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Because corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports in China are surging in quantity but are low in quality, impression management in CSR reports has become a hot research topic in recent years. This paper aims to research whether and how media coverage affects CSR report impression management and whether CSR report disclosure attributes have different regulating effects.

Based on the effective supervision hypothesis and the market pressure hypothesis, this study uses Heckman’s two-stage regression model to examine the effect of media coverage on CSR report impression management from the perspective of managers’ self-interest.

The results support the market pressure hypothesis, which suggest that firms with higher levels of media coverage are more likely to engage in CSR report impression management, and this effect is especially significant in firms with a higher proportion of institutional investor shareholding and more analysts tracking. Further cross-sectional group studies show that market pressure is only present in firms whose CSR reports are subject to mandatory disclosure without third-party assurance or policy-oriented media attention.

This paper does not consider the attention of other forms of media. The findings of this paper has policy implications for a better understanding of the motivation underlying impression management in CSR reports, encouraging voluntary disclosure and assurance to relieve the market pressure from media coverage.

From the perspective impression management of social responsibility report, further understanding the governance role of media coverage. A large number of previous literatures have shown that media coverage has a good supervisory role, but these studies mainly focus on the financial level of enterprises. Media coverage seems to be a “double-edged sword”. While it plays a supervisory role and inhibits earnings management or irregularities at the financial level, it also brings enormous market pressure to the enterprises, which is reflected in the increase of impression management behavior of social responsibility reports at the non-financial level, and this pressure is probably caused by the financial level.

Voluntary disclosure and verification of social responsibility reports, as an important mechanism to improve the quality of social responsibility reports, supports the correctness, scientificity and rationality of the current policies of the SFC and the exchange on encouraging voluntary disclosure and verification. In the future, changing regulatory thinking, encouraging voluntary disclosure of social responsibility reports and introducing more independent and authoritative certification agencies should be the direction and focus of policy-making, so that social responsibility reports can play a better role in helping investors make decisions.

From the perspective of impression management of CSR reports, this paper provides evidence regarding the effect of media coverage and its transmission mechanisms. This paper uses China's unique institutional environments to study the impact of different types of media coverage on impression management in CSR reports in emerging market economy. Different from the institutional environment of developed countries such as the USA, mandatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure coexist in CSR reporting in China. The authors provide critical evidence to show that third-party assurance and voluntary disclosure improves the quality of CSR reports.

This paper investigates the influence of team characteristics and organization context factors on new product quality and compares these influences on Taiwanese (Collectivists) and American (Individualist) teams. For the Taiwanese teams, new product quality was positively affected by the capability of information integration and quality orientation of the firm, but was negatively influenced by speed-to-market pressure and level of product innovativeness. Functional and tenure diversity had no effect on new product quality. The capability of information integration in a team tended to reduce the negative effect of speed-to-market pressure on new product quality. For American teams, new product quality was positively affected by functional diversity, capability of information integration in the team, and quality orientation of the firm, but negatively influenced by supplier involvement. Customer involvement did increase the positive effect of the capability of information integration on new product quality.

The rising food demand around the globe goes hand in hand with the rapid development of the agriculture industry. However, this development at the same time has detrimental effects on the natural environment. Hence, promoting ecological strategies in agriculture is essential for environmental sustainability. This study aims to investigate the institutional determinants of ecological strategies adopted by agricultural exporting firms and how these strategies enhance the firms' competitive advantage and financial performance.

A survey was conducted to collect data from 218 managers of agricultural exporting companies in Vietnam, which is a major exporter of agricultural products. The data were analyzed using different techniques including partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results reveal that market pressure, regulatory pressure and competitive pressure motivate the adoption of ecological strategies among the surveyed agricultural exporting firms. Furthermore, such strategies help these firms obtain competitive advantage, which in turn increases their export financial performance. In addition, larger firms, compared to smaller firms, are more likely to adopt ecological strategies.

This study contributes to the literature by developing and validating a unique model examining the institutional pressures of ecological strategies and their outcomes in export markets. The study extends current knowledge about ecological exporting strategies for agricultural products, and its findings have several managerial and policy implications for promoting these strategies among agricultural exporting firms in emerging countries like Vietnam.

This study aims to investigate whether and how earnings guidance affects corporate innovation.

