No abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) restrictions, including national lockdown, social distancing, compulsory quarantine, and organizational measures of remote working, are imposed in many countries and organizations to combat the coronavirus. The various restrictions have caused different impacts on the employees' mental health worldwide. The purpose of this mini-review is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on employees' mental health across the world. We searched articles in Web of Science and Google Scholar, selecting literature focusing on employees' mental health conditions under COVID-19 restrictions. The findings reveal that the psychological impacts of teleworking are associated with employees' various perceptions of its pros and cons. The national lockdown, quarantine, and resuming to work can cause mild to severe mental health issues, whereas the capability to practice social distancing is positively related to employees' mental health. Generally, employees in developed countries have experienced the same negative and positive impacts on mental health, whereas, in developing countries, employees have reported a more negative effect of the restrictions. One explanation is that the unevenly distributed mental health resources and assistances in developed and developing countries.

Purpose“Metaverse” has become a buzzword in the Chinese stock market. However, it remains unclear whether a firm's metaverse-related announcements will elicit positive stock market reactions. Whether and how stakeholder reactions are influenced by a firm's metaverse-related readiness also needs to be further explored. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.Design/methodology/approachThe authors derived a set of factors based on readiness theory and business ecosystem literature and extend them into the context of the metaverse. The authors used a sample of 642 Chinese listed firms in 2021 to investigate the hypotheses through the event study.FindingsThe study’s findings show that metaverse coverage induces a positive stock market reaction, but it is subject to three moderating effects. The authors introduce the novel concepts of IT readiness, ecosystem readiness and digital infrastructure readiness as the moderators. Stakeholders perceive metaverse announcements as overhyped, and stock prices do not fluctuate significantly after a metaverse announcement when the listed firms are not ready to embrace the metaverse.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first that introduces the event study method into the metaverse research, and it reveals that different levels of readiness influence stakeholders' evaluations and reactions to corporate metaverse coverage. This provides empirical evidence on metaverse development in China from the stock market's perspective.

Corporate environmental investment has long been recognized as a non-market strategy that helps secure both economic and social benefits. However, we know much less about how environmental investment affects corporate innovation. We argue that investment in environmental protection is an important source of institutional legitimacy for firms to secure government resources, thus providing financial support for corporate innovation activities. Using a sample of Chinese industrial firms, we find that firms investing more in environmental protection can receive more government subsidies and then have better innovation performance. This study emphasizes the mechanism of government resources, which enriches our understanding of the effect of environmental investment on corporate innovation.

The media is viewed as an external mechanism of corporate governance in a large body of literature. In agenda-setting research, the media can exert influence on corporate emissions behavior by controlling the public and government agenda. However, it is unclear whether such effect will be influenced by the regional institutional environment. The authors construct a theoretical framework including different types of media and corporate environmental behavior, which is used to investigate the impact of institution informatization on the media agenda-setting effect. The authors then used a sample of Chinese industrial enterprises from 2011 to 2014 to test this hypothesis. The empirical results reveal that both printing and electronic media elicit improvement on corporate environmental performance. Institutional informatization can significantly enhance the disincentive effect of electronic media on corporate emissions, while the moderating role in the relationship between printing media and corporate emissions is not significant.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanism of the role of government subsidies on corporate environmental investment and explore how specific characteristics of firms affect corporate environmental responsibility.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines the relationship between government subsidies and corporate environmental investment and models with a sample of 78,854 industries. The authors measure the corporate environmental investment by the natural logarithm of the volume of waste gas treatment facilities.FindingsThe results show the positive effect of government subsidies on corporate environmental investment. In addition, state ownership positively regulates the relationship between government and corporations, but the relationship between them is negatively regulated by the slack resources.Practical implicationsWhen people are increasingly concerned about corporate social and environmental responsibility, clarifying the link between government subsidies and corporate environmental investments can help policymakers formulate policies and allocate limited resources.Originality/valueThis study uses the resource-based view as a theoretical framework to reveal the mechanism of action between government subsidies and corporate environmental responsibility, enriching the previous literature that explores the issue based on the legitimacy perspective.

Although existing research has discussed the impact of market strategy or non-market strategy on corporate legitimacy thoroughly, there is limited research on the joint role of the two strategies. Based on the big data analysis of media coverage, this study addresses this research gap by using a sample of Chinese listed firms during 1999–2018. Our finding reveals that positive media coverage promotes corporate financial performance, and advertising intensity and corporate donation strengthen this relationship. However, the simultaneous application of market and non-market strategies diminishes the effect of both strategies on the expansion of corporate legitimacy. This study extends the literature on the impact of corporate strategies on corporate legitimacy by highlighting the joint role of the corporate market and non-market strategies.

The impact of religion on business has attracted cross-academic attention in recent years. Does the religious atmosphere impact corporate social responsibility (CSR)? This study addressed this question using a sample of Chinese-listed companies from 2010 to 2018. Our findings reveal that firms in regions with a Taoist-dominated religious atmosphere are more charitable and less environmentally invested. In contrast, firms with a Buddhist-dominated religious atmosphere are more ecologically engaged and less charitable. This study extends the literature on the impact of the informal institutional environment on corporate social responsibility by distinguishing the heterogeneity of the impact of Buddhist- and Taoist-dominated religious atmospheres on CSR. It also provides a new perspective for enterprises to formulate corporate social responsibility strategies based on the regional cultural environment. And it also enriches the application of informal institutional theory to the fields of management and religion.