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This paper aims to examine the impact of six possible foreign direct investment (FDI) spillover channels on the total factor productivity (TFP) of Chinese agricultural enterprises and investigate the moderating role of absorptive capacity (technological acumen) on TFP spillover effects.

Based on data from 118 agricultural and related Chinese industries, the authors employ a multithreshold regression model to empirically analyze the impact of FDI on the TFP of agricultural enterprises and the threshold effect of absorptive capacity. To overcome potential endogeneity problems, the authors select the FDI stock of corresponding USA industries and the industrial access policy index as instrumental variables and re-estimate the model.

The results suggest foreign-invested agricultural enterprises are more likely to benefit from FDI, while the “aggregate” FDI spillover effect is negative for domestic agricultural enterprises. However, once threshold effects are introduced, the authors find firms “close to” (“far from”) the technological frontier experience statistically significant positive (negative) spillover effects. Similar results are obtained for virtually all FDI spillover channels for firms in both upstream and downstream industries. FDI spillovers, when they occur, can be a two-edged sword – benefiting some firms at the expense of others.

The authors introduce six FDI spillover channels to examine the impact of FDI on the productivity of foreign-invested and domestic agricultural enterprises. Moreover, the authors analyze the threshold effect of firms' absorptive capacity. These findings can help formulate foreign investment introduction policies based on the characteristics of agricultural enterprises with different ownership structures. These results are also beneficial for agricultural enterprises to better exploit FDI spillover effects and improve their productivity.

The objective of this study is to explore the impact of a government-supported initiative for operational security, specifically the establishment of the national security emergency industry demonstration base, on the profitability of local publicly traded companies. Additionally, the study investigates the significance of firms' blockchain strategies and technologies within this framework.

Using the differences-in-differences (DID) approach, this study evaluates the impact of China's national security emergency industry demonstration bases (2015–2022) on the profitability of local firms. Data from the China Research Data Service (CNRDS) platform and investor Q&As informed our analysis of firms' blockchain strategy and technology, underpinned by detailed data collection and a robust DID model.

Emergency industry demonstration bases have notably boosted enterprise profitability in both return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). Companies adopting blockchain strategies and operational technology see a clear rise in profitability over non-blockchain peers. Additionally, the technical operation of blockchain presents a more pronounced advantage than at the strategic level.

We introduced a new perspective, emphasizing the enhancement of corporate operational safety and financial performance through the pathway of emergency industry policies, driven by the collaboration between government and businesses. Furthermore, we delved into the potential application value of blockchain strategies and technologies in enhancing operational security and the emergency industry.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on pollution emissions and how environmental regulation affects this relationship.

In the empirical research, the authors selected panel data for 30 provinces in China from 2005 to 2019 as samples. First, the authors used the instrumental variable method to verify the existence of the above hypotheses in China. Then, the authors analyzed the moderating effect of different types of environmental regulations on the environmental effects of FDI. Next, in further discussion, the authors analyzed the difference between the environmental effect and the moderating effect in different time periods and regions, respectively. Finally, the authors discussed whether the different intensities of environmental regulations lead to the transfer effect of FDI in choosing investment destinations.

The result shows that FDI can help reduce pollution emissions and create a “pollution halo” effect, which is enhanced by command-and-control regulation but suppressed by market-based incentives. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party has weakened the pollution halo effect of FDI, while the environmental effect of FDI in the eastern region is not significant, but in the middle and western regions, there is a significant pollution halo effect and a positive moderating effect of environmental regulations. Finally, further analysis reveals that FDI has a transfer effect under command-and-control environmental regulations.

First, the main purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between FDI and pollution emissions from the perspective of heterogeneous environmental regulation. Therefore, there is no detailed discussion on their effect mechanism of them. Second, limited by data, the authors adopt the single index to measure the stringency index of command-and-control and market-based incentive environmental regulations in China. The single index may not be able to fully reflect the intensity of regional environmental regulation, so the construction of a composite indicator is necessary. These shortcomings are the focus of the authors' future research.

Under the guidance of high-quality development, the conclusions above can provide reference for adjusting FDI policies and improving environmental regulation policies.

The innovations in this paper can be summarized as the following four dimensions: First, the authors use the instrumental variable (IV) method to address endogeneity in the relationship between FDI and pollution emission, which can further ensure the robustness of the research results and increases the credibility of the paper. Second, the authors distinguish between two types of environmental regulations to investigate their moderating effect on the environmental impact of FDI. Third, the authors consider the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of both the environmental effects of FDI and the moderating effect of regulation. Last, the authors analyze the spatial spillover of environmental regulation through the study of the transfer effect.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social responsibility performance’s current situation, influencing factors and mechanisms of multinational companies (MNCs) in China. The paper is based on the MNC’s social responsibility performance factors to find some relevant reasons for unsatisfied performance and on the multiple perspectives such as institutional distance and stakeholders, to provide feasible solutions for MNCs to assume civic responsibility and the high-quality development of the host country.

