Large European Firms Research Articles

Effects of financial restrictions on firms’ financial resilience against the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from the European hospitality industry

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the tourism sector and the survival of hospitality firms. This study examines how hospitality firms’ financial characteristics prior to the outbreak of the pandemic determined their financial resilience. We analysed a sample of large European firms operating in the hospitality industry from 2016 to 2020. Using ordinary least squares, we find significant impacts of both COVID-19 incidence (negative) and the strength of the health system (positive) on firms’ financial health. Our results show that firms’ recent pre-COVID-19 profitability, leverage, tangibility, and liquidity histories are key drivers of their financial health in the presence of this exogenous and extremely negative shock. Furthermore, a contextual macroeconomic factor, the interest rate, introduced as a proxy for external financial restrictions, plays a key role in the effects of liquidity and debt on firms’ financial health. With higher interest rates, firms accumulated liquidity during the years prior to the pandemic, making them more resilient to the shock; in contrast, with lower interest rates, a history of limited leverage and tangibility contributed to making hospitality firms more resilient in 2020.

Impact of social media technologies on new product development performance: theory and empirical evidence

ABSTRACT In current unpredictable environments, it is essential to understand customers’ needs as quickly as possible. Social media platforms are important sources of knowledge and developing a social media capability is critical in quickly sensing customers’ requirements. Social media capability can enable firms to co-create internal knowledge between employees, functional departments, and business units and external knowledge with customers. Despite the potential of social media for innovation, prior research has not studied the internal processes that should be developed to manage and leverage the information obtained through social media. Drawing upon the IT-enabled organisational capabilities perspective and the social media affordances theory, this study proposes a research model on the impact of social media capability, social knowledge co-creation, and NPD dynamic capabilities on NPD performance. The research model was tested on a sample of large European firms using survey and secondary data. Results show that social media capability enhances NPD performance by enabling firms to co-create knowledge and developing NPD dynamic capabilities. This study contributes by: (1) operationalising and measuring social media capability and social knowledge co-creation; and (2) demonstrating how social media capability improves NPD performance by co-creating knowledge and developing NPD dynamic capabilities to develop new products.

Career patterns of top managers in Europe: Signs of further globalisation?

Investigating career patterns of top managers has been a prominent topic in European Management Journal (EMJ) since the 1990s. Our article contributes to ongoing debates about national differences in top managers' career patterns between European countries. An open question is whether globalisation processes may have challenged the existence of specific career patterns and whether they may have transformed the profiles of business elites in Europe. Our article uses recent data from four European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK), collected in a way similar to an EMJ article published in 2013, with the objective to assess potential developments that have taken place over the last decade. Some of the major changes relate to the growing relevance of business school degrees or certificates (such as MBA degrees), a higher proportion of non-nationals and women on boards, more managers with international experience and an increasing number of top managers with a prior career with auditing or consulting firms. The article provides not only new empirical insights, but also a review of the key characteristics of top managers’ careers, some methodological reflections on cross-national comparison and new research avenues at the cross-roads of career literature and upper echelons literature. By shedding light on the career patterns of key decision-makers in large European firms, the article offers new insights for researchers, educators and managers alike.

MANDATORY JOINT AUDIT AND AUDIT QUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EUROPEAN BLUE CHIPS

This study investigates audit quality under joint and single audit regimes with a sample of large European firms. Both, the economic relevance of these companies, and the fact that the impact of joint audit on audit quality should be stronger when the audited company is a blue-chip firm motivate the study. If mandatory joint audit were positively associated with audit quality, French firms, under mandatory joint audit since 1966, should present higher audit quality compared to their European peers. The results do not indicate this to be the case. Specifically, similar levels of discretionary accruals are observed for French and other European firms. Furthermore, for the first time in the literature, evidence is reported indicating that French firms may even present lower audit quality than their European peers, when audit quality is measured by the likelihood of just beating earnings benchmarks. These results are expected to inform the ongoing debate in several countries about joint audits.

