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The paper investigates the market performance of strategic acquisitions for growth in the fifth and sixth merger waves and outlines the major determinants that affect the performance of acquiring companies in these most complex and most challenging corporate transactions.

To perform the quantitative analysis a unique data sample was built out of acquisitions performed in the 5th and 6th merger waves with an only single purpose – strategic growth. Their performance was first analyzed using the method of market-based event study. In addition, the impact of several non-accounting determinants identified through a thorough literature review was tested using univariate/multivariate regression analysis.

The new findings of the study state that strategic acquisitions for growth created more value for acquiring companies if they were completed internationally and involved an acquisition of a middle-sized company. Moreover, the acquisition of targets in the less related industries (2-SIC) led to stronger performance of acquirers, especially in the international settings.

The study suggests additional directions for future research. The future analysis can investigate the post-merger acquisition performance of strategic acquirers and can focus on additional financial (accounting) determinants in the evaluation of performance. This perspective can not only address the limitations imposed by the assumption of efficient capital markets but also provide additional insights.

The results of current study have important implications for executives performing M&A for growth. They show that the market reaction to M&A announcement can be at least partially anticipated and help managers to plan their strategic moves based on a defined set of variables.

The study contributes to the sustainable, value-creating growth dynamics and encourages Executives to “lead for value.”

(1) In contrast to the existing studies that do not differentiate between the transaction rationale in their analysis, this paper focuses explicitly only on those acquisitions that have strategic growth as their primary objective and responses therefore, to the problem stated by Halpern (1983). This approach helps to mitigate the distortion of results and make a reliable assessment of the strategic move. (2) The results of quantitative analysis also outline that acquisition of mid-sized targets and larger degree of diversification (2-SIC, international focus) code were associated with higher value creation.

本文旨在研究於第五和第六波的併購浪潮中為增長而作出的策略性收購的市場表現;本文亦概述在這些極其複雜的和極具挑戰性的公司交易中影響作收購公司的表現的主要因素.

為了能進行定量分析,研究人員收集在第五及第六波的併購浪潮中以策略性增長為唯一目的的收購個案、建立一個獨特的數據樣本。研究人員首先以基於市場的事件研究法分析那些進行了收購的公司的表現,並以單變量/多變項迴歸分析法去試驗那幾個透過深入的文獻研究而找到的非會計的決定因素的影響.

研究得出的新發現是、如果以增長為目的的策略性收購是於國際間完成及涉及收購中型公司的話,則這收購行動會給進行收購的公司帶來更多價值。而且、如果收購目標的產業與作收購公司的不太相關的話 (2-標準產業分類),收購行動會為進行收購的公司帶來更強的表現、特別是在國際環境下進行這收購行動.

(1) 有別於現時其它於其分析中不區分交易理由的研究，本文明確地表示只集中探討那些以帶來策略性增長為主要目標的收購；因此、本研究對 (哈爾彭，1983年)(Halpern, 1983) 陳述的問題作出了回應。本研究的理念有助於減輕我們對收購結果的曲解，從而讓我們對策略性行動能作出可靠的評估. (2) 定量分析的結果、亦概述了以中型公司為目標的收購及更大程度的多樣化 (2－標準產業分類、以國際為焦點) 代碼與創造更大價值是有關聯的。

本研究的結果對學術界及管理人員均具吸引力，亦為策略規劃提供一個額外的工具.

本研究可帶來可持續的及可創造價值的增長動力，又可鼓勵行政主管採用以價值為本的領導方針.

This study aims to examine the impact of controversial governance practices on media coverage under a specific context. Based on the attribution theory, this study develops a theoretical framework to explore how antecedent factors can influence attribution process under a particular cultural context.

This paper presents a behavioral view of the media and corporate governance to demonstrate how media attributes different reasons for the same controversial governance practice in Chinese-specific context. Using 1,198 non-state-owned listed company observations in China as the study sample, cross-section data are used to build a multiple linear regression mode to test hypotheses.

The analysis indicates that the media imposes fewer penalties on founder-CEO firms than on non-founder-CEO firms for engaging in controversial governance practices, such as CEO compensation. CEO tenure negatively moderates the effect of CEO compensation on negative media coverage in non-founder-CEO firms. The positive media bias evidence for founder-CEO firms exists only when the firm is better performed.

