This paper examines whether the announcement of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) affects stock price crash risk and the mechanism by which the ESOP may influence crash risk, using a sample of Chinese A-share firms from the period 2014 to 2017. We provide evidence that an ESOP announcement is significantly and negatively related to a firm’s stock price crash risk. An ESOP announcement sends positive signals to the market that insiders are optimistic about a firm’s future value, which helps enhance investor confidence, resist the pressure for a fire sale caused by negative information disclosure, and reduce stock price crash risk. Further research shows that larger-scale, lower-priced and non-leveraged ESOPs are more helpful in reducing crash risk. This paper sheds lights on the impact of ESOPs in a volatile market environment. It also contributes to firms’ implementation of ESOPs and the development of the legal system in capital markets.

The platform economy is becoming an important engine for industrial innovation and economic growth. However, empirical research on how platform governance affects product performance through network externalities remains limited. Leveraging the perspective of platform ecosystems, this paper intends to empirically investigate the impact of platform governance on the product performance of complementors in the mobile application industry, based on firstly released apps on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Our study shows that complementors of free mobile applications on the weakly regulated platform, Google Play, perform much better than those on the strictly regulated platform, Apple’s App Store, due to the larger size of the installed base. However, complementors on the strictly regulated platform, Apple’s App Store, can take advantage of highly valued end-users on the demand side and higher degrees of product differentiation on the supply side to enhance their product performance. This is likely due to higher entry barriers for complementors, and better user communities for end-users. We suggest that higher competition efficiency and performance levels are linked to the platforms associated with strict governance.

This study uses the intrinsic bubbles detection method to identify housing bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market. By using sample period data from 1993 to 2019, the empirical results show evidence of intrinsic bubbles. Based on the unit root and co-integration tests, I found that there are no rational speculative bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market. Furthermore, by using the Granger causality tests of the corresponding asymmetric VECM specification, there is no causality from lagged changes in the rental price returns to changes in the property price returns. However, there is strong evidence to show that changes in the property price index returns can Granger cause changes in the rental price index returns.

Redundant online reviews often have a negative impact on the efficiency of consumers’ decision-making in their online shopping. A feasible solution for business analytics is to select a review subset from the original review corpus for consumers, which is called review selection. This study aims to address the diversified review selection problem, and proposes an effective review selection approach called Simulated Annealing-Diversified Review Selection (SA-DRS) that considers the semantic relationship of review features and the content diversity of selected reviews simultaneously. SA-DRS first constructs a feature taxonomy by utilizing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and the Word2vec model to measure the topic relation and word context relation. Based on the established feature taxonomy, the similarity between each pair of reviews is defined and the review quality is estimated as well. Finally, diversified, high-quality reviews are selected heuristically by SA-DRS in the spirit of the simulated annealing method, forming the selected review subset. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world e-commerce platforms to demonstrate the effectiveness of SA-DRS compared to other extant review selection approaches.

Drawing upon the knowledge-based view and team learning, we investigated how heterogeneity in top management teams (TMTs) in China influences global expansion strategies. Using panel data from Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2014, we found that TMT functional background heterogeneity could positively affect firms’ commitment to outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), as the diversification of TMT members can enrich the team’s knowledge, facilitate efficient team learning, and enhance the decision-making capacity on overseas expansion. However, tenure heterogeneity may hinder knowledge acquisition and team learning among TMT members, hence undermining firms’ OFDI commitment.