学术论文

We investigate how U.S. firms adapt their supply chains in China in response to geopolitical risks from the U.S.–China rivalry. We offer a legitimacy-efficiency balancing perspective to understand firm decisions. We hypothesize that to maintain legitimacy with the home government, U.S. firms in strategic industries are more likely than those in non-strategic industries to align with the U.S. government’s derisking strategy by limiting suppliers in China. However, we expect this tendency to weaken for firms with high economic dependence on China. Analyzing firm-level supplier data from 2009 to 2022, we find that the gap in the number of Chinese suppliers between strategic and non-strategic U.S. firms has widened since 2017 (the first Trump administration). Firms in strategic industries maintain fewer Chinese suppliers, potentially reflecting a more cautious approach. This disparity was initially pronounced only among Republican-leaning firms but later extended to firms across the political spectrum under the Biden administration. The gap diminished among firms with greater reliance on China for revenue or supplies, suggesting that efficiency considerations might temper the inclination to align with national strategies. Thus, U.S. firms might seek to balance political legitimacy at home with the economic benefits derived from China when making supplier decisions.

We examine the relationship between competition and reward practices in the public education sector. We hypothesize and find that school principals who face more intense competition make greater use of performance-based financial rewards and apply greater differentiation in its distribution between higher versus lower performing teachers. However, we do not find similar evidence for nonfinancial rewards. Further analyses suggest that financial rewards help attract and retain teachers in the face of competition. We also hypothesize and find that, as competition intensifies, principals direct incentives toward student outcomes that are easier to measure and communicate (student achievement) as well as their key determinant (teacher competence), relative to outcomes that are harder to measure and communicate (student well-being and engagement). Our findings suggest that school principals view financial incentives as effective for gaining a competitive edge and that competition can influence the relative importance they place on different student outcomes.

This paper addresses the fundamental task of estimating covariance matrix functions for high-dimensional functional data/functional time series. We consider two functional factor structures encompassing either functional factors with scalar loadings or scalar factors with functional loadings, and postulate functional sparsity on the covariance of idiosyncratic errors after taking out the common unobserved factors. To facilitate estimation, we rely on the spiked matrix model and its functional generalization, and derive some novel asymptotic identifiability results, based on which we develop DIGIT and FPOET estimators under two functional factor models, respectively. Both estimators involve performing associated eigenanalysis to estimate the covariance of common components, followed by adaptive functional thresholding applied to the residual covariance. We also develop functional information criteria for model selection with theoretical guarantees. The convergence rates of involved estimated quantities are respectively established for DIGIT and FPOET estimators. Numerical studies including extensive simulations and a real data application on functional portfolio allocation are conducted to examine the finite-sample performance of the proposed methodology.

We exploit the implementation of a rural pension policy in China to estimate the average rural-to-urban migration cost for workers affected by the policy and the average underlying sectoral productivity difference. Our estimates, based on a large panel data set, reveal significant migration costs and substantial sectoral productivity differences, with sorting playing a minor role in accounting for sectoral labor income gaps. We construct and structurally estimate a general equilibrium household model with endogenous labor supply and migration. The results of this model align with the reduced-form findings and illustrate how the rural pension policy influences migration, GDP, and welfare through improving within-household labor allocation. Counterfactual analyses based on the model show that the positive effects of the policy remain even if migration costs were significantly lower, and that scaling up the rural pension policy would lead to even larger improvements in labor allocation, GDP, and welfare.

