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Although the role of returnees is critical to firm innovation, the literature offers inconsistent findings regarding returnees' effect on firms' innovation performance. To reconcile this issue, the authors argue that taking the types of innovation into account – i.e. technical innovation and commercial innovation – is necessary. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine how firms led by returnees affect the relationship between research and development (R&D) input and above two types of innovation output, as well as the contingent role of political connections (PCs) and venture capital funding (VC funding).

This study empirically tested the hypotheses using a dataset of 54,617 firm-year observations for 18,475 Chinese firms in Zhongguancun Science Park (ZSP) from 2009 to 2014.

The results show that the positive effect of R&D input on technical innovation performance (TIP) is reinforced when firms are led by returnees, while the positive effect of R&D input on commercial innovation performance (CIP) is weakened when firms are led by returnees compared with those firms led by the local counterparts. The findings further show that returnee firms' positive effect on the relationship between R&D input and technical innovation performance is more salient for firms with more PCs but weakened for those with more VC funding.

This study enriches the research on returnee firms' advantages and disadvantages in transforming R&D input into innovation performance, and the findings highlight that firms led by returnees can increase R&D efficiency of technical innovation, but reduce R&D efficiency of commercial innovation. Moreover, this study offers a contingent view of political and economic stakeholders' roles in returnee firms' innovation, by revealing PCs help returnee firms to enhance R&D efficiency in technological innovation, while venture capital can hamper such R&D efficiency.

This study aims to investigate the motivations behind the issuance of financial instruments with characteristics of equity (FICE), economic consequences associated with their issuance and accounting classifications based on a value-relevance approach.

Using a sample of 169 financial and nonfinancial firms from 10 jurisdictions that adopted International Financial Reporting Standards, the authors use a difference-in-differences econometric approach.

The findings reveal that FICE issuers are more leveraged companies with higher costs of equity and, in some cases, lower effective tax rates. This evidence corroborates the hypothesis that issuers of FICEs seek to increase their book values of equity (accounting treatment as equity) and, simultaneously, generate deductible expenses for tax purposes (tax treatment as liability).

This finding suggests that market participants do not treat these instruments as regular equity but rather as quasi-equity. The findings suggest that a binary classification of FICE as debt or equity may not be the accounting treatment that best represents the underlying economic substance of these contracts. Furthermore, this study reinforces the IASB indication regarding to increase the FICE disclosure to allow stakeholders to better understand the economic essence of these bonds.

This study assesses the economic outcomes and market evaluation of a specific type of FICE that has not been previously studied, which is similar to the examples provided by the IASB in their materials on the subject.

Outstanding unexercised stock options can motivate managers to engage in actions that increase the value of their company’s stock, including buying back their firm’s stock. The objective of granting stock options to managers is to align their interests with stockholders by tying a portion of their compensation to the company’s stock performance. However, unexercised stock options may have unintended consequences by providing managers with a vested interest in artificially boosting stock prices via stock buybacks. The primary objective of this research is to study the main factors that influence firms' buyback decisions amongst hospitality firms at a time when these firms were clamoring for taxpayer bailouts. Results from logistic regression seem to suggest that outstanding executive stock options are a major contributory factor in a firm’s buyback decision. Estimates also indicate that larger, more profitable firms will likely engage in stock buybacks. These findings survive a battery of tests.

The authors use logistic regression to predict the probability of a firm’s buyback decision based on a given set of exogenous explanatory variables.

The paper supports the hypothesis that buyback decisions are guided by the motive to prop support stock prices in the presence of outstanding restricted stock options/warrants granted to firms' executives.

The paper focuses on the buyback decision of U.S. hospitality firms. The results, therefore, might not be generalizable to firms in other industries or countries.

U.S. share repurchase corporate policy and government regulation needs to be revisited given the economic imperative for firms to invest in activities to restore employment and put them in a position for economic recovery.

Public criticism of the size, structure and form (i.e. loan vs grant) of COVID-19 bailouts warrants an examination of whether the factors that drive hospitality and tourism firms to repurchase shares support economic recovery.

Consistent with agency theory, the authors find a significant positive association between outstanding restricted stocks and a firm’s decision to support the stock prices by buying back shares.

This study aims to investigate sustainability practices in the banking industry, focusing on a developing economy. It uses the triple-bottom-line framework to answer the following research question: how do banks in Nigeria conceptualise sustainability, and what role does it play in their banking practices?

This study adopts a social constructivist approach in its exploration of banking sustainability practices in an emerging economy, and the research design is a purpose-based (exploratory) approach. The qualitative data was collected from 33 bank personnel from various bank units and departments through semi-structured interviews to achieve the research objective.

