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A growing body of literature analyzes eco-innovation in the wine industry, specifically focusing on the internal and external factors that contribute to sustainable innovation in wineries. The purpose of this study is to classify wineries according to their eco-innovation strategy and investigate variations in innovation groups concerning networking and socio-demographic characteristics.

The authors use an original firm-level survey conducted between June 2022 and January 2023 to study eco-innovation practices of 234 Hungarian winemakers using four groups of indicators: marketing, organizational, process and product innovations. The authors apply principal component analysis and cluster analysis to identify eco-innovation dimensions and group wineries. The authors also investigate the relationship between eco-innovation strategies, determinants and firm-specific characteristics.

The estimations identify two innovation modes: with Cluster 1 (characterized by innovative wineries) surpassing Cluster 2 (comprising less innovative wineries) in all aspects. Marketing and process innovations were more widespread than product and organizational innovations. The results confirm the importance of firm and manager characteristics, corporate organization and size, age and education of management influence innovation activity.

The cross-sectional nature of the survey provides a snapshot of the wine industry. To identify changing trends, it is beneficial to conduct follow-up research and ongoing monitoring for a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of eco-innovation over time. The study offers valuable information about the Hungarian wine sector, but generalization of results to other geographic areas or wine-producing regions should be careful. The unique characteristics of particular regions might have a different effect on the dynamics of eco-innovation. Comparative studies across different wine regions or countries may reveal regional variations in eco-innovation strategies and the impact of local contexts.

The study highlights the priority of human elements, such as the commitment of owners and managers to sustainability in driving force for innovation. The ability of businesses to absorb new knowledge and the exchange of information within organizations is crucial in promoting innovation. Considering the results of the survey, managers should proactively strive to improve knowledge transfer and information sharing within their organizations and establish cooperative alliances with universities, research institutes, suppliers, industry bodies and associations and global consultancy firms. Such knowledge-based cooperation can counterweight the innovative inertia of the micro and small enterprises representing the Hungarian wine sector.

To address the issue of “innovative inertia” faced by micro and small businesses in the wine sector, policymakers may implement focused supports, such as educational initiatives and grants, to augment their understanding and promote sustainable innovation. They should initiate intra- and inter-cluster connections and cooperations. Incentives, such as tax reduction or financial support, may stimulate wineries to introduce eco-innovation practices. Policymakers could also streamline the process of obtaining funding or grants for wineries interested in investing in cutting-edge solutions, such as renewable energy or advanced cultivation technologies to accelerate the adoption of sustainable practices.

This study contributes to the eco-innovation literature by providing insights into the drivers and practices of wineries in Hungary. The results emphasize the significance of networking, sharing of knowledge and firm/manager-specific characteristics in influencing eco-innovation in the wine industry.

This paper analyses and assesses the effect of firm-specific determinants (FSDs) on supply-chain performance (SCP) and export performance (EP). It examines SCP’s influence on EP and its mediating effect on the relationship between FSD and EP.

This paper develops a theoretical framework based on the resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic-capability theory to understand SCP’s role in the FSD-EP link while empirically validating using the Indian automobile industry segments (IAIS) data. The sample frame comprises all listed firms in IAIS between the financial year 2010-11 and 2021–22, with continuous data availability throughout the considered timeline. The paper employs factor analysis for dimension reduction, a panel-data-fixed-effect model to analyze the relationships, bootstrap to test the mediation effect and focus-group discussion for validating the results obtained through statistical analyses.

FSD directly influences SCP’s efficiency aspect and EP. Distribution efficiency and inventory efficiency characteristics of SCP directly impact EP and completely mediate the relationship between FSD and EP.

This study provides significant insights into how firms can increase EP by focusing on firm-specific and SCP-related factors. To improve EP, firms should concentrate on enhancing distribution and inventory efficiencies. Firms must focus on critical firm-level factors like age, size and raw-material import capability to increase their ability to solve SC-specific barriers and improve SCP, resulting in enhanced exports.

This study investigates the impacts of FSD on SCP and EP and examines the mediating effect of SCP on the relationship between FSD and EP. Such a mediating role of SCP has rarely been probed in the literature.

This study aims to examine the effects of payment methods used in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) conducted by UK companies spanning the period from 2007 to 2019.

