Research indicates that there is a positive relationship between organization-based self-esteem and in-role performance. The intervening process that creates this relationship, however, has not been investigated. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine employee learning behavior as a process between organization-based self-esteem and in-role performance. Additionally, this study examines perceived delegation as a boundary condition of a positive relationship between two variables. The sample size consisted of 293 employees from a Korean company, and the study findings revealed that employees’ learning behaviors mediate the relationship between organization-based self-esteem and in-role performance. Further, perceived delegation moderated the strength of the mediated relationship. Therefore, this study provides implications for how human resource practitioners and their organizations could support volitional learning behaviors through formal training, development-focused performance feedback, and the creation of new work experiences and learning opportunities.

We analyze how Hollywood films from 1928 to 2016 represented business within a broad historical and business context. We argue that the films actively contributed to audiences’ sensemaking processes and to how different groups perceived the role of business in society. We advance the idea that films provided cultural blueprints to be used by viewers for their own understanding, identification, and practices in relation to business in its historical context, particularly during periods of uncertainty, crisis, and instability when many films addressed deeper societal concerns about the role of business.

Moral obligation, reciprocity, and affection contribute to the development of strong interpersonal relationships. An indigenous notion in Chinese culture, jiangyiqi, captures these three component principles of strong relationship development in one concept. Jiangyiqi has been held anecdotally as a common code of conduct for building strong, trustworthy relationships in China. We explore the possible integration of these three components of interpersonal relationships in Chinese society in our introduction of the construct of jiangyiqi, based upon Confucian ethics and the circles of relationships delineated in past literature on Chinese societies. Drawing from social exchange theory as well as the perspective of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology, we propose that jiangyiqi makes an individual a good candidate for developing strong non-kin relationships. We discuss the managerial implications of jiangyiqi for relationship building in a Chinese cultural context.

This article studies whether knowledge protection affects shareholder value and firms’ investment in knowledge assets using the staggered adoptions and rejections of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as exogenous changes in the level of knowledge protection. We find positive (negative) abnormal stock returns around the IDD adoption (rejection) day for firms headquartered in the state, and we uncover a positive IDD treatment effect on firms’ investment in knowledge assets. Moreover, the effects on stock returns and knowledge assets investment are stronger in more knowledge-oriented industries and firms. Finally, enhancing knowledge protection does not discourage local entrepreneurial activity.

We use a multitude of tax reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries as natural experiments to estimate the market value of the tax benefits of debt financing. We report time-series evidence that tax reforms are followed by large changes in the value of corporate equity. However, the impact of tax reforms is greatly mitigated by the presence of leverage. The value of debt tax savings is greater among top taxpayers, among highly profitable firms, and in countries where tax laws are more strongly enforced. Importantly, the value of debt tax savings is in line with the benchmark implied by a traditional approach.

Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence of bank identity and traces the historical roots of a financial identification society to the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.

Extant spillover literature explains domestic firms' productivity change mainly by the presence and attributes of foreign direct investment. In contrary, this paper, by adopting a routine-based model of absorptive capacity, intends to explore how domestic firms absorb spillovers over time. Based on a qualitative study of a domestic firm in China's silicone adhesive industry, the findings show that unbounded by geographical constraints, domestic firms enact their external absorptive capacity routines to actively search for spillovers from multinational enterprises (MNEs) at both national and international levels. Moreover, rather than searching for what is available, domestic firms are selective for spillovers that are coherent with their business strategies. The most unexpected finding is that domestic firms diligently acquire spillovers from MNEs and from local competitors in combination. Spillovers acquired from local competitors are used to increase the inferential accuracy of spillovers acquired from MNEs about strategic successes. Further, instead of absorbing spillovers from MNEs which pose moderate technology gaps, domestic firms target at MNEs which exhibit wider technology gaps, and undertake organizational learning and develop complementary assets to enhance their internal absorptive capacity routines. Socially enabling mechanisms are found to facilitate domestic firms' absorption of spillovers by employee turnover.

In this paper we review the benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) made to support applications for authorisations under the EU’s REACH Regulation on hazardous chemicals. Experiences from over 100 cases suggest that there are a number of informational and methodological challenges to overcome in these BCAs. In particular, we find that many REACH applicants have had problems explaining the societal relevance of the regulatory impacts expected to affect them and other market actors. Adapting the framework for regulatory impact assessment proposed by Dudley et al. [(2017). Consumer’s Guide to Regulatory Impact Analysis: Ten Tips for Being an Informed Policymaker. Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 8, 187–204], we discuss these impacts from a welfare economics perspective and make suggestions on how to improve current practices in BCA applied to chemicals risk management. From this discussion we then distill a number of topics that deserve more attention in applied BCAs under the REACH Regulation.

We study the effect of antitakeover provisions (ATPs) on innovation. To establish causality, we use a regression discontinuity approach that relies on locally exogenous variation generated by shareholder proposal votes. We find a positive, causal effect of ATPs on innovation. This positive effect is more pronounced in firms that are subject to a larger degree of information asymmetry and operate in more competitive product markets. The evidence suggests that ATPs help nurture innovation by insulating managers from short-term pressures arising from equity markets. Finally, the number of ATPs contributes positively to firm value for firms involved in intensive innovation activities.

We investigate whether short sellers contribute toward the informational efficiency of market prices by trading on their private information or destabilize market prices by trading on rumors and false information. We find that short-selling activities are considerably informative about future stock returns when there is a higher likelihood of private information in stocks, as measured by insider-trading activities. Short sellers also bring considerable additional information to the market that is not fully captured by contemporaneous insider trading. Overall, these results suggest that on average, short sellers bring informational efficiency to market prices rather than destabilize them.

We investigate potential mechanisms through which market-wide sentiment affects firms’ innovation activities. We provide evidence for the financing channel by showing that financially constrained firms are more likely to issue equity and invest more in research and development (R&D) than financially unconstrained firms at high market sentiment. Using time-varying manager sentiment measures, we find suggestive evidence for a sentiment spillover channel whereby market sentiment affects R&D investments through influencing manager sentiment. Furthermore, better patent portfolios are produced from R&D investments stimulated by high market sentiment. Market sentiment has a stronger impact on R&D than the capital expenditures of financially constrained firms.