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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether corporate governance changes along the corporate life-cycle.

In a sample of 205 firms from 21 emerging market countries and using a life-cycle proxy from the dividends literature, the authors use a governance-prediction model which examines whether corporate governance differs along the corporate life-cycle.

Mature firms tend to practice better overall corporate governance. Discipline and independence improve as firms mature. Firms tend to be most transparent and accountable when they are young. These findings suggest that the resource/strategy and monitoring/control governance functions are relevant but at different life-cycle stages.

In the absence of longitudinal governance data with sufficient coverage to track within-firm changes in corporate governance along the corporate life-cycle, the authors analyze differences in corporate governance between-firms at different life-cycle stages.

The authors use an alternative, yet new measure from the dividends literature to account for the firm’s position along the corporate life-cycle. With this new measure, the findings are in line with the predictions of Filatotchev et al. (2006).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how corporate cash holdings changes across firm life cycle and how firms undergo heterogeneous dynamic cash adjustment as they advance from one stage to the next stage.

This study uses an extensive data set of 2,994 Chinese A-listed firms. The authors use generalized method of moments (GMM) and Fisher Panel unit root testing to investigate the targeting behavior of Chinese firms.

The uni-variate investigation reveals that firms in the growth stage exhibits the highest cash levels and firms in the decline stage report the lowest cash levels. As growth firms have high investment needs, they may require raising external capital to meet investment needs. To avoid the costly external financing, firms in growth stage tend to hold more cash. The GMM estimation reveals that along all the phases of firm life cycle there are evidences of trade-off behavior of corporate cash holdings. The authors report that adjustment rate increases as firms enters into the growth stage.

The findings provide both theoretical and practical insight to align cash policies with the available strategic choices along firm life cycle in an emerging market characterized by market imperfections.

The study is unique from the context that it is applying robust methodology to one of rarely investigated area in corporate cash policy. The peculiar Chinese study setting characterized by higher information asymmetry, high cost of external financing and heterogeneous access to financing sources provide theoretical and empirical underpinnings to investigate and gain insight about how corporate cash policy can be aligned with strategic choices available across different stages of life cycle.

The purpose of this paper is to assess US-based firms from 2005 to 2015 to determine whether firms with better corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance will allocate capital through their life-cycle to better maintain or extend total assets.

Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics social performance rating scores were used to measure CSR performance in an initial sample of 19,707 firm-year observations. Firms are first classified into stages including introduction, growth, maturity, and decline, and use multiclass linear discriminant analysis, the Dickinson classification scheme (Dickinson, 2011), and the ratio of retained earnings to total assets (RETA) as life-cycle proxies. Life-cycle was formulated based on a broad set of accounting data sourced from Compustat. Various corporate characteristics from the CRSP database were used to classify all sample firms into five equal groups based on their CSR performance.

A firm’s equity and debt issuance assume a hump shape over the life-cycle under CSR practice, and higher-CSR firms face fewer significant issues as they mature; payout, RETA, and free cash flow decreased from high-CSR performance firms to low-CSR performance firms; and cash holdings also exhibit a hump shape over the life-cycle and higher-CSR practices are associated with significantly lower cash holdings.

CSR performance is a useful predictor for forecasting firm life-cycle and superior CSR performance ensures efficient capital allocation throughout firm life-cycle. Furthermore, CSR practice is an indicator of firm life-cycle sustainability and indicates a firm’s future cash flow patterns.

This paper aims to examine the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate life cycle as well as dividend policy in Indonesia.

The paper develops two hypotheses that are tested empirically through multivariate settings. The tests are conducted using a sample of 527 Indonesian listed firms and 923 Indonesian firm-year observations between 2008 and 2015.

The findings support the hypothesis that CSR expenses increase when firms enter the maturity stage of their life cycle. On the triple bottom line components of CSR, firms which invest on CSR economic are in their maturity stage of their life cycle. The evidence also suggests that firms’ social donation and charitable giving increase as firms become mature. Furthermore, the strong evidence supports the hypothesis that firms’ CSR expenses positively affect dividend policy. This finding is robust to the alternative measurement of dividend payout, additional firms’ characteristics and instrumental variable to address endogeneity.