The study uses general literature review and empirical analysis to analyze the way and degree of various factors which are affecting the social responsibility of MNC in China, and supplements the deficiencies of previous studies.

The paper reveals the influencing factors and mechanisms of MNCs’ social responsibility in China through the regression results. In addition, based on Research Report on Corporate Social Responsibility of China (Huang et al., 2013/2019), the paper also summarizes the performance and dynamic changes of MNCs social responsibility in the Chinese market in the past decade.

The paper enriches research on the social responsibility of MNCs in the background of non-western countries, dynamically describes the performance of MNCs’ responsibilities in a 10-year span and solves the problem of inconsistent research conclusions caused by too long time span. The paper also creates the “local enterprise responsibility level” to quantify the development of the host country’s responsibility, and identifies the “responsibility demonstration effect” of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises.

Previous studies have reached inconsistent conclusions on foreign direct investment (FDI) technology spillovers and corporate innovation. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the technological spillover effects of FDI from the microperspective of firm linkages induced by geographic distance. Further analysis is conducted on the impact and mechanism of this spillover on the innovation quality of Chinese enterprises. The conclusions drawn from this paper can guide Chinese enterprises' foreign capital utilization and innovation strategy choices.

Using the data of China's A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2019, this paper explores the role of FDI technology spillover in enterprise innovation quality through a two-way fixed-effect model. The robustness of the results is proven by substituting variables, adding industry fixed effects and excluding high-profit groups, and further using the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method to alleviate the empirical endogeneity problem.

These findings indicate that FDI technology spillover based on geographic proximity has a positive impact on the innovation quality of Chinese enterprises. However, there are different impacts for different types of enterprises. FDI technology spillover has a positive impact on the innovation quality of non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), while it has no effect on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and large enterprises. The authors also find that the degree of financing constraints and R&D investment are important transmission mechanisms between FDI technology spillover and enterprise innovation quality.

This study ignores industry characteristics when considering foreign enterprises around Chinese enterprises. In fact, technology spillover effects differ across industries. When the authors matched microdata to regions, only the provincial level was considered. Therefore, there is still room for further research. In future research, the authors should consider industry characteristics and group foreign enterprises and Chinese enterprises in the same industry and in different industries to explore industry differences in technology spillover. In addition, when matching corporate data to regions, the authors can match to the city level and draw city-level conclusions.

This study is different from previous studies that focus on the quantity of enterprise innovation or innovation output. The authors focus on the role of technological spillovers in the quality of Chinese enterprise innovation, enriching research in the field of enterprise innovation quality. In addition, the current FDI technology spillover indicators are technically difficult to measure at the micro level. The authors draw inspiration from the theory of the geographical structure of financial supply and combine the creation methods of macro and micro indicators in existing articles in other fields. The authors ingeniously construct a new FDI technical spillover indicator. This indicator combines the commonly used regional FDI technology spillover with the geographic proximity of enterprises at the microlevel by constructing an interaction term between the two. This indicator not only alleviates the endogeneity problem to a certain extent but also has implications for future research in the field of FDI technology spillovers at the micro level.

(1) FDI technology spillovers are an effective way to improve the innovation quality of local enterprises, especially for non-SOEs and SMEs. Therefore, The authors suggest that in the context of dual circulation, the Chinese government should continue to open wider to the outside world and encourage foreign enterprises to invest in China. (2) In future development, managers of SOEs and large enterprises should create an innovation incentive mechanism. Moreover, they should change their vertical management structure and make full use of their policy advantages and budget advantages to increase innovation activities. In the process of acquiring technology spillovers, enterprises need to solve their own financing constraints.

First, this study solves a technical problem. It is technically difficult to measure the current FDI technical spillover indicators at the micro level. This study innovatively constructs a new FDI technology spillover indicator that combines regional FDI technology spillovers with the microperspective of the geographical proximity of enterprises. This approach not only alleviates certain endogeneity problems in the empirical evidence but also enriches relevant research in the field of technology spillover. In addition, this study focuses on the impact and mechanism of this spillover, which addresses the current research gap among previous studies that mainly focus on innovation quantity and ignore innovation quality.

This paper analyses how firm births and deaths are influenced by previous firm births and deaths in related and unrelated sectors. Competition and multiplier effects are used as the theoretical lens for this analysis.

This paper uses 2008–2016 Irish business demography data pertaining to 568 NACE 4-digit sectors within 20 NACE 1-digit industries across 34 Irish county and sub-county regions within 8 NUTS3 regions. A three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimation is used to analyse the impact of past firm deaths (births) on future firm births (deaths). The effect of relatedness on firm interrelationships is explicitly modelled and captured.

Findings indicate that the multiplier effect operates mostly through related sectors, while the competition effect operates mostly through unrelated sectors.

