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The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

We examine whether variations in the most fundamental aspects of state corporate income tax regimes affect state economic activity as measured by personal income, gross state product, and total non-farm employment. We focus on a variety of statutory components of state corporate income taxes that apply broadly in most U.S. states and for most multi-state corporate taxpayers. Our econometric strategy consists of a series of fixed effects panel regressions using state-level data from 1996 through 2010. Our results reveal important interaction effects of tax rates and policies, suggesting that policy makers should avoid making decisions about tax rates in isolation. The results demonstrate a relatively consistent negative economic response to the combination of high tax rates with throwback rules and heavy sales factor weights. Combined reporting has no discernible effect on personal income, GSP, or employment after controlling for tax rates, apportionment, and throwback rules. In an effort to gauge the relative impacts of tax policies on the location of economic activity, we also estimate alternative models in which each state’s economic activity is measured as a share of the national economic activity in each year. Statistically significant effects for tax rates, apportionment formulas, and throwback rules in the shares models suggest that at least some of their impact involves the movement of activity across state lines, thereby leaving open the possibility of a zero-sum game among the states.

Donald Trump portrayed himself as a crusader against corrupt elites, claiming he would “drain the swamp.” Corporate elites generally depicted themselves as either trying to work with him or as directly opposed to him. Yet a closer analysis of Trump's policies and their outcomes in key issue areas, from taxes to immigration to the environment, shows continuity with previous pro-corporate policies. Furthermore, by positioning Trump as opposed to the elite, Trump and commentators on his presidency created a “radical flank” effect that made status quo, pro-corporate policies appear as progressive victories. This analysis suggests that a focus on the personal characteristics of politicians is misleading, and that the focus of political discourse needs to be on the power structure that shapes policy outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to study the payout policy for public firms in different countries. The authors are interested to understand the similarities and differences in the behavior of firms across different countries.

The authors use firm-level data collected from Compustat Global for public firms across the world. The sample consists of more than 23,000 firms for the period 1990–2015 in 94 countries. The authors estimate the corporate payout in an empirical model that incorporates other corporate financing decisions, such as investment and debt policies.

The findings support recent corporate governance theory, which asserts that payout policy is influenced by investment and debt policies, and cannot be determined independently. Furthermore, the authors find that geographic/cultural/institutional variation influence the response of payout policy to other corporate financing decisions. Additional tests are presented to demonstrate the robustness of the main findings.

The interpretation of the results for certain regions could be limited due to data availability. The authors believe the authors have a good coverage especially for countries in Asia, relative to the other regions.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to look at payout policy and its relationship with investment and debt policy in such a large scale of firms across the world with coverage of 94 countries and 16 years. The authors document differences in public firms’ attitudes toward payout policy according to geographic/cultural/institutional reasons.

The aim of this paper is to discuss a theoretical framework for increased integration of a company's communication policy, corporate language policy and corporate information portal with a view to facilitating communication management.

The paper draws on selected theoretical contributions on corporate language policy with special emphasis on theoretical considerations on the type of language policies developed and implemented in companies and organisations and on corporate communication with special emphasis on van Riel's common starting points. The empirical basis of the paper is a triangulation of questionnaire data, content analysis data and interview data.

The paper argues that corporate communication has not sufficiently included the operational part of a company's corporate communication. The paper makes the case for a theoretical integration framework based on van Riel's common starting points (CSPs), and argues that corporate communication also needs to include the corporate language policy and the corporate information portal, defined as a modern information directory offering communicators concrete communication data for use in concrete text production situations.

The paper proposes a CSP‐based theoretical integration framework and makes the case for a Holy Trinity in corporate communications based on the communication policy, the corporate language policy and the corporate information portal.

Corporate firms often follow their peer firms to articulate multiple financial decisions. Among the others, trade credit policy is a vital financial decision that can impart its dynamic role in achieving financial efficiency. Therefore, the current analysis aims to assess the role of herding behavior in determining the trade credit policies of corporate firms and its relevant effect on corporate financial performance.

For this purpose, the financial data of 13089 nonfinancial sector firms from 50 countries are employed and the dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) model to estimate the regression is applied.

The empirical findings first reveal that corporate firms actively mimic their peer firms regarding trade credit policies. However, this mimicking behavior hampers the financial performance due to noncompatibility with peers’ trade credit policies. Peer firms often develop such trade credit policies that are not applicable to corporate firms.

Mainly, the findings of the study suggest two implications. First, it highlights the peer effect in terms of trade credit patterns. Second, it elaborates an adverse effect regarding financial performance due to herding of peers’ trade credit policies.

This study adds new thoughts regarding herding behavior in terms of trade credit policy and its possible consequences for corporate financial performance. No study explores such a relationship.

The monetary policy implementation and corporate investment are closely intertwined. The aim of modern monetary policy is to mitigate economic fluctuations and stabilise economic growth. One of the ways of influencing the real economy is influencing the level of investment by enterprises.

This chapter provides evidence on how monetary policy affected corporate investment in Poland between 1Q 2000 and 3Q 2022. We investigate the impact of Polish monetary policy on investment outlays in contexts of high uncertainty.

Using the correlation analysis and the regression model, we show the relation between the monetary policy and the investment outlays of Polish enterprises. We used the least squares method as the most popular in linear model estimation. The evaluation includes model fit, independent variable significance and random component, i.e. constancy of variance, autocorrelation, alignment with normal distribution, along with Fisher–Snedecor test and Breusch–Pagan test.

We find that Polish enterprises are responsive to changes in monetary policy. Hence, the corporate investment level is correlated with the effects of monetary policy (especially with the decision on the central bank's basic interest rate changes). We found evidence that QE policy has a positive impact on Polish investment outlays. The corporate investment in Poland is positively affected by respective monetary policies through Narodowy Bank Polski (NBP) reference rate, inflation, corporate loans, weighted average interest rate on corporate loans.

This chapter analyzes how the macro-environment determines corporate dividend decisions. First, political factors including political uncertainty, economic policy uncertainty, political corruption, and democracy may have two opposite effects on dividend decisions. For example, firms learn democratic practices to improve their corporate governance, but dividend policy may be the outcome of strong corporate governance or the substitute for poor corporate governance. Second, firms in countries of high national income, low inflation, and highly developed stock markets tend to pay more dividends. A monetary restriction (expansion) reduces (increases) dividend payments, as economic shocks like financial crises and the COVID-19 may negatively affect corporate dividend policy through higher external financial constraint, economic uncertainty, and agency costs. On the other hand, they may positively influence corporate dividend policy through agency costs of debt, shareholders' bird-in-hand motive, substitution of weak corporate governance, and signaling motive. Third, social factors including national culture, religion, and language affect dividend decisions since they govern both managers' and shareholders' views and behaviors. Fourth, firms tend to reduce their dividends when they face stronger pressure to reduce pollution, produce environment-friendly products, or follow a green policy. Finally, firms have high levels of dividends when shareholders are strongly protected by laws. However, firms tend to pay more dividends in countries of weak creditor rights since dividend payments are a substitute for poor legal protection of creditors. Furthermore, corporate dividend policy changes when tax laws change the comparative tax rates on dividends and capital gains.

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.