companies issued by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) in 2013, the authors employ a difference-in-difference model to investigate the impact of dividend regulation on cost stickiness.

The authors find that the cost stickiness of treatment group firms has decreased significantly when compared with control group firms after the dividend regulation. Moreover, this effect is more pronounced among firms in lower marketization regions, in lower competition industries and those with less analyst coverage and lower cash flow levels. Further analyses show that dividend regulation reduces the cost stickiness of firms by mitigating agency problems. Finally, the conclusion holds after several robust tests, including controlling for firm fixed effect, propensity score matching (PSM), placebo test and reconstruction of expense variable.

This paper confirms that dividend regulation serves an important role in corporate governance, which reduces firms' agency costs and thereby decreases cost stickiness. The conclusions shed light on the dividend policies of listed companies and capital market regulation in the future.

Independent directors are important corporate decision participants and makers. Based on the Chinese cultural background, this paper interprets the listing order of independent directors as independent directors’ status, exploring their influence on the corporate research and development (R&D) behavior.

This paper studies A-share listed firms in China from 2008 to 2018 as the sample. The main method is ordinary least square (OLS) regression. We also use other methods to deal with endogenous problems, such as the firm fixed effect method, change model method, two-stage instrumental variable method, and Heckman two-stage method.

(1) Higher independent directors’ status attribute to more effective exertion of supervision and consultation function, and positively enhance the corporate R&D investment. The increase of the independent director’ status by one standard deviation will increase the R&D investment by 4.6%. (2) The above effect is more influential in firms with stronger traditional culture atmosphere, higher information opacity and higher performance volatility. (3) High-status independent directors promote R&D investment by improving the scientificity of R&D evaluation and reducing information asymmetry. (4) The enhancing effect of independent director’ status on R&D investment is positively associated with the firm’s patent output and market value.

This paper contributes to understanding the relationship between the independent directors’ status and their duty execution from an embedded cultural background perspective. The findings of the study enlighten the improvement of corporate governance efficiency and the healthy development of the capital market.

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between corporate governance (CG) structure and firm performance in Chinese listed firms from 2001 to 2015. The authors’ motivation derives from the fact that the CG system in China is different from those in the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and other countries.

A large unbalanced sample, covering more than 22,700 observations in Chinese listed firms, was used to explore, by means of a system-generalized method-of-moments (GMM) estimator, the relationship between CG structure and firm performance to remove potential sources of endogeneity.

Results show that Chinese CG structure is endogenously determined by the CG mechanisms investigated: there is no relationship between board size (including independent directors) and firm performance; CEO duality has a significantly negative effect on firm performance; concentration of ownership has a significantly positive influence on firm performance; managerial ownership is negatively correlated with firm performance; state ownership has a significantly positive effect on firm performance; and a supervisory board is positively correlated with firm performance.

The findings provide policymakers and firm managers with useful empirical guidance concerning CG in China.

Few integrative studies have examined the impact of CG structure on firm performance in China. This study adds new empirical evidence that the relation between CG structure and performance in China is endogenous and dynamic when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, simultaneity, and dynamic endogeneity.

The real estate industry has experienced frequent changes in corporate executives in recent years. A total of 147 A-share listed firms witnessed a total of 191 corporate executives' departure. This wave of corporate executive departures is significantly different from previous waves. This study aims to examine whether industry evolution influence the characteristics of corporate executives? If so, then how?

Drawing on upper echelons theory, this study analyzed the effects of industry life cycle on the characteristics of corporate executives. The data of A-share listed companies in the textile, real estate and computer industries in China from 1992 to 2014 were collected.

There are significant differences in the characteristics of corporate executives that match the life cycles of different industries. Companies at the growth stage in the life cycle of an industry were more likely to select and appoint younger corporate executives with political capital, peripheral functions and output functions, whereas companies at the maturity stage were more likely to select and appoint older corporate executives with throughput functions.

By using the upper echelons theory as a starting point, this study analyzed the effects of industry life cycle on corporate executive's characteristics. The research findings offer theoretical implications for the upper echelons theory and provide managerial implications.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of managerial short-termism on green innovation of firms and the moderating role of digital transformation of enterprises in the association between managerial short-termism and green innovation.

This study uses data from Chinese A-share listed companies from 2001 to 2021 and employ panel fixed model and moderating effect model to examine the impact of managerial short-termism on green innovation of firms and the moderating role of digital transformation of enterprises in the association between managerial short-termism and green innovation.

The findings of this study reveal that managerial short-termism exerts negative influence on green innovation. Digital transformation enables firms to reduce the adverse effect of managerial short-termism on green innovation because digital transformation enhances information processing ability and then improves internal corporate governance and analyst coverage. Moreover, the moderating role of digital transformation is more prominent for firms with lower internal corporate governance, for firms with less analyst coverage and for non-state-owned enterprises.

This paper intends to address the following two questions: what is the impact of managerial short-termism on green innovation and what is the role of digital transformation in the two variables’ association? By using data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2001 to 2021 and developing two individual indexes to measure managerial short-termism and digital transformation, the authors empirically test these above two questions. The results of this study indicate that: First, drawn on time-oriented theory and upper echelon theory, managerial short-termism has an adverse effect on firms’ green innovation. Second, digital transformation enables firms to reduce the negative effect of managerial short-termism on green innovation. Furthermore, the moderating mechanism tests show that the corporate governance effects of digital transformation play a supervisory role that impels managers to reduce short-term investments and promote firms’ green R&D investments, which helps to reduce the negative effect of managerial short-termism on green innovation. Additionally, the heterogeneity checks show that the moderating role of digital transformation in the relation between managerial short-termism and green innovation is more prominent for firms with lower internal corporate governance, with less analyst coverage and for non-state-owned enterprises.