This study’s contribution to the governance literature starts with its logical reasoning of basic assumptions in the agency theory, and that media penalty will arise when managers impose actions that against interests of shareholders or other stakeholders. This study shows that the rule is not always true. The findings also bridge the connection of governance literature and reputation literature to better explain how media can act as a social arbitration role.

This study provides insights into how belief and information of reputational evaluators affect attribution consequences on controversial governance practices. Moreover, this study looks beyond the internal elements and focuses on China’s traditional cultural context as well. Specifically, the authors concentrate on the attribution process by showing the importance of evaluators’ framing tendency with regard to controversial practices. The results extend the knowledge about how conformity makes media coverage shows a bias effect on interactions during the evaluation process.

This study aims to explore gender performance in entrepreneurial pitching. Understanding pitching as a social practice, the authors argue that pitch content and body gestures contain gender-based norms and practices. The authors focus on early-stage ventures and the hegemonic masculinities and femininities that are performed in entrepreneurial pitches. The main research question is as follows: How is gender performed in entrepreneurial pitching?

The authors carried out the study with the post-structuralist feminist approach. The authors collected and analyzed nine online pitches with the reflexive thematic method to depict hegemonic masculinities and femininities performed at the pitch.

The authors found that heroic and breadwinner masculinities are dominant in pitching. Both male and female founders perform hegemonic masculinities. Entrepreneurs are expected to be assertive but empathetic people. Finally, there are connections between what entrepreneurs do and what investors ask, indicating the iteration of gender performance and expectations.

While the online setting helps the authors to collect data during the pandemic, it limits the observation of the place, space and interactions between the judges/investors and the entrepreneurs. As a result, the linguistic and gesture communication of the investors in the pitch was not discussed in full-length in this paper. Also, as the authors observed, people would come to the pitch knowing what they should perform and how they should interact. Therefore, the preparation of the pitch as a study context could provide rich details on how gender norms and stereotypes influence people's interactions and their entrepreneurial identity. Lastly, the study has a methodological limitation. The authors did not include aspects of space in the analysis. It is mainly due to the variety of settings that the pitching sessions that the data set had.

For social practices and policies, the results indicate barriers to finance for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are rewarded when they perform entrepreneurial hegemonic masculinities with a touch of emphasized femininities. Eventually, if women entrepreneurs do not perform correctly as investors expect them to, they will face barriers to acquiring finance. It is important to acknowledge how certain gendered biases might be (re)constructed and (re)produced through entrepreneurial activities, in which pitching is one of them.

Practitioners could utilize research findings to understand how gender stereotypes exist not only on the pitch stage but also before and after the pitch, such as the choice of business idea and pitch training. In other words, it is necessary to create a more enabling environment for women entrepreneurs, such as customizing the accelerator program so that all business ideas receive relevant support from experts. On a macro level, the study has shown that seemingly gender-equal societies do not practically translate into higher participation of women in entrepreneurship.

For theoretical contributions, the study enhances the discussion that entrepreneurship is gendered; women and men entrepreneurs need to perform certain hegemonic traits to be legitimated as founders. The authors also address various pitching practices that shape pitch performance by including both textual and semiotic data in the study. This study provides social implications on the awareness of gendered norms and the design of entrepreneurial pitching.

This paper investigates the stock market reaction to three different events related to the UEFA Champions League – the announcements of draws, odds and match results. The aim of the paper is to test whether these events are informative for stock market operators, i.e. whether they produce abnormal returns.

Applying the event study methodology, the authors investigate the stock market reaction before (at two events: the draw date and on the release of betting odds) and after the matches of 11 listed soccer teams in the period 2003–2019. The authors also conduct OLS regression analyses in order to disentangle the impact of firm specific variables and match characteristics on cumulative abnormal returns.

This paper finds that match outcomes affect the stock market performance of listed teams, while the announcements of draws and odds do not. More specifically, the market does not consider match outcomes involving wins and ties as informative events, while it penalizes losing teams. Moreover, investor reactions to events related to the UCL competition depend more on match characteristics than on company specific variables.

The study enriches the ongoing debate about the impact of soccer team results on stock market performance in several ways: using the widest time span ever adopted in this area; focusing on UCL, which is the most important soccer competition played by private clubs; disentangling for the first time the effects of draws, odds release and sporting outcome on stock returns of listed soccer clubs.

