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Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) dominated by Chinese enterprises have become increasingly conspicuous and prevalent in recent years. However, many of them were obstructed by foreign governments on the ground of “Threating National Security”. Overseas acquisition is a crucial step of Chinese Government’s “Going-Out” strategy, so analyzing the attribution of its success and failure is very important.

This paper adopts empirical study method to analyze the factors from political and cultural perspectives based on a sample of 327 cross-border M&A transactions made by all listed companies in China from 1997 to 2010.

The result shows higher failure rate for those acquisition targets which could be classified as political sensitive assets; meanwhile, positive diplomatic relations and higher bilateral trust between China and the host country will facilitate the M&A transaction.

This paper offers a new research angle on cross-border M&As, which is the impact of culture factors, as well as diplomatic relationship, bilateral trust and war history between China and the host country on M&A transactions. This paper also constructs several ways of measuring the diplomatic relationship between countries.

In this paper content analysis is used to examine the lobbying positions of publicly listed companies making submissions on ED 49, Accounting for Identifiable Intangible Assets. A number of content analysis measures are used in an attempt to gain additional insights into the strength of lobbying positions held. The influence of debt contracting and political costs variables upon lobbying position on capitalisation and amortisation of identifiable intangible assets is investigated. Significant relationships are found with the explanatory variables interest coverage, company size, effective tax rate and membership of a politically sensitive industry. These relationships are most consistently observed when lobbying position is measured using more basic content analysis techniques, such as sentence counts and counting the number of supporting arguments presented in submissions. Use of apparently more sophisticated techniques of content analysis fail to perform as well, possibly due to the introduction of greater subjectivity to the process.

Employing the anti-corruption campaign as an exogenous political shock, this paper examines how political intervention shapes the impact of financial expert CEOs on firm investment decisions.

This paper uses a sample of 2,808 Chinese firms listed in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2003 to 2016. Panel data is used for conducting the analysis controlling for firm, industry, and year fixed effects.

The authors found that CEOs with financial expertise are sensitive to political intervention when making investment decisions. First, financial expert CEOs spend more on R&D expenditure in private-owned companies and they are associated with less R&D expenditure in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Second, financial expert CEOs are associated with higher investment expenditure in general, but they become less likely to invest more in the post-anti-corruption period. The reduction in investment expenditure due to the anti-corruption campaign is more pronounced in SOEs than in private-owned companies. Third, the anti-corruption campaign promotes R&D investment in general, but in SOEs, expert CEOs tend to be less likely to invest more on R&D after the anti-corruption shock.

This paper enriches the growing literature on the impact of political intervention and the role of the anti-corruption campaign on corporate behaviour.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This paper examines the environmental disclosure decisions of New Zealand firms in response to political costs arising from the enactment of the Resource Management Act (RMA) in 1991. Unlike prior disclosure studies, this study provides a more rigorous test of the political cost hypothesis by identifying firms that were directly affected by RMA and by measuring the change in environmental disclosures over the pre‐ to post‐RMA period. We hypothesise that the increase in environmental disclosures will be a positive function of the firm's political visibility. Using six different measures of political visibility and three composite measures derived from a factor analysis of the individual measures, the evidence indicates that, in general, politically visible firms were more likely to increase their environmental disclosures after RMA whether the change was measured on a dichotomous or continuous basis. Overall these results provide support for the political cost hypothesis.

This study aims to examine whether US oil and gas companies engaged in earnings management during the 2011 Arab Spring, which resulted in significant increases in both crude oil and gasoline prices.

Following a similar research methodology from prior research, this study tests the existence of earnings management based on discretionary total accruals, current accruals and non-current accruals to determine whether both large petroleum refining firms and relatively small oil and gas-producing firms, jointly and separately, lowered reported earnings.

The results show that, overall, US oil and gas companies as a group engaged in income-decreasing earnings management during the Arab Spring. The results seem to support the political cost hypothesis. However, further analyses indicate that the results are driven by abnormal income-decreasing accruals of the relatively small oil and gas-producing firms, which are politically less sensitive.

The findings suggest that there may be other non-political cost incentives, such as income smoothing, for the relatively small oil and gas-producing firms managing earnings downward during periods of large oil price increases. However, the possibility for firms with reversals of income-increasing activity from other quarters is not ruled out.

This study not only is the first empirical study of earnings management by oil and gas companies during the Arab Spring, but also contributes to extant earnings management literature regarding political cost hypothesis, which still remains a major concern for US oil and gas companies.

Uncertainties caused by political risks can drastically affect global supply chains. However, the supply chain management literature has thus far developed rather limited knowledge on firms' perception of and reactions to increased political risks. This study has two main purposes: to explore the relationship between extant risk exposure and perceived firm-specific political risk and to understand the impact of firm-specific political risk on firms' vertical integration and diversification strategies.

The authors developed a unique dataset for testing our hypotheses. Specifically, the authors sampled manufacturers (SIC20-39) listed in the United States from 2002 to 2019. The authors collected financial and diversification data from Compustat, vertical integration data from the Frésard-Hoberg-Phillips Vertical Relatedness Data Library and political risk data from the Economic Policy Uncertainty database. This data collection process yielded 1,287 firms (8,329 observations) with available data for analysis.

A two-way fixed-effect regression analysis of panel data revealed that firms tend to be more sensitive to political risk when faced with income stream uncertainty or strategic risk. By contrast, exposure to stock returns uncertainty does not significantly influence firms' sensitivity toward political risk. Moreover, firm-specific political risk is positively associated with vertical integration and product diversification. However, firm-specific political risk does not result in higher levels of geographical diversification.

This study joins the literature that systematically explores the antecedents and implications of firm-specific political risk, thus broadening the scope of supply chain risk management.