Feng He

This paper investigates the impact of changes in formal institutional infrastructure on corporate unethical decision-making. Using the establishment of circuit courts as a quasi-exogenous shock to China’s local judiciary, we find that improved judicial independence and impartiality significantly reduce corporate misconduct. This reduction is primarily observed in misconduct cases related to information disclosure and operational practices. Further analysis reveals that the establishment of circuit courts enhances external disciplinary pressure and fosters corporate ethical self-discipline. Cross-sectional heterogeneity tests show that this impact is more pronounced among firms with stronger political ties, higher information asymmetry, greater operational uncertainty, and weaker local ethical constraints. This study highlights that strengthening formal institutional infrastructure can deter unethical corporate behavior by restoring the flows of regulation and ideology from the external parties to firms, thereby realigning them with societal value.

Regulatory intervention is important in shaping corporate behaviour, especially in markets with relatively weak property rights. Using a sample of publicly listed companies in China from 2006 to 2021, this study investigates the impact of regulatory intervention in managers’ misconduct on the corporate idiosyncratic risk. Using a difference-in-differences design, we explore the idiosyncratic risk change after inspections of a manager’s misconduct to that of their counterparts who are not involved in misconduct activities. We find that inspections of corporate managers’ misconduct significantly reduce their firms’ risk by reducing investors’ heterogeneous beliefs and improving corporate transparency. This effect is more pronounced in firms with lower levels of information transparency and greater external attention pressure, suggesting that regulatory interventions could improve corporate information environment.

We examine the impact of a government-initiated CSR project on corporate misconduct using the unique setting of China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program. The difference-in-differences estimates show that firms participating in the TPA program engage in fewer misconduct activities than do their counterparts. This finding is robust to the parallel trends test, the placebo test, alternative regression specifications, alternative research designs, the reverse causality analysis, and the bivariate probit model with partial observability. Further analysis shows that TPA participation enhances the ability of external financial professionals to monitor performance by stimulating the dissemination of TPA-related incremental information, thereby contributing to the decline in corporate misconduct. The cross-sectional heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of TPA participation on corporate misconduct is more pronounced in firms with higher information asymmetry, with weaker political connections, and with weaker internal governance. Furthermore, we find evidence that TPA participation improves corporate financial performance but does not deteriorate information transparency.

Although big data analytics capability leads to competitive performance, the mechanism of the relationship is still unclear. To narrow the research gap, this paper investigates the mediating roles of two forms of resource integration in the relationship between two forms of BDAC [big data analytics management capability and BDA technology capability] and competitive performance. Supported by Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling and the cross-sectional survey data from 219 Chinese enterprises, the results show that the resource bricolage plays a significantly mediating role in the relationships between BDA management capability and competitive performance as well as in the relationship between BDA technology capability and competitive performance. Furthermore, the mediating effect in the former relationship is stronger than that in the latter relationship. Additionally, BDA technology capability only has a direct effect on resource bricolage, while BDA management capability has a stronger effect on resource optimization than that on resource bricolage. Finally, resource bricolage has a stronger impact on competitive performance than resource optimization. These findings contribute to understanding how enterprises could apply different forms of BDAC to other kinds of resource integration to achieve outstanding competitive performance.