Imposing versus Enacting Commitments for the Long‐Term Energy Transition: Perspectives from the Firm

Imposing versus Enacting Commitments for the Long‐Term Energy Transition: Perspectives from the Firm

Audit committee expertise in large European firms

PurposeThis paper aims to study how audit committee member expertise is related to certain features of the committee and to the audit process.Design/methodology/approachBased on information from 2,477 directors from 296 firms in eight European countries between 2005 and 2014, this study measures average audit committee expertise using a continuous variable, which combines education-based and experience-based expertise. Different measures of the audit process are then regressed against this and other control variables.FindingsAverage committee expertise has increased in recent years. Education-based and experience-based expertise seem to be complementary. Results also show that committees with greater expertise meet more frequently, have fewer directors with full-time dedication and pay lower audit fees. There is no link to changes in the external firm audit, which may be due to mandatory auditor rotation.Originality/valueThe paper provides a comprehensive metric of audit committee expertise that includes directors’ academic background, professional experience and qualifications. In addition, this study expands current knowledge concerning whether and how committee expertise affects the audit process.

ESG and CEO Turnover

We investigate corporate reactions to problems related to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues by observing the connection between negative media attention to these issues and CEO turnover. We use a sample of large US and European firms, which allows us to consider covariates not only at individual-, firm-, and industry levels, but also at the country level. We find that ESG-related negative news has a robust and significant impact on CEO replacement odds, and this impact is proportional to the severity of an event. Also, CEO turnover probability is inversely proportional to the stock market reaction to an ESG incident in both common-law and civil-law countries, however, the negative media attention on itself (shaming) can trigger CEO turnover only on latter group of countries.

Board‐level ethics committees in large European firms

AbstractAfter the approval of a code of ethics, the creation of a permanent board‐level ethics committee is the next step in the institutionalization of business ethics. This study explores how the board's structure and demographic characteristics explain the decision to form an ethics committee. The analysis is based on the constituents of the Standard and Poor's Europe 350 index. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that ethics committees are more likely to be found in firms with a lower presence of executive directors and of directors holding MBA degrees. However, we also observe that boards chaired by executive directors seem to favor the creation of an ethics committee. Additionally, as we had anticipated, firms with stronger agency conflicts seem to be more willing to create committees. The analysis conducted with segmented samples reveals that the model has greater explanatory power when applied to firms from common‐law and French civil‐law countries than when applied to firms from the German–Scandinavian civil‐law area. Finally, our results indicate that a firm's country of origin is a more influential factor in explaining the decision to create an ethics committee than the industry to which it belongs or even the magnitude of its agency conflicts.

It is Not Only What You Say, But How You Say It: ESG, Corporate News, and the Impact on CDS Spreads

We analyze a unique source of media data to assess the influence of different topics of corporate news on costs of financing for a sample of large European and US firms from 2006 to 2016. We distinguish between volume (number of news), tonality (positive, neutral, negative), source (financial and mass media) and focus on ESG and report the following results: (1) the volume of ESG related news is significantly associated with CDS spreads and therefore matters for companies’ refinancing costs; (2) news with positive (negative) tonality is associated with lower (higher) CDS spreads in the order of 5% (8%); (3) the tonality of ESG related news is even more pronounced leading to higher differences in CDS spreads. These results are robust in different subsamples, alternate specifications, and also in sensitivity tests to omitted variables. Overall, these results confirm the saying that it is not only what (ESG or Non-ESG) you (the media) say, but how (tonality) you say it.

Audit Committee Expertise in Large European Firms

Audit Committee Expertise in Large European Firms

The make-whole and Canada-call provisions: A case of cross-country spillover of financial innovation

Almost all North American callable corporate bonds carry a make-whole call option. We trace the evolution of the US make-whole callable bond to the Canada-call that predates it by over eight years. This cross-country spillover of financial innovation continued at a slow pace. Six years after the US market initial adoption of make-whole bonds, AT&T introduced it to Europe. More than 10 years later, large European firms started issuing this financial instrument. The benefits and optimal exercise of the make-whole call provision are described. We provide a simple analysis that indicates the possibility for the optimal exercise of the make-whole call even when traditional analysis suggests a negative NPV of calling and refinancing the bond. Given the possibility of optimal exercise even when the make-whole call is seemingly out-of-the-money, we demonstrate how the effect of incentive alignment between stockholders and bondholders lowers the issuer’s cost of including a make-whole call provision below the issuer’s expected benefit of having the option to utilize such provision.