The study used the estimated expected returns method to identify abnormal returns during the deal announcement period, applying event study analysis with both univariate and multivariate regression models to detect cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement timeframe.

The results show a short-term positive return increase for acquiring firms, controlling for deal-specific characteristics like target firm location and payment methods. The authors observed a preference for cash financing across domestic and cross-border transactions. Multivariate analysis revealed insignificance between payment methods and deal characteristics like cross-border acquisitions and diversification.

The study’s focus on publicly traded firms in the UK and the absence of a comparative analysis across different regions and markets limits the sample size and may impact the generalizability of findings.

The study proposes three practical implications. Firstly, firms should tailor payment methods to each transaction, aligning with strategic goals to optimize value and mitigate risks. Secondly, decision-makers must prioritize comprehensive due diligence and strategic alignment throughout M&A processes to enhance success and maximize synergies. Finally, analysing broader strategic contexts and regulatory landscapes when structuring transactions enables goal attainment, such as market expansion or value creation.

The study’s findings can promote transparency and accountability among corporate decision-makers in M&A transactions. Stakeholders can advocate for transparent decision-making processes, enhancing trust in corporate governance.

This study provides valuable insights into the impact of payment methods on shareholder value in M&A transactions involving UK companies, informing strategic decision-making and contributing to the understanding of corporate finance dynamics.

The paper investigates the determinants of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) bias of the wage return to graduate education for high-school workers in Portugal.

The study uses matched employer-employee data for Portugal, over the 2002–2012 period, to estimate a wage-schooling model that controls not only for individual observed characteristics, firm observed characteristics and year fixed effects, but also for three high-dimensional vectors of fixed effects – one for employees, one for employers and one for job titles.

The main results are the following. First, disregarding individual fixed effects is highly problematic, accounting for 48.5% of the OLS bias. Second, disregarding firm fixed effects is also problematic, accounting for 12.3% of the OLS bias.

The implication for the studies in the labor-supply literature that estimate, by means of instrumental variables, the wage returns to in-school work or to on-the-job schooling is that an instrument dealing with employee’s unobserved ability only may fail to meet the exclusion restriction.

Take the typical instrument based on a policy reform that changes the compulsory schooling level in the population. This instrument may well be argued to be correlated with the education of the employee and uncorrelated with the unobserved ability of the employee, but unfortunately it cannot be seen as orthogonal to the unobserved ability of the employer because of its correlation with the (unobserved) education of the manager. This is a simple corollary of the fact that the employee and the manager belong, in general, to the same population.

Individuals invest a considerable amount of resources in education, which is seen to have positive effects on several dimensions of individual life. Yet, the estimation of these effects is still surrounded by technical difficulties.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that uses the Gelbach decomposition to investigate the determinants of the OLS bias of the wage return to graduate education for high-school workers.

We examine how superstition shapes corporate tax avoidance and do so by taking a risk perspective and focusing on the zodiac-year belief prevalent in China.

We adopt a difference-in-differences research design to compare the degree of corporate tax avoidance in the CEOs’ zodiac year with that in the adjacent years. We do propensity-score matching to form a sample of Chinese listed firms for the regression analysis.

We find causal evidence that firms exhibit a greater magnitude of tax avoidance in the CEOs’ zodiac years, a result attributable to relatively weak tax enforcement in the Chinese context. We also find that the zodiac-year effect on corporate tax avoidance is more pronounced for firms with tight financial constraints, firms with high business risk, firms headquartered in regions with a high degree of superstition and non-state-owned firms.

This study is the first to show that superstition is a determinant factor of tax avoidance and contributes to the tax literature by shedding light on the behavioral risk factors that shape corporate tax avoidance. We take the perspective of CEOs’ risk appetite to analyze how tax avoidance is influenced by the CEOs’ trade-off between the costs and benefits of avoiding taxes. Our results suggest that, when CEOs are more risk-averse, they attach more importance to financial risk than the risk of reputational losses and litigation associated with corporate tax avoidance. The findings imply that tax avoidance can be curbed by increasing (or decreasing) the tax (financial) risk confronting the CEOs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how chair-chief executive officer (CEO) generational difference is related to debt financing.

