Xiaolan Zhou’s research while affiliated with East China Normal University and other places

Listed companies have long faced difficulties in both their global investment strategies and corporate governance improvement, while they are supposed to pay more attention to their sustainable development performance. The complex linkages between these three make the choice of corporate strategy a challenge for public companies. Given the economic downturn in the post-pandemic era, the challenges for listed companies are likely to be even more acute. How companies weigh the relationships between these three and how to ensure the implementation of a global investment strategy that effectively meets sustainable development are pressing challenges. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during 2010–2018, this paper empirically examines the relationship between corporate sustainable development performance, global investment reflected by outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), and corporate governance reflected by equity incentives with econometric tools. We show the positive effects of OFDI on corporate sustainable development performance and discover the crowding-out effect of equity incentives, which challenges the view of equity motivation. These findings are robust. We further explore the heterogeneities in terms of industries and regions. We finally provide some useful implications on how to coordinate the global investment and internal equity incentives to improve corporate sustainable development performance.

In the post pandemic era, most of the countries are facing challenges in economic recovery, while investing in creative human capital such as teachers by increasing their salaries can be one of the policy options for governments to drive development. Housing price, however, may impact the working of these policies. Using the panel data of 31 provincial regions in China during 2006–2018, we evaluated the relationship between housing price, the improvement in teacher salary, and sustainable regional economic development. From the perspective of imbalanced regional development, we discovered the heterogeneity in the rate of return on education investment in terms of teacher salary. Higher teacher salary plays a more active role in the sustainable development of underdeveloped regions, and the crowding-out effect of housing price in Western China is the most intense. The results further provide some policy implications on efficiently promoting the coordinated development of sustainable regional economies by improving the creative human capital cultivators’ salaries. This paper verifies the significance of housing price dynamics from a new perspective based on educational investment. Overall, our study provides theoretical support for improving teachers’ income to promote regional economic development and further provides guidance for the government to carry out macro control to promote regional economic development with changes in housing price dynamics. Our study aims to link land systems, particularly the housing market, to sustainability and public policy.

With the rise of user-generated content (UGC) and deep learning technology, more and more researchers construct and measure the tourism destination image (TDI) through online travelogues. However, due to the impact of COVID-19 prevention and control, the number of online travelogues has decreased significantly and, therefore, the scientific validity of the TDI based only on text or photos has been questioned. This research fills a gap by comparing the differences between visual and semantic images in terms of the overall image perception and image formation through natural language processing technology and image caption technology in obtaining TDIs, taking Tiantai County in Zhejiang Province of China as a case. Our results show that the texts and photographs shared major similarities in the overall TDI, but from the perspective of interest, they reflect differently. Therefore, when considering the data source selection for TDI research with a small number of travelogues, texts should be the main content, supplemented by photographs.

Innovation is an important recovery strategy for Micro and small Enterprises (SMEs), which are expected to play an important role in the economic recovery and redevelopment in the post-epidemic era. We empirically explore how industry associations impact SMEs’ innovation decisions using China Micro and Small Enterprise Survey data. We find that industry associations’ information sharing support is possibly weakly dominant in promoting SMEs’ innovation decisions in general. The information-sharing support and institutional support are almost equally important for hard product or technical innovation, while industry associations’ information-sharing support weakly dominates institutional support for soft innovation. The most important channel for soft innovation in organization, services, marketing or culture is likely to introduce potential customers. We provide policy suggestions on how to guide industry associations to effectively help SMEs’ innovations.

The fast fashion industry is criticized for its unsustainable development. With the rise of the green economy and the awakening of consumers’ awareness of sustainable consumption, more and more companies realize the significance of green marketing in improving brand performance. However, it is undeniable that many fast fashion companies tend to take advantage of information asymmetry and cover up the unsustainable part of their business activities through fake green marketing campaigns to gain more potential consumers. There is a limited number of green marketing studies investigating consumers’ perception of greenwashing, while it is naturally important to explore the demand side responses to greenwashing in different industries. Therefore, this paper examines whether and how consumers’ perception of greenwashing in the fast fashion industry impacts their green purchase intention. The study explores the mediating role of perceived risk and the moderating role of consumers’ impulsive buying. In this paper, 433 valid questionnaires are collected from mainland China, and the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation (PLS-SEM) is used to test the hypotheses. We draw the following conclusions: (1) consumers’ perception of greenwashing in the fast fashion industry has a direct negative effect on their green purchase intention; (2) greenwashing perception has an indirect negative effect through consumers’ risk perception, including financial perceived risk and green perceived risk; (3) consumers’ impulsive buying in the fast fashion industry reinforces the positive effect of greenwashing on their financial risk perceptions as a moderating variable. The conclusion of this paper has implications for the sustainable development of China and other emerging economies, which highlights the importance of pursuing information symmetry in green marketing to reduce consumers’ perceived risk and encourages companies to make substantial, sustainable development initiatives.

This study is to empirically investigate the impact of urbanization through improving transportation infrastructure, reflected by introducing high-speed rail (HSR), on the regional development with the interaction of the socioeconomic factors reflected by industrial structure. An advanced quantitative tool named multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) method is applied. We find the impact of urbanization through HSR on regional development is mixed while interacting with industrial structure helps to explain heterogeneities of the impact. The more the industrial structure tends to be agricultural, the greater the negative impact of HSR opening on regional economic development; meanwhile, the more the industrial structure evolves to be service-oriented, the greater the positive impact of HSR. This study highlights the importance of the interaction between urban growth and socioeconomic factors, which would provides a reference for government and urban planners to make decisions on introducing HSR or improving transportation infrastructure.

In the post-pandemic era, companies are facing challenges in their business development and may pay fewer attention to their sustainable development performance, whereas the investors are looking for better corporate sustainable development. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during 2010–2018, this paper empirically examines the relation between corporate sustainable development performance, investor sentiment, and managerial overconfidence with econometric tools such as panel data regression and S-GMM estimation. Three kinds of corporate sustainable development activities as measured by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) indexes, including consumer rights, employee benefits, and environmental protection, are proved to have a positive impact on investor sentiment. Compared to the SME and GEM Board, investor sentiment in the Main Board is less affected by corporate sustainable development. Furthermore, investor’s high sentiment leads to high managerial confidence in the SME and GEM Board, and managerial overconfidence is self-correcting over time. This paper illustrates why maintaining good corporate sustainable development performance is beneficial for listed companies from a new perspective.

This paper studies the protectionist effect of a non‐trade policy — a consumption tax — compared to that of a tariff on the Chinese automobile market. Our empirical findings suggest that both the consumption tax and the tariff can protect domestic automakers’ market shares, but they can only shift a small portion of demand from imported cars to domestic cars. This demand exclusion is caused by the weak substitution between imported cars and domestic cars, and it is the underlying reason for the welfare loss caused by both the tariff and the consumption tax. A change in the consumption tax favorable to domestic manufacturers is equivalent to an additional 28% tariff, beyond the explicit 25% tariff, in terms of its protective effect on domestic manufacturers’ market shares.