Differences that matter: hiring modes and demographic (dis)similarity in executive selection

Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have long acknowledged the importance of understanding the antecedents of top management team (TMT) composition. Yet, research on how and why firms select executives who are demographically dissimilar to incumbent TMT members remains limited. We take a step toward answering these questions by employing a sample of 575 individual-level executive appointments at 170 large European firms between 2005 and 2009. Drawing on the person-group (P-G) fit perspective, we argue that firms are more likely to appoint socio-demographically dissimilar executives through internal promotion – while external hires are more likely to socio-demographically resemble incumbent top managers. Our results support the hypothesized relationship. They also show that this relationship is influenced by the level of administrative complexity and environmental uncertainty facing the firm. Overall, our theory and results enhance our understanding of why TMTs are composed the way they are, by highlighting the impact of internal and external hiring modes in the selection of demographically (dis)similar executives.

M&A effects on innovation and profitability in large European firms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on innovation and profitability in large European firms.Design/methodology/approachUsing information from a unique micro-longitudinal database of top European R&D investors and information from the European Commission (EC) Merger Control Authority, dynamic panel estimations with firm-level fixed effects are performed. Moreover, the paper presents a qualitative case study of a merger in the European electronic and electrical equipment industry.FindingsThe analysis of a sample of 562 M&As authorized by the EC Merger Control Authority shows that mergers positively influence the R&D intensity and profitability of top companies in the European Union over the period 2004–2012. Furthermore, empirical evidence shows that the timing and magnitude of these effects differs. In particular, the positive effect of mergers on R&D intensity is found for the short and large term while they influence profitability only in the large term.Originality/valueThis paper makes several contributions. First, unlike other studies on this topic, it investigates the effects of M&As using firm-level panel data on the top 1,000 European R&D companies instead of only examining a case study. Second, a unique data set has been used, which collects information on large European firms from the European Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and the EC antitrust authority. Finally, the paper accounts for the casual link between innovation effort and profitability when evaluating the potential effect of M&As on the R&D intensity and profitability of large European firms.

Exploration and exploitation within supply networks

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce and define the concept of purchasing ambidexterity in terms of two dimensions: balance dimension and combined dimension. The study proceeds to empirically examine the multiple performance effects generated for the buying firm and its key suppliers.Design/methodology/approachAmbidexterity theory informs the authors’ conceptual model. To test the hypotheses, the authors collected survey data from 95 purchasing functions of medium and large European firms and applied various estimation techniques.FindingsThis research indicates that ambidexterity substantially varies across purchasing functions. Further, it discovers that a purchasing function’s ability to advance the combined magnitude of exploratory and exploitative activities represents an essential determinant of supplier efficiency, supplier product innovation, and buyer financial performance. Notably, this research also discovers that balancing the magnitudes of exploratory and exploitative activities on a relative basis produces negative effects on the innovativeness of the supply network.Originality/valueAlthough ambidexterity theory has been applied to supply chain management, limited attention has been dedicated to purchasing ambidexterity. This gap led us to study how purchasing impacts the competitiveness of the buying firm and of its supply network by balancing and combining exploratory and exploitative activities. This research is the first to advance the notion of purchasing ambidexterity, unpack its underlying dimensions, and examine its multiple performance implications. Such a conceptual and empirical development presents new perspectives on how purchasing can help the buying firm and its supply network to strengthen their competitiveness.

Female directors, board committees and firm performance

A number of studies have found little economic impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. We return to this issue in the context of large European firms. Our contribution is twofold. First, using information on the gender of CEOs children as a source of exogenous variation in female director appointments, we demonstrate a robust positive effect of female board representation on firm performance. Second, while previous work has considered female representation broadly, we focus on membership of board committees as a proxy for active involvement in corporate governance. We demonstrate economically meaningful positive effects on performance of female representation on board committees. Our evidence is supportive of an economic rationale for increased female representation on corporate boards.