The study reveals a lack of sustainability policies and programmes, as banks focus mainly on profitability. It uncovers unfair treatments of bank workers through casualisation, low wages and work overload. It indicates that most banks in developing countries ignore environmental considerations, as they still carry out paper-based transactions and use diesel-powered generators, which cause various negative environmental impacts. It also confirms that governments and banks in the country are not doing enough to propagate sustainable practices and banks have also not taken advantage of the sustainability concept to promote their brands; instead, they consider it as requiring additional operational costs.

The findings demonstrate the need for banks to see sustainability from a marketing point of view and adopt sustainable practices to create additional value that will improve their brand image and enhance their competitiveness.

The importance of sustainability in the banking industry in emerging economies is considered a viable means of contributing to the overall development goals of the United Nations as the world tries to preserve the environment. It also highlights the consequences of inaction or unsustainable banking practices.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the distributional impact of house price increases on consumption in the context of the energy transition.

This study draws from two micro cross-sectional datasets, the English Housing Survey (EHS) and the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCFS) to study the Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) out of changes in house prices. By employing pseudo-panel regressions, the paper examines the impact of house price changes on consumption among diverse household types.

This paper finds varying consumption responses to house price changes across age and tenure groups. Older homeowners tend to increase consumption when house prices rise. In contrast, middle-aged individuals, often renters or mortgage holders, reduce consumption in response to price increases. The youngest age group also experiences increased consumption but to a lesser degree than the oldest group. Energy-efficient homes are related to lower consumption across all tenure levels. However, when interacted with house prices and age, the estimates are positive, pointing to an unequal accrual of property premiums depending on housing market positions.

The main limitations stem from data constraints. First, using a pseudo-panel approach hinders control for unobservable selection bias. Additionally, while robust under cross-validation and specifications tests, the energy efficiency variable imputation results in a low number of energy-efficient homes. Due to heterogeneous responses to rising house prices, this paper contends that an energy transition model that subsidises homeowners’ renovation is likely to produce a negative impact on consumption among younger and middle-aged households.

This paper contributes to the MPC literature by incorporating energy efficiency as a key variable. It draws from recent data to obtain new estimates. By highlighting shifts in consumption patterns the paper contributes to a well-established body of literature with renewed policy relevance regarding housing retrofit.

This study aims to examine the influence of geopolitical uncertainty on cryptocurrency markets (CM).

Utilizing two distinct sets of daily returns data spanning from January 1, 2019, to May 4, 2023, the analysis employs the geopolitical risk (GPR) index formulated by Caldara and Iacoviello (2022), which encapsulates two pivotal events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine conflict. The cryptocurrency market (CM) encompasses Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE). Employing the DCC-GARCH model and supplementing it with wavelet coherence analysis to discern perceptual distinctions between short- and long-term market reactions.

The main findings indicate that the GPR index clearly impacts the return of CM in the short-, mid- and long-term periods. BTC exhibited the highest volatility in response to changes in the GPR index. The cryptocurrency market offers a better diversification opportunity, and the impact of geopolitical events varies across time, with their direction and magnitude closely related to the specificity of the CM.

This research is helpful for financial market investors, portfolio and risk managers, make informed decisions about including cryptocurrencies in their investment portfolios to mitigate the risks in uncertainty period.

Cryptocurrency market volatility is treated weakly during the risk period. With advanced statistical method, this study links two important events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine conflict and selects the top four cryptocurrencies constituting 80% of the market. This study examines the impact of geopolitical risk on the cryptocurrency market and shows that this market is considered a safe haven.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of institutional investors in the cost of equity for Chinese firms, especially state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

By using data from Chinese firms with a unique state ownership structure, we provide empirical evidence on whether institutional investors can help reduce the cost of equity for SOEs and non-SOEs, respectively, and if so, identify the underlying channels.

We find that an increase in the shareholdings of institutions, especially independent institutions, can lead to a reduction in the cost of equity. This effect is particularly prominent in SOEs compared to non-SOEs. Moreover, institutional investors promote corporate social responsibility activities and innovation activities of invested firms, thereby reducing the cost of equity.

This paper contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the effects of institutional shareholdings with heterogeneity on the cost of equity and their influential mechanisms in the process of mixed ownership reform.

1. Explore the important role of sole actual controller in the innovation decision of the firm and the different effects of the ownership of sole actual controller on innovation; 2. Explore whether the role played by sole actual controllers varies in different types of firms; 3. Explore the important role of cooperative culture in the internal governance of firms and whether sole actual controller firms feel a rejection effect on cooperative culture.

