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The reform and opening-up of capital market is valued for promoting sustainable development, while its impact presented as the form of deregulation of short-selling on the green innovation of enterprises in developing countries remains unclear. The purpose of this study is to outline the significance of gradual reform of financial markets in developing countries for low-carbon transformation and provide implications for achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

Based on the green subdivided patent data and financial data of China’s A-share listed companies, this paper takes the implementation of securities margin trading program as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the difference-in-differences (DID) model to examine the impact of deregulation of short-selling constraints on the enterprises’ green transformation.

The findings reveal that the initiating securities margin trading program significantly enhances the green innovation performance of enterprises. These findings are valid after performing a series of robustness tests such as the parallel trend test, the placebo test and the methods to exclude other policy interference. Mechanism analyses demonstrate a two-faceted effect of the securities margin trading program on the green innovation of enterprises, in which short-selling policy increases the pressure on capital market deregulation and meanwhile induces the environmental protection investment. The heterogeneity results demonstrate that the impulsive effect imposed by securities margin trading program is more significant in experimental group samples with characteristics of lower financing constraints, belonging to heavy polluting industries and possessing better environmental supervision capability.

First, previous studies have focused on the impact of financial policies implemented by banking institutions on the green innovation of enterprises, but few literatures have explored the validity of relaxing short-selling restrictions or opening the capital market in the field of enterprise’s green transformation in developing country. From the view of securities market reform, this paper broadens the incentive and supervision effects of the relaxation of short-selling control on enterprise’s green innovation performance after the implementation of securities financing and securities lending policy in China’s capital market. Second, previous studies have explored the impact of command-and-control environmental regulations, as well as market-incentivized environmental regulations such as green finance, low-carbon pilots and environmental tax reform, on the green transition of enterprises. Recently the role of the securities market in the green development of enterprises has received more attention in academia. The pilot of margin financing and securities lending is essentially a market-incentivized regulatory tool, but there is few in-depth research on how it affects the green innovation of enterprises. This paper enriches the research on whether the market incentive financial regulation policy can contribute to the green transformation of enterprises under the Porter hypothesis. Third, some previous studies used the ordinary panel regression model to explore the impact of financial policy on enterprise’s innovation performance. However, due to the potential endogenous problems of the estimated model, it might get biased conclusions. Therefore, based on the method of quasi-natural experiment, this paper selects the margin trading pilot policy as an exogenous shock to solve the endogenous or reverse causality problem in traditional measurement model and applies the DID model to study the relationship between core indicator variables.

Existing literature demonstrates the important role of information transparency in enterprise development and market surveillance. However, little empirical research has examined the information transparency effect in supply chain management. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the significant role of information transparency on supply chain financing and its mechanism, taking trade credit as the starting point.

From the data set comprising 3,880 Chinese firms with A-shares listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock Exchanges from 2011 to 2020, we obtain the basic picture of information transparency and trade credit. Panel fixed effects regression is used to test the hypotheses concerning the antecedents to trade credit.

The empirical results show that: first, information transparency can significantly support corporate access to trade credit and is found to facilitate financing by mitigating perceived risk. Second, among companies with higher levels of financing constraints, weaker market power and more concentration of suppliers, information transparency promotes trade credit more markedly. Third, the outbreak of COVID-19 causes a substantial increase in uncertainty and risk in external circumstances and then the effect of information transparency is weakened. Fourth, the contribution to trade credit is likely to be stronger for disclosures containing management transparency elements compared to single financial transparency.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the positive role of information transparency to supply chain financing, which to a certain extent makes up for the lack of information transparency research in the supply chain. It provides new ideas for enterprises to obtain trade credit financing and promote the improvement of supervision departments’ disclosure policies.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by extending the empirical work on the relationship between corporate governance and capital structure by analyzing the mediating role of cost of capital in the non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX).

The sample for this study includes non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (formerly Karachi Stock Exchange) for the period of 2004–2016. Based on 1800 firm-year observations, three approaches of panel data analysis are applied for the step-wise analysis of the underlying study. Firstly, Pooled OLS is applied. Secondly, fixed and random effect panel regression followed by the Hausman test to check the unobservable individual heterogeneity of the data. Hausman test indicates that the fixed-effects model is the most appropriate model for the sample panel data.

The study's findings are that board size, board composition, CEO/Chair duality, institutional ownership and managerial ownership have statistically significant direct effect on the firm's financing decisions. However, CEO/Chair duality, institutional ownership and managerial ownership have significant indirect effect on firm's capital structure decisions. The interesting finding of the paper is on the evidence of mediating role of cost of capital in the nexus of corporate governance and capital structure. Moreover, some conventional determinants of capital structure, including the firm's size, asset structure of the firm, profitability, business risk and growth, are found as determinants of capital structure decisions of the firms.

