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This paper examines how “strategic” chief financial officers (CFOs) with an elite MBA (i.e. elite CFOs) influence (1) stock market reaction to CFO hiring announcements (ex ante measure) and (2) post-hiring firm performance (ex-post measure).

This paper utilizes a comprehensive, proprietary database with information about the educational qualifications and prior professional experience of 1,340 CFOs hired during the period 1994–2014. For each CFO, the authors hand-collected data on the CFO's prior experience as well as CFO's educational profile. The authors also identified the date of CFO hiring from financial press articles. To evaluate performance, the authors consider two different, yet complementary performance measures: (1) the stock market reaction, a priori measure and (2) a traditional measure of performance, which is a post-facto metric related to firm performance.

The results show that hiring CFOs with scarce and strategic human capital elicits a positive market response and leads to significant improvement in firm performance. Further, firms with greater managerial discretion benefit more from hiring elite CFOs. The results hold after controlling for chief executive officer (CEO), CFO, top managment team (TMT), and board characteristics.

This study shows converging and mutually consistent results about what specific types of CFO human capital create firm value and, more importantly, show that such value-creation is only in the case of small firms and high growth firms. The study also advances the stream of literature that contrasts the relative benefits of specialist versus generalist qualifications.

The authors investigate the pre-merger process, defined as the period between the announcement and completion of an M&A (mergers and acquisitions) deal. Specifically, the authors examine if the timing of the announcement in a merger wave affects whether or not the M&A deal is completed, and how long this pre-merger process takes. The authors conduct a textual analysis of the 150 largest abandoned M&A deals in the sample. From this, the authors find that competing bidders, regulatory concerns, and shareholder opposition from the acquirer are major roadblocks in the pre-merger process, and that these hurdles often occur jointly. Subsequently, the authors examine a sample of 2,802 announced M&As across four industry waves and find that M&A deals initiated earlier in a merger wave are more likely to be completed and are completed more speedily.

Many announced cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are never brought to completion despite potential negative consequences to acquirers and targets. This paper presented evidence on the dynamic effects of spatial distance and two industry-level characteristics, namely industry relatedness between the two firms and technological intensity, on the completion likelihood of cross-border M&A deals. Based on a sample of 8,489 M&A transactions we found that the completion likelihood of cross-border M&As increases with spatial distance. The effect is more pronounced for deals across technology-based industries, evidence for related deals is inconclusive.

The purpose of our study is to examine the direct and mediating effects of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and urgency, lack of premeditation, lack of perseverance and sensation seeking (UPPS) impulsivity traits on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intention as well as to test the moderation impact of ADHD symptoms in the link between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and start-up intention.

The stratified random sampling was approached to recruit the data from 2,566 university students in Vietnam. Cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis were used to test the reliability and validity of scales. Then, Pearson correlation analysis was utilized to test direct effects, while PROCESS macro was approached to test moderation and mediation impacts.

The study found evidence that ADHD symptoms, sensation seeking, lack of premeditation and lack of perseverance are significantly and directly conducive to the formation of entrepreneurial intention. Yet, ADHD symptoms might weaken the link between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy was also found to partially mediate the link between sensation seeking, lack of premeditation, and lack of perseverance and intention to become an entrepreneur.

The findings provide constructive recommendations for policymakers and educators to nurture and foster university students’ entrepreneurial activities as well as to restrain the negative effects of ADHD symptoms on youths.

Understanding the impacts of psychiatric symptoms, such as ADHD and UPPS impulsivity, on entrepreneurial activities provide useful insights to individuals with ADHD symptoms, the community and the society to restrain the detrimental impacts of psychological disorder symptoms and consider entrepreneurship as a career choice.

The study is expected to have a significant contribution to psychological entrepreneurship literature by broadening our horizons of the links between psychiatric symptoms and entrepreneurial intentions. Especially, this study reveals that ADHD symptoms and UPPS impulsive traits are significantly correlated with intention to become entrepreneurs and the link between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intention become weaker when the degree of ADHD symptoms is high.

The authors investigate how a gender-diverse board, a gender-diverse executive team, or a female chief executive officer (CEO) impact bank balance sheet and equity risk.

Using panel data of U.S. bank holding companies over the period of 1992–2019, the authors conduct panel regressions with bank and year-fixed effects to analyze how female directors, female executives, and female CEOs impact a wide range of bank risk measures, controlling for the bank, board and executive characteristics.

The authors find female directors significantly reduce all types of risk. Female executives reduce some balance sheet risk but have an insignificant effect on bank equity risk. However, the presence of female CEOs does not significantly reduce bank risk-taking. During financial crises, female CEOs even increase equity risk.