Guardians of the Previous Regime: Post-CEO Succession Factional Subgroups and Firm Performance

How can newly-hired CEOs compose their executive team to realize high performance? We attend to this question by drawing on the notion of factional subgroups. We propose that TMT change after a CEO succession event can promote the emergence of a factional faultline between executives hired by the new CEO, and executives who had been TMT members prior to succession (the ‘guardians of the previous regime’). Such faultlines will lead to destructive TMT processes and, thus, advance undesirable firm performance. We also argue that these detrimental effects of post-CEO succession factional faultlines will be stronger when: (a) the firm faced poor financial performance prior to succession, (b) the new CEO is hired from outside the firm, and (c) the incumbent executives shared a longer-term experience with the predecessor CEO. Data from 154 CEO succession events in large European firms between 2008 and 2013 support some of our hypotheses. Overall, our study contributes to upper echelons and strategic leadership research – by highlighting the importance of TMT reconfiguration after a CEO succession event.

Which came first, CEO compensation or firm performance? The causality dilemma in European companies

This study uses both a functionalist paradigm of social theory and agency theory assumptions to examine whether CEO remuneration is performance sensitive and, vice versa, whether companies that pay their CEOs more perform better. Our analysis is based on the sample of 330 large European firms for the period from 2009 to 2013. The findings of panel data analysis confirm that CEO compensation is positively associated with corporate performance, and vice versa. The simultaneous estimation, in which we treat both compensation and firm performance as endogenous using a two-stage least squares method, shows that companies tie bonuses to accounting-based measures and this incentive pay enhances corporate internal performance. However, compensation linked to market-based measures does not improve firm performance.

Impression Management and Non‐GAAP Disclosure in Earnings Announcements

AbstractWe study the market's reaction to the disclosure of non‐GAAP earnings measures that are combined with high impression management. We construct an impression management score that captures several communication techniques that managers often use to positively bias investors’ perceptions of firm performance. We hand‐collect and code both quantitative and qualitative information from earnings announcement press releases of large European firms. Our results indicate that non‐GAAP measures are informative to capital markets. However, non‐GAAP adjustments are more persistent when accompanied by higher levels of impression management. This evidence is consistent with managers attempting to distort users’ perceptions when non‐GAAP adjustments are of lower quality. Market reaction tests suggest that investors are able to see through managers’ intentions and discount non‐GAAP information that is accompanied by high impression management. Moreover, investors in more sophisticated markets penalize non‐GAAP measures communicated with high impression management. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests, including the use of a machine‐coded tone measure.

Female Directors, Board Committees and Firm Performance

A number of studies have found little economic impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. We return to this issue in the context of large European firms. Our contribution is twofold. First, using information on the gender of CEOs children as a source of exogenous variation in female director appointments, we demonstrate robust positive association of female board representation on firm performance. Second, while previous work has considered female representation broadly, we focus on membership of board committees as a proxy for active involvement in corporate governance. We demonstrate economically meaningful positive effect on performance of female representation on board committees. Our evidence is supportive of the economic rationale for increased female representation on corporate boards.

Are environmentally responsible firms less vulnerable when investing abroad? The role of reputation

Globalization allows multinational firms to locate strategically the polluting activities in lax countries. This paper revisits the empirical evidence by exploiting heterogeneity in firms’ environmental image. While locating in countries with weak environmental standards is likely to be detrimental for a firm’s image and reputation, investing in corporate environmental responsibility can help firms to convince consumers that they have good environmental practices, even when investing in the “dirty” countries. Exploiting an original database that records an index of environmental responsibility for large European firms, we find that the firms viewed as environment-friendly are more often than others located in countries with weak environmental regulations. We show that our findings are not likely to be driven by omitted variables bias, specific sectors nor particular countries. Interestingly, this relationship is observed only among the firms with a well-established reputation for environmental responsibility.