This paper's findings show that firm interrelationships are significantly influenced by the degree of relatedness between firms. The raw data used to calculate firm birth and death rates in this analysis are count data. Each new firm is measured the same as another regardless of differing features like size. Some research has shown that smaller firms have a greater propensity to create entrepreneurs (Parker, 2009). Thus, it is possible that the death of differently sized firms may contribute differently to multiplier effects where births induce further births. Future research could seek to examine this.

These findings have implications for policy initiatives concerned with increasing entrepreneurship. Some express concerns that public investment into entrepreneurship can lead to “crowding out” effects (Cumming and Johan, 2019), meaning that public investment into entrepreneurship could displace or reduce private investment into entrepreneurship (Audretsch and Fiedler, 2023; Zikou et al., 2017). This study’s findings indicate that using public investment to increase firm births could increase future firm births in related and unrelated sectors. However, more negative “crowding out” effects may also occur in unrelated sectors, meaning that public investment which stimulates firm births in a certain sector could induce firm deaths and crowd out entrepreneurship in unrelated sectors.

This paper is the first in the literature to explicitly account for the role of relatedness in firm interrelationships.

This paper aims to study the agent learning from expert demonstration data while incorporating reinforcement learning (RL), which enables the agent to break through the limitations of expert demonstration data and reduces the dimensionality of the agent’s exploration space to speed up the training convergence rate.

Firstly, the decay weight function is set in the objective function of the agent’s training to combine both types of methods, and both RL and imitation learning (IL) are considered to guide the agent's behavior when updating the policy. Second, this study designs a coupling utilization method between the demonstration trajectory and the training experience, so that samples from both aspects can be combined during the agent’s learning process, and the utilization rate of the data and the agent’s learning speed can be improved.

The method is superior to other algorithms in terms of convergence speed and decision stability, avoiding training from scratch for reward values, and breaking through the restrictions brought by demonstration data.

The agent can adapt to dynamic scenes through exploration and trial-and-error mechanisms based on the experience of demonstrating trajectories. The demonstration data set used in IL and the experience samples obtained in the process of RL are coupled and used to improve the data utilization efficiency and the generalization ability of the agent.

The purpose of this paper is to study the spillover effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on skilled–unskilled wage inequality in the Indian manufacturing industries.

The authors show theoretically with a model of spillover that if foreign firms (receiving FDI) have a negative spillover effect on domestic firms (not receiving FDI), then the level of capital and skilled workers in the domestic firms falls down. Consequently, the authors conduct an empirical analysis by using system GMM estimation technique on the firm-level data of the Indian organised manufacturing sector.

The authors show that wage inequality worsens when there is negative spillover effects like competition spillover or skill spillover effect of FDI in India.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to measure the various spillover effects of FDI on the wage inequality in the Indian manufacturing industries by using firm-level data.

This study investigates the relationship between leaders’ collectivist orientation and employees’ innovative behavior, as well as the mediating effects of employees’ collectivist orientation and servant leadership.

Based on a survey of 40 leaders and 219 employees in 12 technologically innovative enterprises in Jiangsu Province, China, a hierarchical linear modeling is used.

The results show that leaders’ collectivist orientation significantly positively affects employees’ innovative behavior. Moreover, leaders’ collectivist orientation significantly positively affects employees’ collectivist orientation/servant leadership, employees’ collectivist orientation/servant leadership significantly positively affects employees’ innovative behavior, and employees’ collectivist orientation/servant leadership partially mediates the relationship between leaders’ collectivist orientation and employees’ innovative behavior.

In response to the lack of research on the relationship between leadership cultural orientation and employees’ innovative behavior, this study sheds light on the effectiveness and mechanism of the influence of leaders’ collectivist orientation on employees’ innovative behavior, thus expanding and deepening the boundaries of theoretical research on leadership, culture and innovation management.

Green technology innovation is the organic combination of green development and innovation driven. It is also a powerful guarantee for shaping sustainable competitive advantages of manufacturing enterprises. To explore what kind of executive incentive contracts can truly stimulate green technology innovation, this study aims to distinguish the equity incentive and reputation incentive, upon their contractual elements characteristics and green governance effects, and then put forward suggestions for green technology innovation accordingly.

This study establishes an evaluation model and uses empirical methods to test. Concretely, using data from A-share listed manufacturing companies for the period from 2007 to 2020, this study compares and analyzes the impact of equity and reputation incentive on green technology innovation and explores the relationship between internal green business behavior and external green in depth.

This study finds that reputation incentives focus on long-term and non-utilitarian orientation, which can promote green technology innovation in enterprises. While equity incentives, linked to performance indicators, have a inhibitory effect on green technology innovation. Internal and external institutional factors such as energy conservation measures, the “three wastes” management system, and environmental recognition play the regulatory role in the relationship between incentive contracts and green technology innovation.

Those findings validate and expand the efficient contracting hypothesis and the rent extraction hypothesis from the perspective of green technology innovation and provide useful implications for the design of green governance systems in manufacturing enterprises.