There are a few limitations to our study which could be addressed by upcoming research. We did not include all the four mechanisms of corporate governance including board structure, audit structure, compensation structure and ownership structure. However, we used only five important attributes including board size, board composition and CEO/Chair duality form board structure, managerial ownership and institutional ownership form ownership structure of corporate governance as our explanatory variables to examine their impact on the capital structure choices of the firms. Future studies may fill this research gap by involving some other attributes of corporate governance and analyzing their effectiveness and impact on value relevant capital structure decisions. Further, due to limited time and resources, we only tested the mediating role of cost of capital, hence, future researchers can analyze the mediating and moderating roles of different variables which may influence the relationship between corporate governance and capital structure choices of the firms.

The study has many valuable guidelines and practical implications for the financial managers of the corporations. Our results will facilitate the policymakers in setting their corporate governance policies and practices and making the value relevant capital structure decisions in compliance with the implications of corporate governance mechanism. In addition, our study provides the empirical evidence in accordance with the argument that good governance practices, particularly the voluntary disclosures by the firm may reduce the information asymmetry which, ultimately, reduces the agency cost and the cost of capital for the firm. However, while deciding the financial policy of the corporations, managers can use our findings in order to assess the effectiveness of corporate governance practices employed by the firm in achieving the optimal capital structure at which the weighted average cost of capital is at its minimum level.

This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the mediating role of the cost of capital in the relationship between corporate governance and capital structure decisions of the firms. This paper provides empirical evidence that corporate governance indirectly affects capital structure decisions through the mediating role of cost of capital.

This study aims to analyze the effect of female top management and female dominant owner on whether firms experience obstacles to obtaining external finance in 136 medium- and low-income countries during 2006–2019. The analysis controls for the role of corporate governance and other firm-specific characteristics, as well as for the impact of national institutions.

The analysis elucidates the economic and non-economic factors driving female corporate leadership. Further, in order to capture the causal effect, the analysis uses univariate tests, multivariate regression analysis, disaggregation testing, sensitivity and endogeneity analysis to confirm the quality of the estimates. The analysis controls for various additional country-level factors.

The results show that female top management and female ownership are broadly significant determinants of firms' access to external finance, especially in relatively larger and more developed countries. The role of controlling shareholders is significant and mediates the gender effect. The latter appears more pronounced in smaller and medium-size firms, operating in the manufacturing and services sectors as well as in the countries with higher levels of development. This also varies with the countries' macroeconomic conditions and institutions governing gender development and equality as well as institutional governance effectiveness.

The results suggest that firms wishing to improve the firms' access to external finance should consider the role of gender in both top management and corporate ownership coupled with the effect of the specific characteristics of firms and the conditioning role of national institutions.

The study examines the gender effects of top management and dominant ownership for the external financing decisions of firms in low- and middle-income countries, which are underresearched. These gender effects are mitigated in various ways by the specific characteristics of firms and especially on national institutions.

This study investigates the significance of trade credit (TC) as an alternative source of funding in financing the growth of financially dependent firms.

Panel data analysis using the difference generalized method of moments (GMM) and fixed-effects ordinary least squares (FE-OLS) is conducted on annual data from publicly listed firms across a number of developing economies. The data cover the period from 2003 to 2019.

The findings indicate that financially dependent firms rely on TC to manage their growth, especially when they have exhausted their debt capacity. This dependence on TC displays a cyclical pattern. As firms enhance their financial position, they tend to scale back their dependence. Nevertheless, firms with significant growth opportunities continue utilizing TC for at least two years after their initial identification as financially dependent.

The author's conclusion highlights that TC can be a valuable and accessible source of funding, especially in developing economies where the real sector may require alternative financing channels. Hence, TC has the potential to play a very significant role in financing corporate growth in these economies.

The current study adds to the existing body of literature by revealing that access to alternative sources of finance is also critical for firms that are dependent on external sources and for firms that have exhausted their financial debt capacity.

Given the significance of innovation in enabling firms to maintain a long-term competitive edge and secure excess profits, this paper aims to investigate whether and how stakeholders’ attention to innovation (SATI) influences corporate innovation.

This paper introduces a novel variable, SATI, which is achieved by segmenting stakeholders’ attention into two categories: attention to innovation and attention to other facets, using textual analysis methods. Subsequently, this paper empirically examines the influence of SATI on corporate innovation.