This paper adopts the pooled ordinary least squares and system generalized method of moments estimation procedures to analyze listed firms in Malaysia from 2013 to 2017.

The results reveal that chair-CEO generational difference is negatively associated with leverage. The evidence suggests that substantial age gaps between the chair and CEO precipitate cognitive conflicts, which lead to better monitoring and control. This results in better governance and less information asymmetry, causing firms to depend less on debt as a board monitoring mechanism. The findings provide support to the theory posited in this paper on the substitutability of chair-CEO generational difference and debt financing.

This is the first attempt to investigate the substitutability of chair-CEO generational difference and debt financing.

Due to the constantly increasing competitiveness along with the complexity of knowledge, firms perceive collaboration as a key strategy that preserves firms' radical innovation performance. In this context, this paper aims to examine how firms’ partners’ diversity in open innovation activities influences the development of radical innovations, critical for social development. In particular, this study analyzes how the functional and geographical breadth of the firm’s collaboration portfolio affects its radical innovation performance. Furthermore, it also explores the role of firm size as a moderator in the relationships proposed.

This research employs panel data analysis, using a sample of 4,677 Spanish firms, with data sourced from the PITEC database.

The results of this study show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the functional and the geographical breadth of collaborations and the firms’ radical innovation performance. Moreover, this study finds partial support for the moderating role of firm size, in the sense that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large firms vary in their optimal number of diversity of partners.

This research provides a better understanding on how partners’ functional and geographical diversity, along with organizational characteristics such as firm size, affect how firms benefit from collaboration for innovation. This study shows that both SMEs and large firms experience diminishing returns when their collaboration networks become overly diverse in pursuit of radical innovation, due to increased costs. However, in SMEs, the turning point occurs at a later stage, consistent with the idea that small firms need broader functional networks to access complementary and novel resources they usually lack.

The role played by corporate governance mechanisms on corporate deleveraging policies has not been clarified. Empirical evidence is confined to developed economies, even with conflicting and inconclusive results. This paper aims to examine the role of corporate governance mechanisms, such as ownership structure, board composition and CEO dominance, in explaining corporate deleveraging policies.

Using a sample of listed Pakistani firms between 2010 and 2022, this study resorts to binary response models to examine the effects of governance mechanisms on firms’ decision to go debt-free.

A greater ownership concentration, institutional ownership and family ownership increase the propensity for zero leverage. Board gender diversity decreases the propensity for deleveraging policies, which seems to indicate that the presence of females reinforces the monitoring function of the board. Finally, lower managerial ownership or CEO dominance decreases the propensity toward zero leverage (interest convergence hypothesis), but higher managerial ownership or CEO dominance increases the propensity toward zero leverage (managerial entrenchment hypothesis).

Risk-averse managers who prefer to control a firm using little or no debt will find it easier to implement these financing policies in firms with greater ownership concentration and where institutional holders have a substantial stake. For shareholders, this study suggests that investing in firms with females on board reduces the risk of corporate deleveraging policies being adopted for entrenched reasons.

The presence of females on board seems to decrease the propensity of managers to adopt opportunistic actions and may also contribute to enhancing human welfare and society in developing countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study considering the effect of board diversity on zero leverage. Another singularity is that this study exhibits a nonlinear relationship between managerial ownership and corporate deleveraging policy.

This paper aims to evaluate the effect of commitment misperception on channel conflict. It highlights the importance of trust and transaction-specific investments for business marketing strategies.

This paper develops a concept framework to understand how the direction (overestimated vs underestimated) and extent of commitment misperception influence channel conflict. The model is tested using dyadic data from 212 distributors and manufacturers across several industries in China.

The results show that the direction of commitment misperception affects trust, transaction-specific investments and channel conflict. Overestimated commitment induces positive illusion and enhances trust and transaction-specific investments and reduces channel conflict, whereas underestimated commitment induces negative illusion and reduces trust and transaction-specific investments and enhances channel conflict. Trust and transaction-specific investments mediate the impact of the direction of commitment misperception on channel conflict. The extent of commitment misperception plays the moderating influence on the direction of commitment misperception.

This study reveals the mechanisms and boundary conditions by exploring the mediating influence of trust and transaction-specific investments and the moderating effects of the extent of commitment misperception.

This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.