Exploiting the setting of China, where the Shenzhen Stock Exchange has required all public firms listed on its ChiNext board to issue earnings guidance since 2012, this study uses a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology to examine the effect of earnings guidance on corporate innovation and further conducts cross-sectional analyzes from the information risk and monitoring demand perspectives. Moreover, the authors conduct path analysis to verify the possible channels through which corporate innovation is impeded by market pressure or improved through increased corporate transparency.

This study documents a positive relationship between earnings guidance and corporate innovation, as measured by the number of invention patents, indicating that the “corporate governance” hypothesis dominates in China. Cross-sectional analyzes show that this positive effect is more pronounced for firms subject to greater information risk and monitoring demand. Finally, the path analysis further confirms that earnings guidance improves innovation by increasing corporate transparency.

First, this study captures the bright side of mandatory earnings guidance and suggests that increasing the disclosure frequency can yield benefits for firms. Second, the findings imply that regulations, regardless of what they refer to, should be based on a country’s specific context.

First, this study provides evidence supporting the “corporate governance” argument based on the context of China and, thus contributes to the debate on earnings guidance. Second, this study enriches the literature on the economic consequences of earnings guidance. Third, the study extends research on the determinants of corporate innovation.

While the value of human capital for technological innovation is well acknowledged, literature on the role of vocational training in corporate innovation is notably scarce. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of government support for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) competencies on Korean firms’ innovation. The author investigates SMEs’ patent applications (supported by the government to varying degrees) while accounting for firms’ market position, ownership and management structure, as well as prior changes in firms’ technologies, products, processes and other characteristics. Alternative hypotheses about management motivation – the “lazy manager”, “career concerns” and “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses – are also evaluated.

Censored and count data analysis methods are used on a panel of 595 Korean firms covering 2005–2015 from the Korean Human Capital Corporate Survey, Intellectual Property Office and National Investment Commission. A regression discontinuity estimator accounts for potential endogeneity because of support for vocational training at firms.

Firms receiving training support are more innovative than firms without support, but latent effects may play a role. The regression-discontinuity model suggests that firms that succeeded only marginally in obtaining support had higher innovative output than non-recipients near the eligibility threshold.

The findings of this study establish that government support had the intended effect on SMEs’ technological capacity. This cannot be discounted as a simple crowding-out effect. The author also establishes that management–ownership separation within firms was conducive to innovation, that product competition had an inverse U-shaped effect and that management–ownership separation had a substitutable relationship with competition in overcoming managers’ effort avoidance. The findings support the “lazy manager” hypothesis over the “career concerns” and the “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses.

This paper aims to discuss whether the attention of investors to abnormalities can serve as a mechanism for the influence of online media coverage on earnings management.

Based on Baidu index data of China’s A-share listed companies between 2014 and 2018, this paper studies influencing mechanism of online media reports on earnings management from the perspective on abnormal investor attention.

The results show that internet media reports can impose pressure on managers of companies by inducing abnormal focus of the public on listed companies and further force the latter to generate more actions on the management of earnings. It is the abnormal rather than normal investor attention that mediates network media reports and earnings management.

This research enriches and refines the theory on influencing mechanism of media effects on earnings management and provides significant empirical evidence for future researches. Meanwhile, the conclusion of the research is of great practical importance for instructing listed firms dealing with media reports, guiding rational investment of investors and intensifying precision regulation of regulators.

By categorizing abnormal investor attention into active spontaneous abnormal attention which is not guided by media report and passive guided abnormal attention which is guided by media reports, the authors clarify the difference between the two categories. The result indicates that it is only the latter that is the influential mechanism of media report on earnings management.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between earnings management and media reports, assess the roles played by the media in determining the reputation mechanism and examine whether the media has an influence on executives’ behavior in the case of earnings management.

This paper uses Chinese A-share listed firms from the period 2008 to 2012 to test the research questions using regression analyses.

