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The author investigates the effect of trade protection on domestic firm innovation in China and explores the channel through which trade protection affects corporate innovation.

Using a sample of Chinese A-share manufacturing companies from 2003 to 2019, the author starts with a univariate analysis by examining the innovation output after trade protection for all samples. The author uses the natural logarithm of one plus the number of trade protection cases received by the industry to which the firm belongs in a particular year to proxy for trade protection.

The author finds that trade protection significantly encourages firms’ patent application, particularly substantive patents, which is stronger in non-state-owned enterprises. Moreover, the mitigation of financial constraint is plausible channel that allows trade protection to promote innovation.

For practitioners, they should seize the dividends of national policies. In the process of implementing trade protection, they should concentrate on improving their innovation level and enhancing their core competitiveness. When they are not subject to trade protection, they can also make profits and develop in the long run.

For policy makers, in the early stage of industry development, trade protection can be used to ease the companies’ financing constraints and improve the companies’ profits, which will help them concentrate their efforts, promote innovation and further develop. However, in the mid-term development of the industry, policy makers should reduce trade protection. Through the entry of foreign capital, companies face increased competition, which can enhance the companies’ motivation for long-term development.

Overall, this paper sheds light on the real effects of trade protection and the determinants of innovation. First, the paper sheds light on the impact of international trade on firms’ innovation. Second, this study also contributes to the emerging literature on the effect of trade policy uncertainty on financial constraint. Third, the paper adds to the stream of literature on the drivers of innovation.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the phrase “just and equitable”, and associated terminology, within New Zealand’s strata law, to inform other jurisdictions. In particular, this paper temporarily suspends the notion of a statutory hendiadys to consider what kind of justice is reflected in judicial consideration of the phrase.

This paper takes a mixed-methods approach, drawing on a combination of black-letter law, property law theory and insights from literary and philosophical analysis.

While justice is often considered as “treating like cases alike”, this is not apparent from this study. The analysis shows that different kinds of justice outcomes emerge, with some emphasis on justice as economic efficiency. In addition, the paper highlights the inherent uncertainty in what is “just and equitable” and how associated disjunctive phrases, such as “unjust or inequitable” are still treated as hendiadys, but are no more clear.

The research is limited to consideration of a single jurisdiction (New Zealand), though the useful degree of case law from this jurisdiction provides broad insight.

Among other things, the paper argues for further consideration of the usefulness of the “just and equitable” test in light of the kind of justice we want to achieve. The addition of mandatory considerations to existing statutory tests may allow more of a focus, beyond the exigencies of individual cases or narrow outcomes of economic efficiency.

While there is existing literature on the “just and equitable” phrase within strata law, the paper is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to provide an analysis focused on how suspending the statutory hendiadys normally inherent in “just and equitable” provides insight into the kind of justice that emerges from the application of this test within a single strata jurisdiction. As such, the paper provides lessons for other jurisdictions on how to improve relevant statute and case law outcomes.

This study explores the influence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) career experience on the investment behavior and risk tolerance of chief executive officers (CEOs). Specifically, this study focuses on CEOs' abilities to allocate financial assets and maintain solvency.

This study adopts a comprehensive approach to analyze financial assets and asset-to-liability ratios. Financial data and individual information of CEOs from listed companies are collected from 2020Q1 to 2021Q4, along with statistics on confirmed COVID-19 cases. Instrumental and alternative variables are used to examine the robustness and endogeneity of the research, ensuring a thorough analysis.

A significant positive correlation is revealed between CEOs' COVID-19 career experience and their capacity to effectively allocate financial assets. However, COVID-19 has a negative effect on firm performance in terms of solvency. These findings contribute to the empirical evidence linking the pandemic to company performance, representing part of the initial research in this area.

The study suggests that the implementation of potential policy implications, such as loose monetary policies and tax and fee reduction measures, may alleviate the tax burden on listed companies.

The circular economy (CE) has been endorsed as representing a model that is able to achieve environmental protection through decreased use of raw materials, together with changing economic values and social inclusion thanks to its demand for a wide variety of skill profiles. This has motivated many policy initiatives to support the implementation of the CE. The purpose of this study is to follow such policy initiatives in three geographically anchored industry-specific networks.