The findings are important to shed light on the ongoing debate on how gender quota policy could be efficiently used to balance the need for gender diversity while ensuring corporate performance. It could also improve social welfare by guiding proper public policy to ensure the efficient use of social labor capital and curb banks' excessive risk-taking incentives.

The authors provide the first empirical evidence demonstrating that female directors and female executives in the banking industry have different impacts on bank risk-taking. The authors also provide the first empirical evidence that female leaders have a different impact on two different types of risks: balance sheet and equity risk. The study is also the first to analyze the impact of female executives over multiple financial crises.

This study aims to provide firm-level evidence on the relationship between the presence of financial services multinationals and indigenous counterparts’ performance, using a comprehensive sample of firms in the emerging financial industry in Vietnam.

This study uses the generalized method of moments with instrumental variables (IV/GMM) to deal with potential endogeneity problem. Of this technique, a pragmatic approach to constructing instruments is adopted, capitalizing on the geographical and industry segmentation of the local market. The empirical analyses also address statistical issues of the overall model significance, heteroskedasticity and multicollinearity.

The regression results reveal that foreign entrants have a positive and statistically significant association with indigenous firms’ labor productivity and the average wage, with a more pronounced impact on the latter. The increased entry of financial multinationals appears to be uncorrelated with indigenous firms’ profitability. The extended estimations also suggest that investor origin matters in determining spillover magnitude. The average estimate of Asian affiliates in the examined relationship is approximately half that of European affiliates, whereas foreign entrants originating from America show an insignificant role.

This study sheds light on the broader impacts of foreign financial affiliates by simultaneously exploring their impacts on three key dimensions of indigenous firm performance, namely, labor productivity, average wage and profitability. This paper also enriches the existing literature by disentangling the effects of foreign entrants from different regions of origin, which was largely neglected in the context of financial services multinationals.

Current publication practices in the scholarly (International) Business and Management community are overwhelmingly anti-Popperian, which fundamentally frustrates the production of scientific progress. This is the result of at least five related biases: the verification, novelty, normal science, evidence, and market biases. As a result, no one is really interested in replicating anything. In this essay, the author extensively argues what he believes is wrong, why that is so, and what we might do about this. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This is an essay, combining a literature review with polemic argumentation.

Only a tiny fraction of published studies involve a replication effort. Moreover, journal authors, editors, reviewers and readers are not interested in seeing nulls and negatives in print. This replication crisis implies that Popper’s critical falsification principle is actually thrown into the scientific community’s dustbin. Behind the façade of all these so-called new discoveries, false positives abound, as do questionable research practices meant to produce all this allegedly cutting-edge and groundbreaking significant findings. If this dismal state of affairs does not change for the good, (International) Business and Management research is ending up in a deadlock.

A radical cultural change in the scientific community, including (International) Business and Management, is badly needed. It should be in the community’s DNA to engage in the quest for the “truth” – nothing more, nothing less. Such a change must involve all stakeholders: scholars, editors, reviewers, and students, but also funding agencies, research institutes, university presidents, faculty deans, department chairs, journalists, policymakers, and publishers. In the words of Ioannidis (2012, p. 647): “Safeguarding scientific principles is not something to be done once and for all. It is a challenge that needs to be met successfully on a daily basis both by single scientists and the whole scientific establishment.”

Publication practices have to change radically. For instance, editorial policies should dispose of their current overly dominant pro-novelty and pro-positives biases, and explicitly encourage the publication of replication studies, including failed and unsuccessful ones that report null and negative findings.

This is an explicit plea to change the way the scientific research community operates, offering a series of concrete recommendations what to do before it is too late.

By drawing on the institutional theory and contingency theory, this study aims to examine the effects of leadership and accounting capacity on the quality of financial reporting and accountability of public organisations in Vietnam. Furthermore, this paper is to determine the impact of financial reporting quality on accountability.

The research model and hypotheses have been tested by partial least squares structural equation modeling, with 177 survey samples obtained from accountants and managers working in the public sector in Vietnam.

The research results indicate that leadership and accounting capacity have a positive effect on financial reporting quality; leadership and accounting capacity positively influence accountability; and the quality of financial reporting has a positive impact on accountability.

The research results provide empirical evidence of the direct impact of leadership and accounting capacity on financial reporting quality and accountability of public organisations in a developing country. Moreover, the current work also provides important evidence for the impact of financial reporting quality on accountability.

Public sector organisations must realise that leadership and accounting capacity play a vital role in the accounting reform process. Public institutions likewise need to pay attention to develop accounting capacity and promote leadership. Moreover, the results respond to the continuing call for increased citizen trust in public organisations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the chain from leadership, accounting capacity, financial reporting quality and accountability in the context of public sector organisations in an Asian transition market.