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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of environmental uncertainty on corporate social responsibility (CSR), and involves corporate financial investment as mediating factor into this relationship to identify whether Chinese enterprises pursue fame or profit under rising environmental uncertainty.

Data of listed companies in China from 2010 to 2019 are employed. Fixed effect and mediating effect models were used to explore the relationship between environmental uncertainty, corporate financial investment, and CSR. The heterogeneity influence and moderating effect are discussed by using the method of grouping test and adding interactive items.

The study finds that rising environmental uncertainty has a negative impact on CSR. It stimulates managements' short-sighted motivation, so that enterprises prioritize financial investment that can solve short-term goals, rather than CSR performance. This inhibitory effect is caused by holding illiquid financial assets with the motivation of “speculative profit seeking.” The negative effect is greater in the samples of state-owned enterprises, nonfamily enterprises and enterprises with low risk-taking.

It provides a decision-making direction for implementation of CSR governance and the construction of CSR system, particularly in emerging market economies.

CSR is widely known in developed countries for its formation, development and role, but its effectiveness and behavioral motivation are less mentioned in emerging markets. In the future, the research in this area needs to be further advanced.

The study makes significant contributions to the mechanisms behind the link between environmental uncertainty and CSR by taking corporate financial investment as an intermediary factor into the analysis, especially in the unique market context of China.

Financial flexibility, investment efficiency and effective corporate governance mechanisms have been issues of concern to stakeholders. Yet, little empirical evidence on the combined moderating effects investment efficiency and corporate governance mechanisms on the nexus between financial flexibility and firm performance. This study aims to address this gap and extend the extant literature by examining the moderating effects of corporate governance and investment efficiency on the nexus between financial flexibility and financial performance.

The empirical study is based on progression analysis using a sample of 13,865 US listed companies selected from BoardEx (WRDS) for the period (2010–2022) with 89,198 firm-year observations.

Findings of this study indicate that financial flexibility improves firm value as well as accounting performance. Furthermore, the results reveal that both investment efficiency and corporate governance moderate the effect of financial flexibility on firm performance. The authors complement and extend the literature on the optimal investment strategies domain by showing that the combined impact of corporate governance mechanisms and investment efficiency strengthens the nexus between financial flexibility and firm performance.

Key limitations of this study due to the characteristics of the sample selection: country-specific context and proxies used by this study.

Findings of this study have managerial and theoretical implications for firms’ boardrooms, institutional and individual investors, regulators, academics and other stakeholders regarding behavioural aspects of investment decision-making.

The authors’ novel contribution to the extant literature is articulated by the conceptual framework underlying this study and by the new evidence regarding exploring the combined effect of corporate governance mechanisms on nexus between financial flexibility and companies’ performance.

This study aims to examine how corporate financial flexibility, financial sector development and the regulatory environment influence corporate investment decisions in an emerging economy after controlling for several macroeconomic factors.

The authors estimated random-effects models to empirically examine the impacts of corporate financial flexibility, banking sector development, equity market development, regulatory quality and corruption on corporate investment decisions. The empirical analysis is based on an unbalanced annual panel data set of a sample of 198 non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange for the period 1992–2018.

The results show that financially flexible firms tend to invest more. The increased banking sector development, stock market development and better regulatory quality play a pivotal role for enabling firms to increase their investment ability. However, the results reveal that corruption acts as a barrier and reduces corporate investments during the examined period. The results suggest that unused borrowing capacity is a good source of financial flexibility. These results strongly support the pecking order theory, which explains why firms incline toward internal sources for financing their investments and why they prefer debt to equity when go for external financing.

The empirical findings of the study enable corporate managers to make better financing and investment decisions by understanding the significance of the attainment and maintenance of the corporate financial flexibility to enhance firm value. Furthermore, the findings enable corporate managers to examine and understand the role of banking sector development (BSD), equity market development (EMD), regulatory quality and the role of corruption in affecting corporate firms' investment ability, allowing them to make appropriate investment decisions, especially from an emerging economy perspective. The findings also help investors in making appropriate investment decisions while they are purchasing financial assets. Finally, the findings of the study have some implications for regulators as well. Specifically, the findings suggest that the authorities should implement economic and financial policies favoring banking sector as well as equity market development to enhance corporate investment.

The study significantly adds to the literature by examining the impact of financial flexibility, financial sector development and regulatory environment on corporate investment decisions. According to the authors' knowledge, the empirical evidence examining the impact of all of these factors on corporate investment is very scarce. Therefore, this study is an effort to fill the gap left in the literature.

