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In this study, the authors argue that the private information obtained and transmitted by institutions during the corporate visits can alleviate the degree of information asymmetry between firms and investors, so institutional visits may influence investors' heterogeneous beliefs. Therefore, the authors investigated whether and how institutional investors' corporate visits affect investors' heterogeneous beliefs.

This study examines whether and how institutional investors' corporate visits affect investors' heterogeneous beliefs using the data of A-share companies from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) during 2013–2019. Using empirical research method, this study designs and conducts an empirical research according to empirical research's basic norms.

The authors find that institutional visits effectively decrease investors' heterogeneous beliefs, especially institutional investors. Meanwhile, institutional site visits and sell-side institutional visits have a more significant negative effect on investors' heterogeneous beliefs. The findings remain after robustness tests with the alternative variable, instrumental variable, propensity score matching and quantile regression methods.

The development of China's capital market is imperfect, resulting in a strong speculative atmosphere. So, investors' irrational investment behaviors occur from time to time, leading to sizeable heterogeneous beliefs in China's capital market, which increases the risk of investment and is not conducive to the discovery of corporate value and the efficient allocation of resources. Therefore, exploring the factors influencing heterogeneous beliefs and finding ways to alleviate heterogeneous beliefs can reduce the proportion of speculative investors and promote the healthy development of China's capital market.

As an important participant in capital market, institutional investors play a principal role in improving corporate governance. Most existing studies have focused on institutional ownership and its economic consequences. Nevertheless, they have not provided sufficient insight on the governance behavior of institutional investors as well as the underlying incentive mechanism. This paper aims to analyze the governance role of institutional investors in information disclosure and provide related evidence.

The authors propose a novel theory to analyze the institutional investors’ behavior of active governance and shows that such behavior significantly improves the quality of corporate information disclosure. The authors then conduct an empirical test by using the hand-collected data of institutional investors’ corporate visits during 2009-2014 in ChiNext.

This paper finds that the firms visited by institutional investors are more likely to have a greater tendency of disclosing more information than the firms that have never been visited. In particular, a higher frequency of visits or a larger number of participating institutional investors leads to a higher degree of disclosure. Consistent with the notion that on-site visits endow institutional investors with more frequent and active interaction with the firms, the authors find that the results are stronger for firms which are visited on-site, when compared with other information acquisition activities such as online meetings, conference calls and investor meetings. In addition, the effect of a site visit is greater when the site visit is conducted by securities companies or funds rather than insurance companies or QFIIs. Finally, the test of the direction of causality suggests that visits conducted by institutional investors leads to more information disclosure, rather than the reverse. Collectively, these results show that institutional investors’ participation enhances corporate information disclosure.

This paper explores the internal mechanism that institutional investors affect corporate governance by improving information disclosure through their corporate visits. This is the first study to investigate the influence of institutional investors’ corporate visits and their economic consequences.

Corporate site visits increase labor investment efficiency.

Our empirical model for the baseline analysis follows those of Jung et al. (2014) and Ghaly et al. (2020).

We show that corporate site visits are associated with significantly higher labor investment efficiency; more specifically, site visits reduce both over-hiring and under-hiring of employees. The effect of site visits on labor investment efficiency is more pronounced for firms with higher labor adjustment costs, greater financial constraints, weaker corporate governance and lower financial reporting quality. We also find that site visits mitigate labor cost stickiness.

First, while the literature has suggested how the presence of institutional investors and analysts may affect labor investment decisions, we focus on institutional investors and analysts’ activities and interactions with firm executives. We provide direct evidence that institutional investors and analysts may use corporate site visits to improve labor investment efficiency. Second, our study adds to a line of recent studies on how corporate site visits reduce information asymmetry and agency conflicts. We show that corporate site visits allow institutional investors and analysts to influence labor investment efficiency. We also provide new evidence that corporate site visits reduce labor cost stickiness.

This paper aims to provide new evidence that corporate site visits give institutional investors better opportunities to obtain information and exert monitoring powers, which reduce listed firms’ earnings management.

This paper explores how private communications affect firms’ earnings management by using a sample of institutional investors’ visits to the corporate sites of Chinese listed firms between 2010 and 2018. This study uses the performance-matched Jones model (Kothari et al., 2005) to measure accrual-based earnings management and Roychowdhury’s (2006) method to measure real earnings management. The authors also perform several robustness checks including an alternative measure of accounting accruals, a two-stage instrumental regression and the Heckman two-step approach.

Using a sample of institutional investors’ site visits to Chinese listed firms during the 2010–2018 period, this study finds that institutional investors’ site visits reduce listed firms’ earnings manipulation activities (both accrual-based and real). This association is robust to several checks, including an alternative measure of accounting accruals, a two-stage instrumental regression and the Heckman two-step approach. This study further documents that other private communication approaches such as private in-house meetings and conference calls moderate the effect of site visits.