For investors in Indonesian listed firms, it is more profitable to invest in socially responsible firms than socially irresponsible firms. For firms, the results imply that spending in CSR does not reduce performance, thus becoming attractive for investors.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is thin literature investigating the relation between corporate life cycle, CSR, and dividend policy in emerging markets while it is important as it could encourage companies to integrate CSR into their business strategy and transparently disclose their CSR activities. Further, as previous research on these topics mainly conducted using the US data (Rakotomavo, 2012; Benlemlih, 2014; Hasan and Habib, 2017), which most of CSR disclosures are voluntary, this paper contributes to the existing literature by examining these topics in a country where CSR is mandatory by the law.

In this paper, we investigate whether internal control and whether corporate life cycle would affect firm performance in the emerging markets of China.

We use Chen, Dong, Han, and Zhou’s (2013) internal control index on the effectiveness of internal control and Dickinson’s (2011) definition on firm life cycle. We use multivariate regression analysis.

We find that the internal control improves corporate performance. When dividing firm life cycle into five stages: introduction, growth, mature, shake-out and decline, we find that the impacts of internal control on firm performance vary with different stages. The positive impact of internal control on firm performance is more significant in maturity and shake-out stages than other stages.

Our findings would have implications for the regulators and policy makers with regards to the importance of internal control in corporate governance and the effectiveness of implementing standards and guidelines on internal control in public firms.

In addition, our findings on the various roles of internal control at different stages of firm life cycle would help managers and board of directors find more focus in risk management and board monitoring, respectively.

Although the prior literature have examined the link between internal control, information quality and cost of equity capital (Ashbaugh-Skaife, Collins, Kinney, & LaFond, 2009; Ogneva, Subramanyam, & Raghunandan, 2007), our study would be the first attempt to investigate the link between internal control and firm performance during different stages of firm life cycles.

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), this study investigates how tax planning affects the likelihood of financial default in different stages of the corporate life cycle.

Collecting a large sample of US firms between 1989 and 2016, hypotheses are tested using a hazard model. Several robustness and endogeneity checks corroborate the main findings.

The results show that tax-planning firms are less likely to default in the introduction and decline stages, while they are more likely to default in the growth and maturity stages. The findings suggest that introductory and declining firms use cash resources obtained from tax planning efficiently to meet their needs and acquire other useful resources. In growing and mature firms, tax aggressiveness generates unnecessary slack resources, weakens managerial discipline and increases reputational risks.

The results shed light on the benefits and costs associated with tax planning throughout firms' life cycle, holding great significance for managers, investors, lenders and other stakeholders.

This study contributes to the literature that examines resource management at different life cycle stages by showing that cash resources from tax planning are managed in distinctive ways in each life cycle stage, having a varied impact on the likelihood of default. The authors shed light on underexplored cash resources. Furthermore, this study shows the potential linkages between the agency theory and RBV.

The real estate industry has experienced frequent changes in corporate executives in recent years. A total of 147 A-share listed firms witnessed a total of 191 corporate executives' departure. This wave of corporate executive departures is significantly different from previous waves. This study aims to examine whether industry evolution influence the characteristics of corporate executives? If so, then how?

Drawing on upper echelons theory, this study analyzed the effects of industry life cycle on the characteristics of corporate executives. The data of A-share listed companies in the textile, real estate and computer industries in China from 1992 to 2014 were collected.

There are significant differences in the characteristics of corporate executives that match the life cycles of different industries. Companies at the growth stage in the life cycle of an industry were more likely to select and appoint younger corporate executives with political capital, peripheral functions and output functions, whereas companies at the maturity stage were more likely to select and appoint older corporate executives with throughput functions.