The behavioral finance literature focuses on the effect of investor sentiment on the fundamental values of individual stocks. This study constructs a firm-level investor sentiment indicator based on transaction and price data for individual firms and shows that credit rating changes affect investor sentiment. We find the following empirical results. First, the response of investor sentiment to upgrades (downgrades) is significantly positive (negative). Second, the greater the magnitude of the downgrade is, the more negative the investor sentiment reaction is, although we do not find a similar result for upgrades. Third, cumulative abnormal returns around the event day are affected by cumulative abnormal sentiment before that day. This result suggests that the market reaction is affected by a combination of credit rating downgrades and investor sentiment.

Utilising a database that distinctly classifies firm-level ESG (environmental, social and governance) news sentiment as positive or negative, the authors examine the information flow between the two types of ESG news sentiment and stock returns for 20 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange between 2015 and 2021.

The authors use Shannonian transfer entropy to examine whether information significantly flows from ESG news sentiment to stock returns and a modified event study analysis to establish how stock prices react to changes in the two types of ESG sentiment.

Using Shannonian transfer entropy, the authors find that for the majority of the companies studied, information flows from the positive ESG news sentiment to stock returns while only a minority of the companies exhibit significant information flow from negative ESG news sentiment to returns. Furthermore, the study’s findings show significantly positive (negative) abnormal returns on the event date and beyond for both upgrades and downgrades in positive ESG news sentiment.

This study is among the first in an African context to investigate the impact of ESG news sentiment on stock market returns at high frequencies.

Recent research finds that the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) information, especially when CSR is not related to core business activities (immaterial CSR issues), on investment decisions will be eliminated when it is explicitly assessed. As CSR expectations from investors appear to be different across specific cultures and countries (Van der Laan Smith et al., 2010), we aim to investigate (1) the effect of CSR materiality on investors' willingness to invest and (2) how the explicit assessment of CSR information moderates the effect of explicit assessment and CSR materiality on investment judgment by professional investors in Thailand.

A 2 × 2 between-subject experiment was conducted based on 136 professional investors.

Overall, the results suggest that an investor's willingness to invest is greater when CSR is material than when CSR is immaterial. In addition, the assessment of willingness to invest in a firm's stock is not affected by the presence or absence of explicit assessment of the material CSR. However, the results suggest that when CSR issues are immaterial, explicit assessment significantly removes the effect of CSR performance on the investor's investment judgment. Consistent with the findings from Guiral et al. (2019), professional investors seem to process CSR information in a similar way as nonprofessional investors.

The findings suggest that material CSR information has a significant impact on the investment decisions of professional investors. This is consistent with the materiality guidance provided by the Sustainability Accounting Standard Board (SASB) as helpful in improving the value of CSR information for investors. These results should be of interest to both business people and regulators because, despite differences in the cultural and audit environment, the results confirm that professional investors in Thailand use CSR information in an experimental setting, thereby providing some evidence of value creation from CSR activities and nonfinancial disclosures.

While recent experimental research has primarily examined how nonprofessional investors evaluate CSR information in Western countries, this study extends the literature by focusing on professional investors in emerging capital markets and how they use CSR information in their investment decisions (Coram et al., 2009). The study also addresses the call for research on differences in CSR reporting and practices in different cultures and countries (Van der Laan Smith et al., 2010; Coram et al., 2009) to provide insights into how professional investors in Thailand use CSR information to formulate investment judgments.

Whilst the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance has been well documented, CSR has rarely been studied from the perspective of corporate poverty alleviation. This study aims to test whether participation in targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) affects firms' market value and to explore how the magnitudes of market value vary in different CSR environments.

Based on recent Chinese TPA initiatives and on 108 TPA announcements of Chinese-listed firms from 2016 to 2020, this study adopts an event study method to investigate the impact of firm's TPA announcements on the firm's market value. Then, the authors construct a cross-sectional regression to analyse different CSR factors that may affect market reactions.

The results demonstrate that TPA announcements can increase a firm's overall market value. Additionally, the results show that TPA way and firm ownership significantly moderate the market reaction, namely the positive reaction is more significant when the TPA announcements involve charity poverty alleviation rather than industrial poverty alleviation and for privately owned firms rather than state-owned firms.

The empirical results help TPA practitioners obtain a nuanced understanding of whether and when to participate in poverty alleviation is worthwhile. This study also provides a reference for poverty alleviation work in countries with similar backgrounds.

This study not only provides empirical evidence for the consequences of poverty alleviation behaviour of firms in developing countries, but also complements the field of CSR research in developed countries.