Previous studies have shown great interest in examining the performance impact of platform-based functions (PBFs) used by e-marketplace sellers and the contingent role of salient variables, such as seller reputation, in the e-marketplace. Their findings, however, are fragmented and inconsistent, as they generally focus on the net, separate effect of a single PBF with debatable findings. The theorization of how sellers should configure multiple types of PBFs as a whole to achieve high sales performance lags far behind the booming competition practice. To identify an effective PBF combination, this study takes a configurational perspective to identify appropriate PBF configurations that can achieve high sales performance for sellers with different product positions and reputations. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of a longitudinal data set of over 3,300 apparel sellers in a large e-marketplace yields interesting findings. The configuration results reveal recipes for PBF combinations for achieving high sales performance that vary across different levels of seller reputation and product positioning strategies. Our configuration findings suggest that sellers should configure PBFs according to distinctive product strategies accompanied by seller reputation conditions, where the resulting PBF configurations play an essential and multifaceted role in achieving high sales performances. Interestingly, our configuration analysis uncovers that for reputable sellers offering high-priced products, the utilization of pricing and marketing functions is counterproductive. Additionally, we observe complex interplays between after-sales functions and online reputation, characterized by complementary, substitutive, and independent relationships. Furthermore, our results demonstrate an asymmetry relationship between high and low sales configurations. It contributes to the emergent investigation of causal complexity in competitive strategy studies of e-marketplace sellers and provides specific causal recipes and holistic guidelines for sellers and platform operators.

Online retailers often confront the problem of order cancellation due to customers’ poor satisfaction with their online purchase decision, termed as choice satisfaction in this study. However, very little e-commerce literature has addressed customer choice satisfaction, and none, to our knowledge, has investigated how to design product display interfaces to achieve it. Drawing from choice closure theory and eye and vision research, we examine how product display orientation of an online shopping web page affects customers’ choice satisfaction upon purchase. We propose that a horizontal (versus vertical) display of comparable products on an e-commerce website is more positively related to customer choice satisfaction by promoting a higher level of choice closure (a psychological process by which online customers come to perceive a decision as completed and settled). Through five carefully designed experiments (including one using an eye-tracking device), we find that online customers achieve a higher level of choice satisfaction from an assortment of comparable products displayed horizontally than vertically on e-commerce websites. This effect results from the fact that a horizontal product display increases the amount of comparisons customers make between product options prior to making a purchase decision and consequential sense of choice closure after the decision. We also find that a cue of finality (e.g., adding a textual note “The end” to the product display) can largely attenuate this effect. The implications for online retailers’ product showcase strategies are discussed, along with future research directions.

We document an increase in market power for politically active firms during times of heightened policy uncertainty, when their information and influence advantage is greater. The effect is long-lasting and stronger for large politically active firms. We show that relatively large investments during high uncertainty periods serve as a potential mechanism for gains in market power. Industries populated with politically active firms experience lower business dynamism and import penetration, consistent with active firms leveraging investment timing to restrict competition. Results suggest that political activism is a likely contributing factor to the dominance of large firms over the last two decades.

This paper studies whether investor composition affects the sovereign debt market. We construct a data set of sovereign debt holdings by foreign and domestic bank, nonbank private and official investors for 101 countries across three decades. Compared with other investors, private nonbank investors absorb a disproportionate share of the debt supply, and their demand for emerging market debt is most price responsive. A counterfactual analysis of emerging market sovereigns shows a 10% increase in debt leads to a 5.8% yield increase but an outsized 8.4% increase without nonbank investors. We conclude that sovereigns are vulnerable to the loss of nonbanks.

The literature on psychological contracts has focused on employees’ perceptions of their employers’ obligations, but not on employees’ perceptions of their own obligations. Hence, perceived general obligation has seldom been theorized. This study argues that workplace support (i.e., from the organization, supervisors, and coworkers) and morally relevant traits (i.e., moral identity, conscientiousness, and agreeableness) predict perceived general obligation, that perceived general obligation predicts performance outcomes, and that the effects vary across cultures. Meta-analytic data collected from 148 samples (N = 45,671) provide preliminary support for the proposed relationships. I also examine the incremental validity of perceived general obligation in predicting performance outcomes beyond other correlates (e.g., normative commitment, positive and negative affect), the mediating role of perceived general obligation in its nomological network, and alternative models for linking the study variables. This study therefore illustrates the value of perceived general obligation in psychological contract research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)