As the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is one of the few stock markets to mandate that listed firms record and disclose their private communication information, this study also has implications for researchers and policymakers who work in other stock markets.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first comprehensive study of the impact of private communications on earnings management. This study extends the earnings management literature by examining institutional investors’ information acquisition process and revealing a negative association between their site visits and listed firms’ earnings management. Moreover, this study examines the effects not only on traditional accounting accruals but also on real earnings management. In addition to studies that emphasize the effect of corporate site visits on individuals and market reactions, this study examines the effect of site visits on firms’ financial misbehavior. This study shows that institutional investors’ corporate site visits provide external monitoring that mitigates listed firms’ earnings management behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizations can strategically frame their legitimate perspective on a specific issue in order to gain salience and public support in a social media context.

By means of framing theory and a critical perspective on strategic discourse in hypermodal spaces, the study examines in detail the discursive strategies and framing processes employed by a non-profit organization that faces local and global contestation of its corporate operations.

Through a critical discourse analysis of the organization’s 385 Facebook posts during two periods of time, the results not only show how the corporate perspective is strategically framed and legitimized, but also challenged and consequently adapted in this hypermodal issue sub-arena. In addition to legitimizing the organizational perspective by providing evidence-based facts and external expert views as reliable and neutral sources, and echoing supporters’ voices and actions as further endorsements, the organization also strategically manages the Facebook dialogue by delegitimizing counterarguments.

This study contributes to the corporate communication field by revealing how framing can be materialized in specific discursive strategies aimed to legitimize and delegitimize. It shows how such strategies are interrelated in hypermodal clusters in ways that sustain the organizational discourse, and can evolve across time and within the same actor’s strategy. Methodologically, this study expands the research toolkit by introducing hypermodality in exploring framing and strategic organizational discourse.

In this fast-changing world, digitization has become crucial to organizations, allowing decision-makers to alter corporate processes. Companies with a higher corporate social responsibility (CSR) level not only help encourage employees to focus on their goals, but they also show that they take their social responsibility seriously, which is increasingly important in today’s digital economy. So, this study aims to examine the relationship between digital transformation and CSR disclosure of Chinese A-share companies. Furthermore, this research investigates the moderating impact of governance heterogeneity, including CEO power and corporate internal control (INT) mechanisms.

This study used fixed effect estimation with robust standard errors to examine the relationship between digital transformation and CSR disclosure and the moderating effect of governance heterogeneity among Chinese A-share companies from 2010 to 2020. The whole sample consists of 17,266 firms, including 5,038 state-owned enterprise (SOE) company records and 12,228 non-SOE records. The whole sample data is collected from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research, the Chinese Research Data Services and the WIND databases.

The regression results lead us to three conclusions after classifying the sample into non-SOE and SOE groups. First, Chinese A-share businesses with greater levels of digitalization have lower CSR disclosures. Both SOE and non-SOE are consistent with these findings. Second, increasing CEO authority creates a more centralized company decision-making structure (Breuer et al., 2022; Freire, 2019), which improves the negative association between digitalization and CSR disclosure. These conclusions, however, also apply to non-SOE. Finally, INT reinforces the association between corporate digitization and CSR disclosure, which is especially obvious in SOEs. These findings are robust to alternative HEXUN CSR disclosure index. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative relationship between corporate digitalization and CSR disclosures is more pronounced in bigger, highly levered and highly financialized firms.

Digitalization and CSR disclosure are well studied, but few have examined their interactions from a governance heterogeneity perspective in China. Practitioners and policymakers may use these insights to help business owners implement suitable digital policies for firm development from diverse business perspectives.

The findings suggest that reducing information processing costs as a result of better transportation is an important ingredient in promoting the pricing of firm-specific information. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

The authors adopt a difference-in-difference (DID) research design to examine the impact of information processing costs on stock price synchronicity with a sample of firms listed in the Chinese A-share market during 2007 and 2017.

This paper shows that the launch of the high-speed railway (hereafter HSR) in China is associated with lower stock price synchronicity, consistent with the theory that the HSR reduces investors’ information processing costs (cost of monitoring, acquiring and analyzing firm disclosures). This effect is more pronounced for companies located in remote areas than for those located in large cities. Further tests show that the negative association between the launch of HSR and stock price synchronicity is stronger for companies with higher information asymmetries, proxied by higher equity concentration, higher complexity and lower internal control quality.

This study contributes to the literature in the following three ways. First, prior literature relates the effects of geographic distance to information transmission and information asymmetry between insiders and outside investors (e.g. Coval and Moskowitz, 2001; Kang and Kim, 2008; Malloy, 2005). The authors supplement the literature by providing new empirical evidence from an exogenous shock (natural experiment), that is, the launch of HSR, that facilitates transportation and reduces information transmission costs. Second, prior studies have shown that new airline routes that facilitate transportation improve investment and productivity (e.g. Bernstein et al., 2016; Giroud, 2013). The authors extend this stream of studies by showing that the development of HSR networks reduces information processing costs, and promotes the incorporation of firm-specific information in the asset pricing. More importantly, in this study, the authors explicitly incorporate disclosure processing costs theory into our framework thus enhancing our understanding of how and why improvements in transport relate to better market outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to finds out how investor attention plays the moderating role between the relation of information risk and COE by considering the effect of three different types of information risk, that is private information, lack of quality and transparent information.

