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The operational framework of external financing in the correlation between the gender of entrepreneurs and firm performance remains to be resolved. This study aims to investigate the mediating effect of external financing on gender-based disparities in private firm performance and to explore its heterogeneity within the Chinese context.

Based on national data from the 10th to 13th Chinese Private Enterprise Survey, this study used a bootstrap-based mediation effect model to analyze the role of external financing as a mediator in the relationship between entrepreneur gender and firm performance.

This study found that external financing is a constructive mediator between entrepreneur gender and firm performance. Heterogeneity analysis revealed that external financing plays a complementary mediation role in the impact of entrepreneur gender on performance in West China. In the tertiary industry, external financing acts as the sole mediator for the impact of gender on firm performance. Notably, this mediating effect is present in non-startups but not in startups.

The findings suggest that external financing can improve the firm performance of female entrepreneurs. Governments and policymakers should strengthen financial support for female entrepreneurs in West China, tertiary industry and non-startup enterprises.

This paper contributes to the literature on gender and corporate governance by shedding light on the mediating role of external financing in the relationship between the gender of business owners and firm performance.

In recent years, China's marine industry has maintained rapid growth in general, and marine-related economic activities have continued to improve. The purpose of this research is to analyze the basic situation of China's marine economy development, identify the problems therein, forecast development trends and propose policy recommendations accordingly.

This research conducts a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the development of China's marine economy with rich data in diversified aspects. The current situation of China's marine economy development is analyzed from the perspective of scale and structure, and the external and internal development environment of China's marine economy is discussed. With the application of measurement and prediction method such as trend extrapolation, exponential smoothing, grey forecasting and neural network method, the future situation of China's marine economy development is forecasted.

In a complex environment where uncertainties at home and abroad have increased significantly, China's marine economy development suffers tremendous downward pressure in recent years. As China has achieved major achievements in the prevention and control of the COVID-19 epidemic, the marine economy development will gradually return to normal. It is estimated that the gross marine production value in 2022 will exceed 10 trillion yuan. China's marine economy will continue to maintain a steady growth trend in the future, and its development prospects will remain promising.

This research explores the current situation and trends of China's marine economy development and puts forward policy recommendations to promote the steady and health development of China's marine economy accordingly.

This study aims to fabricate a cool phthalocyanine green/TiO₂ composite pigment (PGT) with high near-infrared (NIR) reflectance, good color performance and good heat-shielding performance under sunlight and infrared irradiation.

With the help of anionic and cationic polyelectrolytes, the PGT composite pigment was prepared using a layer-by-layer assembly method under wet ball milling. Based on the light reflectance properties and color performance tested by ultraviolet-visible-NIR spectrophotometer and colorimeter, the preparation conditions were optimized and the properties of PGT pigment with different assembly layers (PGT-1, PGT-3, PGT-5 and PGT-7) were compared. In addition, their heat-shielding performance was evaluated and compared by temperature rise value for their coating under sunlight and infrared irradiation.

The PGT pigment had a core/shell structure, and the PG thickness increased with the self-assembly layers, which made the PGT-3 and PGT-7 pigment show higher color purity and saturation than PGT-1 pigment. In addition, the PGT-3 and PGT-7 pigment showed 11%–16% lower light reflectance in the visible region. However, their light reflectance in the NIR region was similar. Under infrared irradiation the PGT-5 and PGT-7 pigment coating showed 1.1°C–3.4°C and 1.3°C–4.7°C lower temperature rise value than PGT-1 pigment coating and physical mixture pigment coating, respectively. And under sunlight the PGT-3 pigment coating showed 1.5–2.6°C lower temperature rise value than the physical mixture pigment coating.

The layer-by-layer assembling makes the core/shell PGT composite pigment possess low visible light reflectance, high NIR reflectance and good heat-shielding performance.

This paper aims to reveal the green governance role played by stock connect in transition economies from the perspective of corporates’ environmental violations and provides implications for the coordination and optimization of subsequent stock market liberalization and green transformation policies in pursuit of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

With the data of Chinese listed enterprises, this paper takes the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect or Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect in China as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) model to identify the impact of stock market liberalization on the corporates’ environmental violations.

The findings reveal that the stock market liberalization significantly restrains the corporates’ environmental violations. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity tests, including excluding two-way effects, adjusting the year of policy implementation, replacing the core variables, introducing the regional fixed effects and excluding the interference effect of other relevant policies during the sample period. Furthermore, the stock market liberalization is beneficial for upgrading information disclosure quality, improving internal governance capability, strengthening environmental protection incentives, and thus restrains corporates’ environmental violations. Meanwhile, heterogeneity tests show that the inhibitory effects are more significant in those grouped samples which is large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden.

