This study examines stock market reaction to the announcement of various forms of seasoned issues in China. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that market reactions differ in ways that suggest a difference between management's internal assessment and the market's assessment of the stock price. The market responds unfavourably to the announcement, notably in the case of rights issues and also with regard to open offers. Private placements experience an unfavourable pre‐announcement reaction, which contrasts with the favourable reaction after the event. Convertible bond issues generate positive excess returns consistent with the market's confidence that they can help to align management and shareholders’ interests. Further investigation shows that market reaction is related to factors specific to the issuer and issue by reference to the period immediately surrounding the issue. Specifically, ownership concentration, agency matters connected with equity offerings, investor protection connected with fund allocation and security pricing, and the influence of powerful moneyed interests together provide an instructive insight into market reaction. Institutional inefficiency pertaining to underwriting, auditing, analysts’ forecasts and credit ratings are found to have a weak association with market price, consistent with due public scepticism concerning management and their gatekeepers.

The extensive literature on participative budgeting has paid little attention to the interaction among managers as they discuss and resolve budget-related issues. This study employs goal interdependence theory to explore the impact of team dynamics on budgeting. How managers believe their goals are related affects the dynamics and outcomes of participation. In a large utility in Hong Kong, 64 managers were interviewed on specific budget participation incidents. Results of structural equation analyses found support for the study¿s three main hypotheses. Budget team members who had cooperative goals were found to engage in more open-minded discussion in conflict situations. This resulted in improved group productivity and strengthened relationships which, in turn, led to higher-quality budgets. Results were interpreted as suggesting that the benefits of budget participation depends upon establishing strongly cooperative goals among team members and developing the skills to discuss opposing views open-mindedly. The antecedents of goal interdependence are also explored.

This article illustrates the causes of piracy and pinpoints piracy associated with registrations and with production and distribution. Based on interviews with British and American multinational managers working in China, the authors elaborate 10 corporate actions to counter the spread of the `inevitable curse¿. In order to implement these 10 strategies, the authors recommend that firms treat piracy as a challenge, be corporately proactive, be aware of the repertoire of possible strategies, investigate co-operative action with other companies, agencies and government and be continuously alert to the dynamic nature of piracy. The problems reflected here are common to multinationals operating businesses around the world, and the destructive nature of piracy is likely to encourage more academic study to yield further insights for practice.

The open door policy since 1979 highlights the globalisation process in China. Since then, all walks of life, and businesses have been affected by globalisation. One clear sign of the global impact is China¿s effort to move gradually from a country ruled by government to that ruled by law although this process is slow moving, especially from an enforcement perspective. This paper intends to study the change of intellectual property (IP) environment in China under the global trend of legal harmony. Objectively, this paper discusses and analyses four related topics¿the legal system in China, the rapidly expanding scope of IP, the evidential data and analysis of the IP activities, and finally, two cases highlighting practical aspects of IP.

A two-step modelling strategy is applied to a panel of 5,861 foreign-invested and 7,697 indigenous Chinese firms for the period 1998¿2001 to investigate whether export spillovers may represent a mechanism underpinning Dunning¿s Trade Development Path hypothesis. ¿ Such spillovers are found, and the results emphasize the importance of a wide spectrum of spillover channels involving labour mobility, spatial agglomeration, technological imitation and the diffusion of exporting experience. ¿ Multinational enterprises in China positively affect local Chinese firms¿ exports through various spillover channels, and inward FDI brings significant, indirect spillovers.

International Joint Ventures (IJVs) have become one of the most important ways for companies to expand their activities and exploit business opportunities abroad. In China, for example, which has become the world's largest recipient of Foreign Direct Investment, IJVs with local companies are the most important way of doing business. However, many companies have learnt that the performance of their joint ventures in China does not meet their expectations. This study focuses on functional diversity - differences in business practices between foreign and local companies - and its influence on IJV performance. We investigate the influence of this functional diversity on the performance of IJVs and discuss how companies can moderate this influence through adaptation, trust, commitment and communication. Hypotheses are formulated and empirically tested using data gathered through a questionnaire survey of managers of German-Chinese IJVs. The results show that although functional diversity has a negative impact on IJV performance, managers can influence the magnitude of this impact. We use insights from interviews with managers of German-Chinese IJVs in China to supplement our discussion and provide some indication of best practice.

This paper seeks to contribute to the existing business strategy and the environment literature by examining the effect of governance structures on environmental performance within a unique context of improving environmental governance, policies, regulations and management. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which corporate board gender diversity, including the proportion, age and level of education of female directors, affect environmental performance of Chinese publicly listed corporations. Using one of the largest Chinese datasets to-date, consisting of a sample of 383 listed A-shares from 2011 to 2015 (i.e., observations of 1,674), our findings are three-fold. First, we find that the proportion and age of female directors have a positive effect on the overall corporate environmental performance. Second, our findings indicate that the proportion and age of female directors also have a positive effect on the three individual environmental performance components, namely environmental (i) strategy, (ii) implementation and (iii) disclosure, respectively. Finally, and by contrast, we do not find any evidence that suggests that the level of education of female directors has any impact on environmental performance, neither the overall environmental performance measure nor its individual components. Our findings have important implication for regulators and policy-makers. Our evidence is robust to controlling for alternative measures, other governance and firm-level control variables, and possible endogeneities. We interpret our findings within a multi-theoretical framework that draws insights from agency, legitimacy, neo-institutional, resource dependence, stakeholder, and tokenism theoretical perspectives.