Abstract: By using Chinese data, this paper proposes to investigate the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and corporate environmental performance in an emerging economy, and further investigate the moderating effect of regulatory stringency, competition, and agglomeration. The debate between pollution haven hypothesis and trade up hypothesis has not been resolved conclusively, and we are attempting to provide empirical evidence in support of trade up hypothesis by utilizing the differences in FDI and environmental performance at the subnational level. By combining the provincial level environmental performance data with firm level data on output, location, and foreign investment status, we also propose that regulatory stringency, competition, and agglomeration moderates the relationship between FDI and corporate environmental performance.

Abstract: Although research exhibits that firms can benefit from improving employee wellbeing at work, investment in employee wellbeing inevitably carries related costs. Consequently, firms are at variance with each other in terms of investment in employee wellbeing due to different benefit-cost calculus. In this paper, we argue that firm institutional embeddedness has a profound impact on their propensities to make investment in employee wellbeing because the level of institutional embeddedness bears a direct relationship with stakeholders’ perceptions of firm behaviors and such perceptions have a profound influence on institutional isomorphic pressures that firms receive in host institutions, which in turn influence firms’ decisions to invest in employee wellbeing. We integrate institutional theory and social comparison theory to argue that the level of institutional embeddedness has a curvilinear relationship with firms’ investment in employee wellbeing and the curvilinear relationship is moderated by firm-level and institutional-level contingencies.

Abstract: This study investigates the heterogeneous organizational responses to one government regulation by highlighting the role of multiple institutional logics, with their conflicting guidelines for organizational attention as well as governance structure which helps organizations to process institutional complexity. We argue that although firms that are targeted by the new government regulation are more likely to comply, while their responses are conditioned by the existing institutional complexity and governance structure. We test our argument by studying how Chinese publicly listed firms respond to the central government’s regulations on issuing CSR reports between 2008 and 2010. Our study contributes to the literature on institutional logics, research on how organizations respond to institutional pressures and CSR in transitional economies.