Events

Prof. Ilya Cuypers
Associate Professor of Strategic Management
Lee Kong Chian School of Business
Singapore Management University

Following extensive investigations into the implications of political ties for firms, researchers have more recently started to study how such ties also impact society. This direction reflects broader changes in the world at large and in management research, where grand challenges are receiving greater attention. We advance this vital area of inquiry by proposing an integrative framework to synthesize the mechanisms that link political ties to firms’ polluting behavior (i.e., bridging, buffering, and binding) and identifying an important contingency (i.e., level of the government). We then apply this general framework to the context of China to derive hypotheses that predict contrasting implications of a firm’s political ties for its pollution, depending on the level of the government to which these ties connect the firm. In line with our hypotheses, we find a positive association between having high-level political ties and firm pollution, but a negative association between having low-level political ties and firm pollution. Our study advances the political ties literature by synthesizing the implications of political ties in multi-tiered governments and contributes to the growing research on grand challenges.