For that purpose, data is collected from all the non-financial firms listed on PSX from 2007 to 2019. Two-step system GMM dynamic panel estimators are applied to test the dynamic nature of the proposed model.

The findings of the study show that investor attention reduces these three information risks by increasing the stock liquidity and decreasing the crash risk which ultimately decreases the COE. Also, this study examined the role of investor attention between the relations of information risk and corporate investment in the dynamic panel model, where the two-step system generalized method of the moment has been applied. The finding of the study shows that investor attention stimulates the innovative investment by increasing investor confidence and decreasing the agency conflict.

This study contributes to the literature by providing the novel findings by considering the role of investor attention in reducing the effect of three different types of information risk, that is private information, less quality as well as less transparency of information and further their effect on the cost of equity.

Retail marketing: it can be discussed in a retail marketing course to explain the growth and expansion of the retail chain and illustrate the features of a retail model that can consider franchise as a method to expand or distribute its branded merchandise in other retail outlets. The case will also help assess the financially viable growth. Marketing Management: It can be useful for a comprehensive yet straightforward explanation of marketing mix price, promotion, place, and product, also at the same time it serves to explain the importance of customer service in terms of retailing. Strategic Marketing: The case provides varied growth options that are being considered by retail organizations, which gives the student real-time opportunity to arrive at strategic decisions by considering financial viability, internal strengths (SWOT analysis), franchising as a growth option.

This case can be used in foundation course on retail marketing or even in strategic marketing in postgraduate management program, or the dilemma can be explained as a part of a marketing course for postgraduate, executive programs, management development programs.

Kanwar, the owner of 39 Bakers, was one of the fastest-growing retail outlets in Jammu, India. He had been successful in carving his pie for himself with its unique bakery products of more than 1000 variety of, break-even point price, everyday surprise product (EDSP), reasonable price, open kitchen concept, hygiene, excellent customer service. Within three years, 39 Bakers had grown from one to eight outlets, and revenue had increased to US$68,621, and vision was to achieve US$2m within the next three years. To achieve his vision, he made two business expansion plans either to start product distribution to other retailers like an FMCG company or to go ahead with the business format franchising model. The investors needed a detailed planned within three days. But Kanwar had to decide should he expand geographically and start with franchise model or shall he establish his brand with product distribution, and then go for the franchise model, which plan would make him reach his vision by 2023? Which strategy would be efficient? He indeed wanted to go for the franchise model, but the question is when?

This case will help entrepreneurs to decide on services and retail industries to expand their business and explore available growth options. It offers a platform to talk about how often franchising used to fuel growth. Either you select to be a franchisee or independent business owner or provide franchising opportunities or start your distribution network, a detailed business plan is one of the most critical decision-making activities. Without adequate details, it can make your life's most expensive option. After students have worked on the case and the task questions, the students can analyze whether a company should grow through product distribution, franchise or both; appreciate the significance of a business plan and to recognize all aspects of a retail operation, including the marketing mix; carry out strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats analysis and can develop Internal and External Factor Evaluation Matrix (IFE AND EFE); and examine various franchise options available for business expansion in a developing econ.

Position in course – This case can be used in foundation course on retail marketing or even in strategic marketing in postgraduate management program, or the dilemma can be explained as a part of a marketing course for postgraduate, executive programs and management development programs.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 8 Marketing.

The learning objectives of this case study are to understand business-to-business (B2B) marketing in a logistics organization; apply go-to-market (GTM) strategy in the logistics industry; design B2B distribution strategy so as to enhance geographic penetration; and develop digital marketing strategies in the logistics industry.

V-Xpress is a leading B2B player in the express cargo category in the Indian logistics industry. In March 2017, Sachin Nair, Head of V-Xpress Marketing, was presenting three different GTM strategies to the CEO for the new Assured Timely Movement services. He wanted CEO views on each of them so that he can choose the best one. Sachin was also trying to find a solution to backhaul problem in eastern India. The resolution of this problem would have helped V-Xpress to become a truly pan-India B2B logistics company. Sachin was also revamping the digital marketing strategy as part of ambitious V-Xpress marketing strategy. These initiatives were taken as part of CEO’s vision for reaching annual revenue of INR 10bn by 2020. Sachin was thinking about various options so as to implement these changes with least investments.

This case study can be used in B2B marketing, marketing management and marketing strategy course of an MBA program.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS: 8: Marketing