By using the upper echelons theory as a starting point, this study analyzed the effects of industry life cycle on corporate executive's characteristics. The research findings offer theoretical implications for the upper echelons theory and provide managerial implications.

The paper seeks to present a novel conceptual framework that integrates the strategic dynamics of the firm with changes in its governance systems.

The agency research agenda is extended to include other corporate governance roles, such as resource and strategy functions, alongside monitoring and control functions. Theoretical arguments are supported by empirical data related to the founder‐manager/IPO, IPO/maturity, maturity/decline and reinvention thresholds.

The paper shows that corporate governance parameters may be linked to strategic thresholds in the firm's life‐cycle. Successful transition over a threshold is accompanied by a rebalancing in the structure and roles of corporate governance compared with each previous stage in the cycle.

In the absence of longitudinal data relating to firms as they pass through all life‐cycle stages the study has been restricted to reporting illustrative data from different studies regarding each strategic threshold. Further research might usefully undertake detailed long‐term case studies using a combination of archival and interview data to trace the evolution of firms across the four thresholds.

This paper develops a novel conceptual framework that integrates the strategic dynamics of the firm with changes in its governance systems. It rejects the notion of a universal governance template and argues that corporate governance parameters may be linked to transitions from one stage to another in the firm's life‐cycle. Accordingly, it argues that changes in a firm's strategic positioning may be associated with rebalancing between the wealth‐protection and wealth‐creation functions of governance.

This study aims to explore corporate governance (CG) practices that can lead to firms’ better performance in different organizational life cycles. The authors propose a configurational approach to explore how a set of CG practices combine in bundles to achieve high performance outcomes for firms across their corporate life cycles.

Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was used to analyze a sample of data of 21 countries and 9 industries. Data referred to the period of 9 years extending from the year 2005 to the year 2013.

This study reveals that there are multiple CG practices that exist through firms that can achieve high firm performance. Moreover, CG practices combine in different ways for firms in their growth, maturity and declining stages.

This study demonstrates the value of using a configurational analytical approach to explore both the firm and country-specific CG practices (together) that engage firms to achieve the desired level of performance across the corporate life cycles.

The current study draws attention to the policymakers’ need to assess the current level of regulatory and competitive development of their countries and form policy accordingly. The approach used in the current research study not only offers the linkages between CG and performance to managers as incentives to comply with regulation but also to view CG-related activity as a strategic move.

The approach used in the current research study not only offers the linkages between CG and performance to managers as incentives to comply with regulation but also to view CG-related activity as a strategic move.

This study broadening the focus of CG studies to include a rigorous explanation of the global CG phenomena and to provide effective solutions for the practitioners.

This study demonstrates the value of using a configurational analytical approach to explore both the firm and country-specific CG practices (together) that engage firms to achieve the desired level of performance across the corporate life cycles.

This study extends related research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the less-researched realm of Southeast Asia setting by investigating the role of life cycle stages on the relationship between CSR and firm value.

This study uses a sample of 1,247 firm-year observations of firms listed in Southeast Asia from 2012 to 2018. Descriptive, multiple regression and sensitivity analyses are presented in the study.

The results provide evidence that although CSR and firm value, in general, have a positive relationship, the relationship is contingent on the stages of firm's life cycle. The effect of each CSR dimension on firm value differs across life cycle stages. The social dimension of CSR predicts higher firm value at the introduction and mature stages. The governance dimension affects firm value at the growth and shake-out/decline stages. Moreover, the environmental dimension affects firm value only at the later stage of the life cycle.

This study is limited to five countries in Southeast Asia, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand from 2012 to 2018. Future studies may explore other countries and investigate the impact of country classification on the relationship between CSR and firm value.

Policymakers, managers and other decision-makers may have a better understanding of firm's behavior in different life cycle stages. With such understanding, CSR will be successfully adopted in decision making, formulation and implementation of policies.

CSR-related research in Southeast Asia remains an under-studied domain, and little attention has been dedicated to different dimensions of CSR and life cycle in the area of CSR-related preference for decision making.