In recent years, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors have played an increasingly important role in how companies are evaluated and how investment decisions are made. While much of the existing research has focused on developed markets and broad, market-level data, this study looks more closely at industry differences within China’s A-share market—a setting where ESG practices are still evolving. Using firm-level time series regressions on data from around 3,000 listed companies between 2010 and 2020, this study identifies 198 firms where ESG ratings are significantly linked to annual stock returns. The results show a clear positive relationship in infrastructure and resource industries, where ESG activities often align with long-term growth. In contrast, companies in the consumer services sector tend to show negative correlations, likely due to higher costs, price sensitivity, and brand-related risks. Manufacturing firms show mixed outcomes, pointing to uneven ESG adoption. These findings add new insight to the ESG debate in China and offer useful guidance for investors, regulators, and company leaders.
As a key component of China’s financial market for effectively achieving risk hedging, price discovery, and serving the real economy, the gold futures market has seen a steady rise in trading activity in recent years. However, irrational trading behaviors among investors—such as chasing price surges and selling during dips, as well as excessive short-term speculation—remain prominent. The "rational man" assumption in traditional financial theory struggles to explain such phenomena, while theories related to "bounded rationality" and "behavioral biases" in behavioral finance provide a fresh analytical perspective for dissecting these market issues. Drawing on publicly disclosed data from authoritative institutions including the Shanghai Futures Exchange and the China Futures Association, this study conducts a systematic analysis of the behavioral bias characteristics of investors in China’s gold futures market from three core dimensions: herd effect, prospect theory bias, and anchoring effect. It identifies the amplifying role of market mechanism defects and lagging regulatory education on these behavioral biases, and puts forward targeted countermeasures such as optimizing the investor structure, improving market operation mechanisms, and building a behavior-oriented regulatory system, thereby offering support with both theoretical value and practical significance for promoting the steady development of the gold futures market.
Employee motivation is critical for organizational performance, particularly in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), where cross-border collaboration, cultural diversity, and institutional differences present unique challenges. Further research is needed to understand how corporate governance moderates the impact of employee motivation on organizational outcomes in this context. This study integrates core employee motivation theories (Self-Determination, Two-Factor, Equity, etc.) within the GBA context. Through case analyses of Huawei, Citigroup, and a Hong Kong social welfare initiative, it investigates how intrinsic, extrinsic, and public service motivation impact organizational performance. The research emphasizes OCB's mediating effect and corporate governance's moderating role. Findings suggest all three motivation types effectively stimulate OCB, boosting organizational performance, but potential downsides exist. Corporate governance significantly moderates this, providing adaptable institutional support, stabilizing motivation-performance transformation, and mitigating OCB's negative impacts. Future studies could quantify varying moderating effects of governance dimensions and broaden samples to explore limits.
Set in the post-pandemic era, this paper examines how the ownership structure influences financial recovery in Macau's integrated resort sector. It compares the local resort SJM with a composite group of four foreign-invested competitors from 2020 to 2024. Drawing on Dynamic Capabilities theory, the study links a profitability–liquidity–risk triad to sensing, seizing and reconfiguring processes.The results indicate a long-term asymmetry in the post-pandemic era: compared to SJM, the foreign-versus-SJM group has a higher profitability, improves the efficiency of their operations more significantly, restores the interest-coverage of their investments more thoroughly and maintains a higher year-end value.These results support three ownership-based hypotheses and suggest that heterogeneity in dynamic capabilities, rather than demand recovery alone, is a key driver of post-crisis financial trajectories in Macau's integrated resorts.