The study contributes to the research debate on the CE through a spatial approach with a focus on how the implementation of the CE is conditioned by spatial and regional contexts. The authors investigate three different networks in Sweden for CE with different locations and industrial profiles.

The findings reveal the difficulty that exist in relation to the implementation of the CE. The network and support functions in combination with private industry are vital. The risk of sustaining an uneven regional economic development is evident.

Although research on the development of the CE has proliferated, geographical approaches to this development are comparably rare to date. The authors seek to contextualise the strategy development and policy implementation of a CE policy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the supervening loss of inter-organisational trust in long-term commercial contracts. The underlying research question is whether contract law – the legal institution regulating economic exchanges – should intervene and enable a party to a long-term commercial contract to extricate itself from a situation where a relationship of trust has broken down irretrievably.

This paper uses doctrinal methodology and theoretical conceptualisation to answer the underlying research question. The legal instrument chosen for analysis purposes is the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. This paper also draws on extant literature on inter-organisational trust (including conceptual and empirical studies) to support the arguments and propositions. Furthermore, this study proceeds to assess the substantive justifiability of the proposed remedial measure using four normative values: legal certainty and predictability, protection of the performance interest, economic efficiency and the preservation of the relation.

The central argument put forward in this paper is the reformulation of draft Article 6.3.1 proposed by the UNIDROIT Working Group on Long-Term Contracts, which confers a novel right to terminate for a compelling reason. This paper presents a multidimensional model of inter-organisational trust that would serve as the conceptual framework for the proposed reformulation of the provision and establishes a coherent juridical basis for the legal solution that would accord with the Principles of International Commercial Contracts’ general remedial scheme. As for the normative assessment, this paper demonstrates that the proposed remedial measure would significantly promote efficient outcomes and positively serve the norms of legal certainty, protection of the performance interest and the preservation of the relation.

This paper addresses the lacuna in current legal scholarship in relation to the adverse socio-economic effects following trust violation and deterioration in inter-organisational relationships. Additionally, the propositions and findings should contribute to the workings of the UNIDROIT in adopting new rules and principles that would serve the special requirements of cross-border trade.

Within the labor-intensive construction industry characterized by distinctly structural shortages in the labor force worldwide, efficient and effective migration of construction workers across regions is critical for the smooth operation of construction activities. This study aims to investigate how the interregional migration patterns of construction workers are impacted by the disparities in both employment opportunities and environment amenities between the origin and destination provinces.

Drawing on the push and pull theory and the archival data on 13,728 migrant construction workers in China, descriptive analyses are first performed to characterize the interregional migration patterns of the investigated construction workers. Combining regional data in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, this study uses hierarchical regression modeling techniques to empirically test the relative importance of the employment-related and environment-related factors in driving the interregional migration of construction workers after controlling for the effects of related economic and geographic factors.

The results provide evidence that the interregional migration of construction workers is principally driven by the disparities in employment opportunities while disparities in environment amenities (including climate comfort disparity, medical service disparity and educational service disparity) generally play much fewer substantive roles. With regard to the impacts of employment opportunities, the results provide evidence that compared with the disparity in job market size, the disparities in job income and industry development level are more significantly relevant factors, which positively pull and adversely push the interregional migration flows, respectively.

This study contributes to a deepened understanding of how workers specifically balance their employment and amenity needs to make temporary migration decisions in the “laggard” labor-intensive construction industry. This study also adds to the literature on population migration by characterizing the specific characteristics of construction workers and the temporary nature of the workers' migration activities. The findings hold important practical implications for construction organizations and policymakers for effectively managing the mobility of migrant construction workers.

The extant literature on migrant construction workers has primarily focused on the consequences of international migration and the generalization of empirical findings on population migration mechanisms in other domains to the construction industry is substantially limited by the specific characteristics of construction workers and the temporary nature of their migration activities. In addressing this gap, this study represents an exploratory effort to quantitatively characterize the interregional migration patterns of construction workers in the labor-intensive construction industry and examines the roles of employment opportunity and environmental amenity in driving interregional migration.

