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The purpose of this study is to examine the role of retail investors’ green attention in promoting corporate environmental investments (EIs) using a communication sample on “Hudongyi” from 2011 to 2022.

In this paper, Python is used to capture data and text analysis techniques to obtain green attention information. In the word-matching process, words are matched in the target document one by one based on the preset dictionary and vocabulary rules. In addition to employing fixed effects, this study also incorporates instrumental variables using two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation and applies the Heckman two-step method to verify the regression results.

First, this paper empirically examines the positive influence of retail investors’ green attention on EIs. Second, the findings show that retail investors’ green attention promotes EIs through decreasing principal-agent costs and principal-principal costs. Third, the results show that retail investor’s supervision effect is strengthened under the following three circumstances: executives with stronger green conception, corporations with less information asymmetry and areas with higher level of investor protection.

Our findings broaden the scope of prior research by exploring the impact of retail investor activism on nonfinancial outcomes, contributing to understanding the “black box” of how investor attention fosters EIs. Moreover, by leveraging the power of technology, retail investors have evolved from being the “silent majority” to being actively engaged. The internet has empowered retail investors by providing them with access to information and enabling them to exercise “voice” rights by appealing companies to engage in pro-environmental activities. Our study can provide useful suggestions for the green development of listed companies in China, as well as in other emerging countries.

Unlike other studies that focus on the deterrent effect and corporate financial outcomes of retail investors, we focus on the supervisory effect of retail investors and verify its role in driving EIs. This fills the knowledge gap in prior studies and contributes new insights to explain EIs and extends the understanding of retail investor activism.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of customers' environmental concern on corporate green innovation and its underlying mechanisms.

This study empirically examines the impact of customer environmental concern on corporate green innovation using 967 company-customer-year observations of Chinese A-share listed companies over the period 2012–2022.

The empirical results show that customer environmental concern significantly enhances corporate green innovation. Furthermore, executive environmental awareness and research and development (R&D) investment play a partial mediating role in this relationship. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that state-owned customers, customers located in the same province with the corporate and the intellectual property model cities contribute to strengthening this relationship. Moreover, corporate performance analysis shows that customer environmental concern can significantly increase corporate financial performance and sustainable performance.

This study innovatively proposes a measure of customer environmental concern and examines its impact on corporate green innovation and its underlying mechanisms. In addition, this study also proposes some insights for policymakers.

This study aims to elucidate the causal relationship between corporate greenwashing and celebrity leaders.

This study considers winning the National Model Worker Award as an external shock for producing celebrity leaders and conducts a difference-in-difference (DID) estimation with listed companies from 2009 to 2022 in the Chinese context.

The findings indicate an increase in greenwashing of companies with celebrity leaders in the post-award period. Stakeholder pressure can moderate the effect of celebrity leaders on corporate greenwashing.

This study enriches the research on the antecedents of greenwashing and the impacts of celebrity leaders. The findings advance the understanding of the real effect of celebrity leaders on environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts and provide new insights into how celebrities respond to legitimacy pressures.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in assisting firms in their response to public emergency crises under the integrated view of government emergency response.

Using event study and survival analysis method, the authors examine whether CSR can act as a stock price stabilizer for companies from China by splitting the stock price fluctuations into two phases – CSR price insurance, which decrease the shock on stock prices during the emergency crisis, and CSR price recovery, which helps stock prices rebound faster during the postcrisis phase.

The authors’ empirical results confirm the stabilizer role of CSR during crisis and that effective government response can strengthen such effect. Furthermore, the authors examine the different aspects of the government’s response and the impact of multiple waves of public emergency.

This study provides empirical evidence on the topic of CSR and the government’s response to public emergency under the emerging context.

This study aims to explore whether investors’ inattention is associated with firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) decoupling, which is defined as the misalignment between the implementation and incorporation of ESG policies.

Focusing on a sample of the components of ESG ratings for China Securities Index (CSI) 300 companies between 2017 and 2019, the authors test the relationship between firms’ ESG decoupling level and mutual fund investors’ distraction by applying exogenous shocks to their portfolios.

The results show that firms with distracted mutual fund investors engage in more external than internal ESG actions, leading to a high ESG decoupling level. Mutual fund investors use “threat of exit” rather than “voice” as a governance mechanism to influence corporate ESG decoupling. While external ESG actions mitigate stock price crash risk, internal ESG actions increase firm value; firms with a high ESG decoupling level suffer lower valuations.

This study has implications for increasing the congruence between firms’ external and internal ESG actions, thereby improving firms’ ESG performance and long-term economic outcomes.

This paper helps policy-makers and regulators to reassess how ESG policies can be implemented to be consistent with organizations’ core business activities.

Contributing to prior studies of greenwashing and corporate social responsibility decoupling, this paper extends decoupling literature by revisiting ESG impacts in an integrated framework and explores the antecedents of corporate ESG decoupling from the perspective of institutional investor monitoring.

Philanthropy is taken as a strategic behavior by private enterprises to obtain financial resources from governments. This paper aims to examine the relationship between private enterprise philanthropy and the debt finance, further investigating the way by which governments exchange resources with private enterprises.

The paper opted for an empirical study using a sample of 1,489 Chinese private-listed companies from 2007 to 2010. The study analyzed the relationship between philanthropy and debt finance based on the resource dependence theory and social exchange theory and tested the moderating effect of political connection.

Philanthropy can help private enterprises to get the debt finance, and this effect occurs mainly among the political connected private enterprises; the higher degree of credit allocation marketization is, the less philanthropy can affect the debt finance and the less influence political connection can exert on that relationship. Philanthropy contributes to debt financing mainly because it can help obtain more long-term loan, and this effect is more obvious for politically connected private enterprises in regulated industries.

This paper verifies the action logic of private enterprises philanthropy from the perspective of exchange behavior, which is helpful to understand the motive and influence of private enterprises philanthropy.

In recent years, the quality and environment of global corporate governance have drawn attention from researchers and practitioners. Based on the public information of Chinese listed companies (CLCs), the Evaluation Research Group of China Academy of Corporate Governance at Nankai University developed the first corporate governance index system that includes six dimensions to evaluate the status of the governance of CLCs.

This paper reports the findings of the annual evaluation in 2017.

The authors found that five of the six dimensions of CLC governance index increased, except for shareholder governance index. Management-level governance and information disclosure index increased most significantly.

Through the evaluation, the authors discovered some governance problems of CLCs and proposed some corresponding suggestions to improve the effectiveness of corporate governance of these companies.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the characteristics, efficiencies and interaction of many alternative market governance modes, by the approach of comparative institutional experimentation.

First, a highly simplified model of market economy is developed, which is embedded in a three‐layer governance structure. Then the model is transplanted into laboratory experimentation, so the characteristics and efficiencies of different governance modes can be identified by observing the subjects' behaviors under them.

The experimental results show that the market with governance structure based on rule is more efficient than the market with governance only based on long relation and based on preference or belief, and the dynamic improvement of governance based on rule has a destructive effect on the governance based on relation and governance based on preference or belief.

These results have profound implications for the development or enhancement of market institutions in transition or developing countries.

The widespread family businesses play an important role in the national economy of developed countries in Europe and North America, or of developing countries in East Asia. However, family business succession is a worldwide difficult problem. The innovative family business succession practices of Robert Bosch GmbH, the German family company which has a history of 130 years (1886-2016), basically follow the trend of evolving from family businesses to social enterprises after further socialization. However, it has its own innovation and uniqueness which is worthy of reference by Chinese family businesses.