The authors collect data on Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2021 to analyze the role of the sole actual controller on innovation investment, as well as the moderating effect of cooperative culture in corporate annual reports using natural language processing.

The authors find that sole actual controllers promote corporate innovation investment and that concentrated equity inhibits corporate innovation investment, while dispersed equity concentration promotes it. In addition, cooperative culture has a nonlinear moderating effect on the relationship between SACs and innovation.

On the one hand, this study focuses chiefly on the decision-making behavior of top managers, such as the SACs and shareholders, and does not account for the role of bottom-level employees or professional R&D teams in innovation. On the other hand, although this study discusses the moderating role of corporate cooperative culture, it is limited to internal cooperative culture; cooperative culture should also consider external cooperation, such as cooperation between companies or between companies and universities.

First, companies should actively implement the SAC model and scientifically select a truly compassionate and visionary SAC as the dominant person in the company. Second, the Chinese government needs to standardize the identification of actual controllers, who should not be a shareholder of the company. Third, policymakers should promote the reform of the mixed system of enterprises, optimize the shareholding structure of firms, make executives an important part of corporate governance. Fourth, cooperation culture is a good start, though firms should avoid letting it become a “double-edged sword” of the management mode of the SAC.

First, existing studies do not address the impact of SACs on innovation from the perspective of SACs, who have most influence the firm's decision-making. Focusing on the SAC's decision-making style has sufficient practical implications for future corporate innovation planning. This study used the natural language processing (NLP) module in ChatGPT to analyze the culture of cooperation in corporate annual reports. Currently, corporate culture is an obstacle to the study of corporate governance because of its obscurity and difficulty of quantification. The authors adopted a PSM (propensity score matching) approach to eliminate the endogeneity of the data, which makes the results more scientific.

The study intends to evaluate the impact of inflation expectation on the performance of listed commercial banks in India during 2005–2021. Inflation expectation is considered as a direct policy tool by the policymakers for stability of the economy. The study explores how inflation expectation affects the performance indicators of the Indian banking industry while controlling for a wide range of bank-specific factors.

The study applies the generalized method of moments (GMM) on a panel sample of 27 listed bank to analyse the impact of inflation expectation on banking sector performance. The data on inflation expectation are obtained from the household inflation expectation survey introduced in India by the Reserve Bank of India in 2005. Return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Tobin's Q have been considered as the banking performance indicators in this study.

Empirical results exhibit that inflation expectation is instrumental in deciding the banking sector's performance. Inflation expectation has been found to have a significant and positive impact on accounting-based measures of banking performance. At the same time, it shows negative impact on the marketing-based measure.

The study gives a clear picture about how inflation expectation affects the banking performance and the monetary policy of the country. The study provides crucial insights to develop strategic decisions for the Indian banking sector. The adoption of proper macroeconomic policies, taking into account inflation expectation levels, is instrumental in enhancing bank's performance and in achieving economic growth.

This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the impact of inflationary conditions on banking performance. The originality lies in capturing the role of inflation expectation solely in determining banking sector performance.

This paper aims to highlight the role of the CEO’s background in the stock market reaction to a product recall. Based on the upper echelons theory and the crisis management literature, we argue that the CEO’s background influences the expected response in a product harm crisis and the updating of investors’ expectations following a product recall announcement. We test if the CEO’s background influences the abnormal stock market returns around product recalls and how it affects the way investors interpret the recall strategy and severity.

We use an event study, for a sample of 2,576 product recalls in the US automobile industry, between January 2010 and June 2021.

We observe that the stock market’s reaction is less negative if the firm’s CEO presents a core specialist background and for firms led by insider CEOs. This result is in line with our argument that in the presence of a crisis that requires operational and firm-specific knowledge, such as product recalls, the best alignment in terms of the CEO’s background occurs when the CEO was recruited inside and is a core specialist. Finally, we also find that the CEO’s background has a moderating effect on the impact of the recall strategy and severity on the stock market reaction to a recall announcement. In particular, a recall with high severity has a more negative stock market reaction when the CEO is a core specialist as such an event is not expected by the market.

These results have important implications for practitioners and scholars working in the areas of product quality and corporate governance. Given the high frequency and high costs for firms to carry out these operations in the automobile industry, we recommend a careful analysis of the CEO’s background before their appointment as well as careful planning to prevent and to adequately react appropriately to product quality problems. While there is a common tendency among executives to cut discretionary expenditures such as spending on product safety, our results regarding the stock market reaction to product recall announcements suggest that investors expect firms led by insider and core specialist CEOs to be more likely to ensure product quality and to respond to product quality crisis.

We extend knowledge of product recalls by studying the role of the CEO’s background on the stock market reaction to product recall announcements.