This paper finds that SATI positively affects corporate innovation input, and the result remains true after addressing possible endogeneity issues using instrumental variable regression. Furthermore, the positive effect of SATI on corporate innovation is stronger in firms facing greater financing constraints, thus verifying the financing constraints hypothesis. The positive effect is also stronger in firms with lower risk-taking levels, thus confirming the innovation failure tolerance hypothesis. Further analysis suggests that SATI increases both corporate innovation output and efficiency, thus ruling out the catering hypothesis.

This paper highlights the importance of SATI in driving corporate innovation. It enriches the literature on the repercussions of stakeholders’ attention and determinants of corporate innovation. In addition, it provides practical suggestions for further implementing China’s national innovation-driven development strategy.

This study aims to investigate the impact of supply chain concentration (SCC) on corporate research and development (R&D) investment and determine the moderating roles of industry concentration and financing constraints on the relationship between SCC and R&D investment.

The study collected data from Chinese listed companies, used the fixed effects model to test the research hypotheses and further used the two-stage Heckman test and propensity score matching (PSM) to address potential endogeneity issues.

The result reveals a negative impact of SCC on corporate R&D investment. In addition, industry concentration mitigates the negative impact of SCC on corporate R&D investment, but financing constraints strengthen the negative impact.

This study introduces the concept of SCC and empirically tests its effect on R&D investment, further explaining the lack of corporate innovation. This study inspires companies to strengthen SC management and weigh the level of SCC with environmental factors.

The operational framework of external financing in the correlation between the gender of entrepreneurs and firm performance remains to be resolved. This study aims to investigate the mediating effect of external financing on gender-based disparities in private firm performance and to explore its heterogeneity within the Chinese context.

Based on national data from the 10th to 13th Chinese Private Enterprise Survey, this study used a bootstrap-based mediation effect model to analyze the role of external financing as a mediator in the relationship between entrepreneur gender and firm performance.

This study found that external financing is a constructive mediator between entrepreneur gender and firm performance. Heterogeneity analysis revealed that external financing plays a complementary mediation role in the impact of entrepreneur gender on performance in West China. In the tertiary industry, external financing acts as the sole mediator for the impact of gender on firm performance. Notably, this mediating effect is present in non-startups but not in startups.

The findings suggest that external financing can improve the firm performance of female entrepreneurs. Governments and policymakers should strengthen financial support for female entrepreneurs in West China, tertiary industry and non-startup enterprises.

This paper contributes to the literature on gender and corporate governance by shedding light on the mediating role of external financing in the relationship between the gender of business owners and firm performance.

This article aims to clarify the impact of stock market liberalization on corporate green technology innovation, analyze its mechanism from the perspectives of financing constraints and environmental management level and explore heterogeneity.

Using the panel data of Chinese enterprises from 2010 to 2020, this article adopts the multi-point difference-in-difference (DID) method to test the impact of stock market liberalization on enterprise green technology innovation and its conduction pathway.

The outcomes demonstrate that stock market liberalization contributes to the furthering of green technology innovation. The heterogeneity test reveals that this promotion is more pronounced for private companies, small-scale companies and companies with high information transparency. The mediating effect test shows that stock market liberalization boosts green technology innovation by alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate environmental management.

This article elucidates the impact path of stock market liberalization on corporate green innovation based on alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate environmental management levels. From the perspective of corporate green technology innovation, this article provides evidence from emerging market countries for the economic effects of capital market opening, which helps to further improve the level of green innovation.

This study examines the relationship between oil price uncertainty (OPU) and corporate inventory investments using a sample of 6,072 USA manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2019.

The author's study employs a panel dataset to examine the relationship between OPU and corporate inventory investments. The author uses several alternative specifications such as fixed effects models, an instrumental variable analysis, an impact threshold for confounding variable (ITCV) analysis, alternative measures, additional control variables and the percent bias analysis to account for endogeneity issues.

Corporate inventory investments decrease in response to high OPU. This decrease in inventory investments happens regardless of firms' expected stockout costs, information environment and reliance on external financing. As a potential mechanism, an uncertainty-induced increase in cash holdings contributes to this reduction in inventory investments. Also, the effect of OPU is non-linear and asymmetric. In response to the volatility of positive (negative) oil price changes, inventory investments decrease (increase) up to a certain point and increase (decrease) after that. Further, uncertainty-induced adjustments in inventory investments positively influence the operating performance of firms.

The author's study adds to the growing literature that examines the impact of OPU on corporate outcomes. Inventory investments directly affect business operations and could better reflect firms' responses to an uncertain environment.