We study the potential effects of pension underfunding on corporate investment, financial constraints and improved employee bonding using 10 Pacific-Basin countries (including the United States, Australia, and eight Asian countries) at heterogeneous economic development stages and different regulatory environments. We document that corporate pensions are significantly underfunded in most countries of our sample in the period of 2001–2017, when interest rates were ultralow in most countries. In addition, firms from countries with stronger employee protection and more generous retirement benefits tend to show higher levels of underfunding in their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. To the extent of pension underfunding imposing constraints on corporate investment, we find that firms in these countries can face more constraints on investment when their pension is underfunded.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the effects of corporate financial performance toward the influences of corporate growth and company asset utilization on the corporate market value.

This research is an explanatory research that describes the influences of one or more variables on other variables based on secondary data. This research took place in Indonesia and was carried out from 2011 to 2016.

The findings of this study are corporate growth has a significant influence on the corporate market value, implying that companies should consider the short-term and long-term profitabilities before making any investment decision; asset utilization has been confirmed to have a positive and significant influence on financial performance. Insights into asset utilization effectiveness and efficiency are important for company managers to consider in making strategic decisions upon operational activities of the company. Also, financial performance has a positive and significant influence on the corporate market value.

Research originality offered in this research is in the form of empirical evidence upon the influence of company asset utilization on the financial performance and corporate market value of a company. The finding of this research is expected to provide a better understanding on the role of company asset utilization in determining corporate financial performance which is known to be certain.

This study aims to investigate the influence of macro-financial conditions on firm-level capital allocation as a micro-transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Vietnam.

The authors employ a dynamic model of investment based on the Euler equation approach that allows for financial frictions. The financial conditions are proxied by a composite index of the current states of financial variables, including interest rates, exchange rates, stock prices, and credit demand – which captures short-term shocks in monetary transmission channels. Corporate financing constraints, as a reflection of financial frictions, are measured by the sensitivity of investment to internal funds, which are extensively examined in terms of both negative and positive cash flows.

In the presence of a non-monotonic (or U-shaped) investment–cash flow relation, the empirical evidence from Vietnamese listed firms indicates that financial conditions affect investment behavior for only firms with negative cash flows, in the sense that better financial conditions alleviate the level of “negative” financing constraints (i.e. the sensitivity of investment to negative cash flow). This effect is greater for larger firms and more likely pronounced for firms without state ownership.

This study contributes to the literature on corporate financing constraints in a manner of considering the macroeconomic dimension, specifically exploring the asymmetric impacts of financial conditions on the investment sensitivity to cash flow.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the macroeconomic condition on investment-cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) of Indian firms and examine whether the effect of macroeconomic condition on ICFS depends on the size and group affiliation of the firm.

An empirical investigation is conducted using a dynamic panel data model or more specifically system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique.

Empirical findings postulate that the availability of cash flow influences the investment decisions which depicts that Indian manufacturing firms are internally as well as externally financially constrained. This study finds that good economic condition (period of high GDP growth rate) reduces the ICFS, although this effect is stronger for small-sized and standalone firms than the large-sized and business group affiliated firms. The authors find that macroeconomic condition has a positive and significant effect on investment decisions.

This study has considered only the non-financial sector. The future research could explore the effect of macroeconomic condition on ICFS might be affected by firm other characteristics such as firm age and firm capital structure.

The government should provide loan on the low rate to the small-sized firms and standalone firms because it is very difficult for these firms to finance their investment during the bad economic condition (period of low high GDP growth rate).

This study contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the impact of the macroeconomic condition on ICFS as well as investment decisions of the Indian manufacturing firms, which is an unexplored issue from an emerging market perspective. To the best of my knowledge, this is a first-ever study which explores the effect of macroeconomic condition on investment decisions with respect to business group affiliation and firm size.

This study aims to examine the impact of stock mispricing on corporate investment decisions by taking the sample of non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange during the period of 2008-2014.

To measure the mispricing, this study decomposes the market-to-book ratio into mispricing and growth components and measures corporate investment by capital expenditures. Fixed and random effect panel regression models are used to estimate the results.

Results of the study show that firms issue overvalued equity to finance the capital expenditures. Consistent with other studies, the relationship between stock mispricing and investment is more prominent in the financially constrained firms. In addition, cash flow investment sensitivity is higher in financially unconstrained firms.

Nonetheless, the results give important implications to the Pakistan Stock Market on how the mispricing enhances the welfare by relaxing the financial constraints and allowing the managers to make investment in profitable projects that otherwise go non-funded. These findings have interesting implications for further research in the literature of finance and also help in economic policy-making.

This study finds the impact of stock mispricing on corporate investment decisions by considering the role of market timing in the context of Pakistan.