Although the Chinese Stock Markets are still immature compared to those of developed countries, the media seems to play a role in affecting executives’ decisions about dabbling in earnings management. Specifically, firms receiving more media attention are more likely to undertake earnings management. Furthermore, negative media reports result in even higher levels of earnings management activities, indicating that managers tend to use earnings management to achieve earnings goals to reduce or relieve the pressure they feel from the media and to remedy any reputation loss. Moreover, the authors have found that firms whose CEOs have higher reputations are more likely to manage earnings and they are more likely to be affected by negative media reports. Similar results were found for state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

This study analyzes how the level and tone of media coverage affect earnings management rather than just assessing the overall effect of media coverage on earnings management. This paper verifies that the reputation mechanism of the media works in China, but it leads to different results than those experienced in developed countries. Reputational benefits have been introduced into the equation for measuring the governance effect of the media to derive a more in-depth analysis of the reputation mechanism. This paper is among the first to link news coverage and state ownership with earnings management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the spillover effects of a bright-line disclosure regulation that required Chinese listed firms to provide earnings forecasts if they anticipated specified, large earnings changes.

The paper examines the discontinuity of the earnings change distribution of firms listed on the Shenzhen Stock Market between 2010 and 2014. The paper finds that firms no longer subject to the bright-line test still exhibited discontinuity in earnings change distribution. The discontinuity lasted for at least three years with magnitude comparable to that of the firms still subject to the bright-line test. In addition, newly listed firms that had never experienced the bright-line test showed similar tendency to avoid the same threshold. There is some evidence that these firms’ avoidance of the −50 per cent changes was partly because of market pressure.

Research on bright-line tests has to date focused on their immediate and direct effects on firms currently subject to such tests. This study finds that a bright-line disclosure regulation’s influence is not limited to the firms directly governed by the regulation. It could lead to widespread and long lasting distortions in financial reporting behaviors of firms not currently subject to such tests.

The paper has implications for regulators who study the economic consequences of bright-line regulations in general and analysts of the Chinese capital market in particular.

This is the first empirical report that bright-line disclosure regulations affected the financial reporting behavior of firms that were not directly subject to the bright-line tests.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of equity market misvaluation on manager behavior. Using a sample of 535 French-listed over 2000–2018, the authors analyze whether corporate investment decision is sensitive to equity market overvaluation.

The study adopts market-to-book (M/B) decomposition developed by Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan (2004, RKV) that proxies for market misvaluation at the firm and industry levels. The authors conducted a long-term performance analysis via a portfolio sorting procedure and a Carhart (1997) four-factor pricing model. The authors tested the relationship between equity misvaluation, corporate investment decisions and equity issuance. The authors ran several robustness tests.

The empirical results show that equity market misvaluation affects corporate investment positively as the stock price deviates further away from its fundamental. Based on market timing theory, the authors find that corporate investment occurs in periods of high valuation motivated by equity issuance to benefit from the low cost of capital. This effect is more prominent for financially constrained firms. Consistent with the catering channel, the authors find that the misvaluation-investment nexus is more pronounced in firms with short-horizon investors. By examining the stocks’ long-term performance of misvalued firms, via a sorting portfolio procedure, the authors find that undervalued firms outperform and generate higher abnormal returns (Jensen’s alpha) than overvalued firms, suggesting that mispricing-driven investment appear to be short-lived and lead to lower return in the long term.

Corporate decision-makers and governance structures should pay attention to the rationality of the corporate investment decision in the context of equity market misvaluation. Managers who focus on maximizing the stock market value in the short-run at the expense of its long-term performance must give preference to value-creating investment, not driven by an external mechanism such as equity market mispricing. More generally, investors and portfolio managers must take into account the market mispricing process in decision-making. Nonetheless, from the portfolio sorting perspective, decision-makers must act in terms of high governance quality to mitigate suboptimal investment due to stock market mispricing (Jensen, 2005). Finally, equity market overvaluation, leading managers to invest via equity financing in particular, should be a signal to attract investors’ attention to seize the window of opportunity and embark on a short-term portfolio strategy. Such a strategy promises high returns in the short term.

This paper investigates jointly two theoretical channels: equity market timing and catering. The authors propose for the analysis three components of the M/B decomposition to dissociate market misvaluation at the firm and industry level from the fundamental component of market value (growth). This procedure provides a better understanding of the role of firm and industry misvaluation in explaining corporate investments. The authors provide evidence of the equity market misvaluation via a portfolio sorting procedure and a Carhart (1997) four-factor pricing model. The authors examine the effect of misvaluation on both the investment and the financing decisions.

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.