We make two marginal contributions to the current literature. First, this paper enriches the literature on the factors influencing corporate environmental violations by focusing on how the macro-level financial policy influences the micro-level corporate environmental violations. One the one hand, prior studies mainly focused on the consequences of corporate environmental violations; however, there is still a puzzle that the effect of stock market liberalization cannot be fully justified to influence corporate environmental violations. The findings help explain this puzzle by examining that stock market liberalization can restrain corporate environmental violations. Moreover, prior studies mainly focused on corporate share price (Yunsen Chen et al., 2022), market liquidity (Han Kim and Singal, 2000), information disclosure (Liang, Lin, and Chin 2012), corporate governance (Bae and Goyal, 2010) and corporate violations (Lingyun Xiong et al., 2021), but not on corporate environmental violations. We assume that the suppression effect of stock market liberalization on corporate environmental violations can help reduce corporate environmental violations, improve corporates’ awareness of environmental compliance. Second, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the literature on stock market liberalization by investigating the restraining effect of Stock Connect on corporate environmental violations from the perspective of information channel, corporate governance channel and motivation channel, which is of practical significance. Moreover, we investigate the differences in the inhibitory effects of stock market liberalization on different enterprises' environmental violations, from firm size, property rights, enterprise assessment results, tax burden to geographical location, which is conducive to the construction of a green financial system and the promotion of sustainable economic development. Our results show that firms which are large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden tend to compliance with environmental laws. These findings emphasize the importance and benefits of Stock Connect.

Using Chinese A-share listed firms between 2007 and 2020 with 21,380 observations, we aim to examine the impact of cross-ownership on firms’ innovation output and explore the underlying mechanisms.

To test the influence of cross-ownership on firms’ innovation output, this paper constructs an ordinary least square regression model. The explained variables are firms’ innovation output, including the total number of patent applications (Apply) and the number of invention patent applications (Apply_I). Considering the long period of patent R&D, we take the value of the explained variables in the following year for regression. Cross-ownership (Cross) is the explanatory variable; Control is the control variable; and ε is the regression residual term.

We find that cross-ownership significantly promotes corporate innovation output, indicating that cross-owners play an important role in “collaborative governance.” This finding remains unchanged after conducting a series of robustness tests. We also find that cross-ownership contributes to innovation output mainly through two plausible channels: the relaxation of financing constraints and reducing both types of agency costs. Further analysis shows that cross-ownership has a more pronounced influence on innovation output in those firms with higher equity restriction ratios and facing more competitive markets. Moreover, cross-ownership has a profound impact on firms’ innovation quality and innovation efficiency, thereby increasing firm value.

This study provides important policy implications. First, cross-owners should actively play their resource and supervision advantages to improve firms’ long-term development capability through the “collaborative governance” effect. Second, listed companies in China should be fully aware of the value of the cross-ownership and use the cross-ownership as a bridge to strengthen the cooperative relationship with firms in the same portfolio. Meanwhile, they need to pay attention to cross-ownership’s “collaborative governance” effect to provide an impetus for the healthy development of enterprises. Finally, government regulators should maintain appropriate supervision of the cross-ownership linkage in the market.

Our findings show that cross-ownership significantly contributes to firms’ innovation output, indicating that cross-owners play the role of “collaborative governance.” While paying attention to the collusion effect of the cross-ownership, they shall not ignore its governance effect, for example, the promotion effect on the innovation level. Government regulators should appropriately supervise the cross-ownership linkage, which is conducive to maintaining the market order and driving the healthy development of the capital market.

Live streaming commerce, a new form of social commerce where firms integrate with broadcasters, community members and customers in live chat rooms for real-time interaction to help sell products, has become increasingly popular. However, factors that impact the success of live streaming commerce are not fully explored. The purpose of this study is to examine these factors by exploring the relationships among customer trust (i.e., trust in broadcasters, community members, and products) and customer engagement, and the mediating role of swift guanxi.

The authors surveyed 422 customers who have watched Taobao Live, one of the largest live streaming commerce sites in China, and used their questionnaires to test the research model employing partial least squares modeling.

The authors’ results indicate that trust in broadcasters has a positive effect on trust in products and community members, which positively influences trust in products. Additionally, swift guanxi has a fully mediating effect on the relationship between customers' trust in broadcasters and customer engagement.

First, from the theoretical perspective, this study comprehensively identifies three types of trust, explores the transfer relationships among trust in broadcasters, community members, and products based on Trust Transfer Theory. In addition, this study examines the mediating influence of swift guanxi on the relationship between customer trust and engagement. Second, from the managerial perspective, the study provides insights to help broadcasters and practitioners use live streaming to facilitate shopping.

This paper aims to help hosts or service providers of sharing economy-based accommodation (SEA) to attract new customers and retain existing customers by exploring the antecedents and outcomes of customers’ participation intention.

A questionnaire-based empirical study was conducted to explore the proposed relationships in SEA. Partial least squares modeling with SmartPLS was used to estimate the model and interpret the results.

The study shows that personal factors (utilitarian and hedonic motivation) positively influence customers’ participation intention. The relationship between environmental stimuli (perceived information fit-to-task and perceived visual appeal) and participation intention is negatively moderated by hedonic motivation. Furthermore, the results suggest a positive effect of participation intention on customer engagement behavior and the partial mediating role of experience evaluation.