As the cost of completing a transaction, the green merger and acquisition (M&A) premium paid on mergers can influence whether the acquisition creates value or not. However, studies linking M&A premiums to firm value have had mixed results, even fewer studies have examined the effect of green M&A premiums on bidders’ firm value. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how green M&A premiums affect firm value in the context of China’s heavy polluters.

Using 323 deals between 2008 and 2019 among China’s heavy polluters, this paper estimates with correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis.

Green M&A premiums are negatively associated with firm value. The results are more significant when firms adopt symbolic rather than substantive corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. Robustness and endogeneity tests corroborate the findings. The negative relation is stronger when acquiring firms have low governmental subsidy and environmental regulation, when firms have overconfident management, when firms are state-owned and when green M&A occurs locally or among provinces in the same region. This study also analyzes agency cost as an intermediary in the relationship between green M&A premium and firm value, which lends support to the agency-view hypothesis.

This study provides systemic evidence that green M&A premiums damage firm value through agency cost channel and the choice of CSR strategies from the perspective of acquirers. These findings enrich the literature on both the economic consequences of green M&A premiums and the determinants of firm value and provide a plausible explanation for mixed findings on the relationship between green M&A premiums and firm value.

This study developed new measures of the routine and non-routine task contents of managerial, professional, technical, and clerical occupations from a workload perspective. Here, we present a comparative analysis of the workload structures of state and industrial sector employees.

Our method involves detailed descriptions of work processes and an element-wise time study. We collected and analysed data to obtain a workload structure that falls within three conceptual task categories: (i) non-routine analytic tasks, (ii) non-routine interactive tasks and (iii) routine cognitive tasks. A total of 2,312 state and industrial sector employees in Kazakhstan participated in the study. The data were collected using a proprietary web application that resembles a timesheet.

The study results are consistent with the general trend reported by previous studies: the higher the job level, the lower the occupation’s routine task content. In addition, the routine cognitive task contents of managerial, professional, technical, and clerical occupations in the industrial sector are higher than those in local governments. The work of women is also more routinary than that of men. Finally, vthe routine cognitive task contents of occupations in administrative units are higher than those of occupations in substantive units.

Our study sought to address the challenges of using the task-based approach associated with measuring tasks by introducing a new measurement framework. The main advantage of our task measures is a direct approach to assessing workloads consisting of routine tasks, which allows for an accurate estimation of potential staff reductions due to the automation of work processes.

This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual entrepreneur cognitive characteristics contributing to social enterprise performance and recommended a framework for women's social entrepreneur development.

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study of 22 women founders of social enterprises using a semi-structured questionnaire. In-depth interviews were conducted, and the transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis.

This study found a significant impact of self-efficacy on the performance of social enterprises among the studied subjects. Social support in the form of material, information and emotional support enhanced the ability of women social entrepreneurs to better achieve business sustenance and continuance of operations. The business skills of the women social entrepreneurs led them to move from just social impact generators to becoming thought leaders. The strong prosocial motivation of the founders contributed to building their resilience in the face of adversity.

This study extended the existing theories on social entrepreneurship by bringing the dimensions of entrepreneurial resilience in driving social enterprise performance along with business skills. Thus, it provided an enhanced explanation to the existing body of knowledge on contributors to superior social enterprise performance.

This study gathered insights into the role of entrepreneurship education focused on business skills, especially for women social entrepreneurs in achieving superior performance for their social ventures. This also reconfirmed the role of social support and how structurally this could be provided by educational systems to aspiring women social entrepreneurs.

The practice of social entrepreneurship by women social entrepreneurs has been growing. Its importance in developing economies because of its ability to make grassroots changes at the lower levels of society was substantive. Women have shown more inclination toward social business with an affinity for prosocial contribution. By focusing on nurturing these social enterprises, governments as well as global agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum could accelerate social change. Furthermore, support for the current women social entrepreneurs as change-makers making a difference in society could be achieved.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research study was one of the first studies on women social entrepreneurs focusing on the factors of self-efficacy, social support and entrepreneurial resilience contributing to social enterprise performance. This study combined the social entrepreneurship intention theory with entrepreneurial resilience and business skills to understand the factors leading to successful social enterprise performance for women social entrepreneurs.