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This paper aims to demonstrate that state shareholders are confronted with contradictory logics leading to institutional contradictions that activist shareholders can exploit. The competing logics of the state as shareholder and their impact on corporate governance and shareholder activism offer fertile grounds for research advances in Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs).

Through an extensive literature review of state ownership, institutional contradictions and shareholder activism, this paper analyzes two case studies involving the French State as shareholder.

In the French context, these two cases illustrate how institutional contradictions result in opportunities for shareholder activism. By focusing on the institutional contradictions of the state shareholder, this investigation suggests a need for experimental research to observe how shareholder activists adapt to each institutional change in CMEs. This experimentation can help policymakers to avoid creating additional conditions that shareholder activists can exploit.

This focuses only on France and its state shareholdings. To generalize results, studies of other CMEs and state shareholders are needed.

Policymakers should consider all legislative proposals for their potential to deviate from corporate governance practice by experimenting with them in a laboratory setting. Shareholder activists can compare state shareholders’ actions against the state’s legislation to emphasize institutional contradictions that counter minority shareholders’ rights.

This research is the first to analyze how the state as shareholder can exploit its competing logics to resist against shareholder activism and support management or to become itself a shareholder activist.

This paper aims to examine the link between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication efforts of companies and their ability to obtain public procurement contracts.

The authors are exploiting a database with the number of public procurement contracts won by SBF 120 companies in France and a constructed CSR index over the period of 2007–2015. The authors provide estimates of the amount of public contracts won by those companies.

The results suggest a striking influence of CSR communication on the ability of firms to win contracts.

This study focused on the case of the SBF 120 companies under the French regulatory system and European directives, which are different from the obligations in North American countries. Second, our constructed CSR index may be too simplistic in nature, and its application is limited only to the French context. Third, we do not have any evidence about the efficiency of well-ranked firms in our study. CSR reporting is still considered to be a form of communication, even if formal, that can contain information that does not especially reflect reality, as the scandals of several companies have shown in recent years (e.g. Volkswagen, Eiffage, Enron).

Companies should consider Business-to-Government (B-to-G) market when investing in CSR actions.

This is one of the first empirical studies measuring the impact of CSR on the ability of companies to win public contracts.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the direction of the causal relationship between dividend policy (DP) and earnings management (EM).

This research utilizes the panel data analysis to investigate the causal relationship between EM and DP. It provides empirical insights based on a sample of 280 French nonfinancial companies listed on the CAC All-Tradable index during the period of 2008–2015. The study initiates with a Granger causality examination on the unbalanced panel data and employs a dynamic panel approach with the generalized method of moments (GMM). It further estimates the empirical models simultaneously using the three-stage least squares (3SLS) method and the iterative triple least squares (iterative 3SLS) method.

The estimation of our various empirical models confirms the presence of a bidirectional causal relationship between DP and EM.

Our study highlights the prevalence of EM in the French context, particularly within DP. It underscores the need for regulatory bodies, the Ministry of Finance, external auditors and stock exchange organizers to prioritize governance mechanisms for improving the quality of financial information disclosed by companies.

This research is, to the best of our knowledge, the first is to extensively investigate the reciprocal causal relationship between DP and EM in France. Previous studies have not placed a significant emphasis on exploring this bidirectional link between these two variables.

The purpose of this study is to explore at what stage of a company’s life cycle the theory of market timing has explained debt. Drawing on a unified conceptual framework of market timing theory, the authors scrutinize the impact of life cycle and ownership structure on the market condition.

Based on a sample of 24 Tunisian companies listed on the stock exchange and 100 French firms listed on the CAC All-Tradable on a 10-year period, this paper grounded the market timing theory and attempted to clear the relation between ownership structure, life cycle of the firm and market timing theory by statistical analysis.

The findings of panel data modeling indicate that when the life cycle was used as an explanatory variable, it was found that the variable reflecting the market timing is not significant in either context; it means that no significant support is found in the theory of market timing in both countries. Whereas when the life cycle was used as a dummy variable, it was found that the life cycle has an impact on debt only in the Tunisian context.

This study has several important implications for researchers and practitioners. The findings reported here clarify the strength of the impact of life cycle on the market timing, when it explains the debt in the two contexts and the impact of ownership structure such as the managerial ownership and concentration of capital on debt.

This study contributes to examine the theory of debt in different phases of life cycle. Focused on the case of Tunisian and French firms, this study is unique and valuable.

Fama–French model (FFM) has been successful in helping to predict the financial markets, but investors have been interested in creating more sophisticated models to better predict the performance of the stock market. The objective of the extended version is to create a more robust econometric model to better predict the performance of the Mexican Stock Market.

The study divides the Mexican Stock Market into six different portfolios. The criteria to build those portfolios are the same one used in Fama–French (1992). The study comprises 78 stocks listed in the Mexican Stock Market that are analyzed monthly during 1997–2018. The study analyzes the period before and after the 2008–2009 financial crisis to identify whether there are important changes. The estimation applies the traditional and an extended version of the FFM that include macroeconomic variables such as country risk, economic activity, inflation rate, and exchange rate and some financial variables recommended in the literature.

Results indicate that classic FFM variables are statistically significant in most cases, but relevant macroeconomic variables such as the interest rate, exchange rate and country risk stand out for being weakly relevant in most of the portfolios. However, it is noticed that some of these macroeconomic variables became relevant for different portfolios only after the 2008–2009 crisis, especially in portfolios which include small market capitalization firms.

The study includes the stocks listed in the Mexican Stock Market. One limitation is the small number of stocks available, which reduces the possibility of creating well diversified portfolios. This study includes 78 stocks. The stocks removed from the sample are from firms that were not listed during six consecutive months or whose market capitalization did not change in the same period. Outlier data were removed from the sample to capture in better way the general performance of the stock market.

The objective of the extended version is to create a more robust econometric model than the traditional model. It is expected that such estimations can be helpful to investors to make better decisions when they try to predict performance in the stock market.

An extended version of the FFM can be helpful to investors to make better decisions when they try to predict performance in the stock market.

To the best of our knowledge there are no more studies in the literature of the Mexican financial market that apply the same methodology.

Investors label high (low) book-to-market (B/M) firms as value (growth) companies. The conventional wisdom supports that growth stocks grow faster than the value ones, creating greater shareholder value. The Purpose of this paper is to analyze how stocks of growth and value companies create value for their shareholders in Brazil, compared to the USA market. For this, the authors analyze three dimensions of return.

First, the authors perform portfolios to analyze the growth rates of shareholders’ return. Then, the authors perform regressions to study the explanatory power of the B/M in growth. The data come from Thomson Reuters Eikon database and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. The authors select all non-financial firms with available data from 1997 to 2017.

The profitability of growth firms is higher than the value ones, in almost every year after the portfolios’ formation, with little variation. Contrary to the findings for the US market, growth companies in Brazil show higher dividend growth than value companies.

It is possible that the database does not contain complete and entirely reliable accounting data, which may partially affect the results.

The findings contradict those exposed in the USA. The implications are the inverse of the US study: the duration-based explanation could be a vital factor for the value premium in the Brazilian stock market. Also, the findings support the standard valuation techniques and help the growth rates estimation in the valuation process (top-down approach).

This study is the first to compare the profitability and dividend growth of growth/value stocks in the Brazilian market. Overall, growth stocks have considerable profitability, and dividend growth compared to value stocks.