This paper provides industry practitioners of SEA with valuable insights on attracting new customers and retaining regular customers. First, they can distinguish customers in terms of motivation and provide information based on their requirements. Second, they can encourage customers to evaluate their experience and provide feedback, which would help in promoting the accommodation and service and building a long-term and harmonious relationship with the customers.

This study first investigates the interaction effect of personal motivation and environmental stimuli on participation intention in SEA. It further examines the influence of participation intention on customer engagement behavior and the mediating role of experience evaluation.

本论文旨在帮助SEA(共享经济住宿)的民宿老板或服务提供者, 通过探索顾客参与和契合的影响因子和反应变量, 来吸引新顾客以及保留老顾客。

本论文采用问卷形式实际调研, 探索SEA中的各种假设关系。本论文采用SmartPLS软件, 使用PLS分析法来检验模型以及展示分析结果。

本论文结果表明, 个人因素（功利与享乐需求）正向影响顾客参与。环境因素（感知信息适合和感知视觉吸引）与参与意愿之间被享乐需求负向调节。此外, 结果还表明参与意愿对于顾客契合行为有着正向作用, 以及体验评价的部分中介效应。

本论文为SEA企业从业人员提供如何吸引新顾客以及留住老顾客的宝贵见解。首先, 顾客根据需求和基于他们的需求所提供的信息可进行区分。第二, 企业主应该鼓励顾客评价他们的体验和提供反馈, 从而帮助提高住宿服务以及建立与顾客长期和谐的关系。

本论文首先调研了个人需求和环境刺激对SEA参与意愿的相互作用。其次, 本论文还检验了参与意愿对于顾客契合行为的作用, 以及体验评价的中介效应。

It is unattainable that entrepreneurs engage equivalent resources in public and private morality because of the limitation of resources. This study aims to conduct experiments to test how entrepreneurial deviation in morality affects legitimacy perception of consumers to entrepreneurs.

This study conducted secondary data analysis and experiment to test how entrepreneurial deviation in morality affects legitimacy perception of consumers to entrepreneurs.

The experimental results show that entrepreneurial deviation in morality negatively affects legitimacy perceptions of consumers to entrepreneurs. Specifically, when public moral is higher than private moral, consumers have negative perceptions of pragmatic legitimacy to entrepreneurs, because consumers perceive deviation behaviors disobey the norm “Li”. However, entrepreneurial private morality excels public morality, consumers have negative perceptions of social legitimacy to entrepreneurs because consumers perceive deviation behaviors disobey the norm “Qing”. Moreover, the authors examined entrepreneurial values moderate the effects of moral deviation and legitimacy perceptions.

This study expands the ethical marketing of entrepreneurs from the perspective of the deviation between public morality and private morality.

Thriving brand communities are inseparable from engaged members and their word-of-mouth behavior. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which customer experience elevates customer engagement and consequent word-of-mouth intention in online brand communities, and how.

From the perspective of service ecosystem theory, a framework with several hypotheses was proposed. The model was verified with structural equation modeling based on questionnaire data collected from smartphone communities in China.

Empirical results indicate that customer experience promotes community engagement, and further enhances word-of-mouth intention. Furthermore, the mediating effect of community engagement in the relation between customer experience (social support and flow) and word-of-mouth intention has been verified.

This paper informs practitioners about the importance of experience co-creation with community members in brand and community promotion, and provides several implications to encourage more engaged customers with fostering pleasant customer experiences.

This study contributes to the theory of service ecosystem by empirical examination of its several propositions in a brand community context. The paper extends the present theory with the discussion of the mediation effect of community engagement in the continuing value co-creation process.

Virtual worlds are a typical form of social network syndication. Although the future of the virtual world phenomenon seems bright, not all efforts have succeeded. Therefore knowing how to motivate users and keep them continually engaged and visiting is an important challenge for those who create and manage virtual world websites. This paper aims to address these issues.

The present study proposes a conceptual model from technological, entertainment and social perspectives to examine the determinants affecting users' intentions in their virtual worlds usage. Recognising that human behaviour varies according to different social roles, this study investigated four social roles (habitual, active, personal and lurker), and 729 valid data samples were collected from the Chinese virtual world, i‐Partment. Partial least square and multi‐group analysis were performed to measure the research model.

The results of this study indicate that ease of use, usefulness, social presence and enjoyment are important factors of virtual worlds usage. This study also confirms that social presence and enjoyment are influenced by platform‐based and sociability‐based interactive quality, with sociability‐based interactive quality having a much higher impact on social presence than platform‐based quality. Moreover the proposed model demonstrates different intensities of explanatory power for users' usage intentions according to four social roles, and the results of this study indicate different but insightful findings for each of the four social roles.

The virtual worlds practitioners should strive to launch creative and new recreational information or functions on a regular basis to make users' experiences enjoyable. In addition practitioners should initiate special activities or festivals to promote social interaction and devise rules to encourage users to spend more time on the virtual world websites. Moreover virtual world websites must be easy to use – with a user‐friendly interface, smooth moving lines and clear and understandable information – and provide useful functions.

This paper is one of the few studies that compares and analyses the behavioural models of different social roles, and suggests that virtual world website practitioners should make use of these findings and provide flexible services to fulfil different users' special needs.