The mystery of zombie enterprises——‘‘stiff but deathless”

Drawing on social exchange theory,this study uses data on China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2016 to examine why zombie enterprises are‘‘stiff but deathless."We?nd that these enterprises are able to‘‘linger breathlessly"due to government support in the form of increased subsidies and bank loans.The government is more inclined to grant subsidies to zombie companies that assume greater policy burdens,speci?cally those offering more jobs.Furthermore,an enterprise’s property rights do not in?uence the level of‘‘blood transfusions"received,and government assistance fails to bolster operating effciency or value.This phenomenon is further explored in the context of the incentives local government offcials have to maintain employment stability.Our conclusions highlight the necessity and urgency of cleaning up zombie enterprises.

Who Drives Environmental Governance of Enterprise:Official Tenure Evaluation or Five-Year Plan Target Assessment?

Based on the non-financial listed enterprises data from 2000 to 2014,this paper calculates the level of environmental governances of enterprises with environmental investment,and empirically analyzes the impact of provincial official tenure and Five-Year Plan target assessment on the environmental governance of enterprises.The results show that the enterprise environmental investment presents a significant periodic trend in the Five-Year Plan,while the trend is not significant in official’s tenure.The further test suggests that with the clear requirement of“environmental performance”incorporated into the performance evaluation system of local government officials,it has become significant in the periodic trend in the impact of officials’tenure on environmental investment.In contrast,the trend has become less prominent in the Five-Year Plan,which indicates that there is a substitute relation between the two evaluation systems.The mechanism test also finds that both environmental subsidies and pollution abatement expenditures present a significantly periodic trend in the Five-Year Plan.And official’s tenure plays a regulatory role in the Five-Year Plan periodic trend in the environmental governance of enterprise,showing that it is more significant when the time about officials’tenure evaluation is earlier than Five-Year Plan target assessment.The above results indicate that it is beneficial to improve local environment governance from the perspective of top institutional design by both strengthening the environmental evaluation.

Corporate Donations in China： A Strategic- Political Perspective

This paper explores how the influences corporate donations, based on political identity of top managers upper echelons theory （UET）. The results show that the political identity of the top manager has a significant impact on the donation behavior of a company, especially in areas with poor institutional environments. Corporate donations depend not only on whether the top manager has a political identity but also the type of this identity. Furthermore, the impact differs significantly between companies with different ownership structures. This study enriches our knowledge of corporate philanthropy by demonstrating that corporate donation practices are shaped by a range of contextual factors. Corporate giving behaviors in emerging economies such as China are differently motivated according to the fundamentally different aspects of their institutional settings.