The increasing number of migrants returning from developed countries has become a global trend. This study examined the impact of executives’ overseas experience on the corporate pay gap from the perspective of cultural differences. Using publicly available data collected manually from listed Chinese firms concerning executives’ overseas experience from 2011 to 2018, we found that executives’ overseas experience was positively associated with both internal and external pay gaps. Additionally, the higher the number of executives with overseas experience, the higher the pay gap. These findings highlight the effects of cultural differences on corporate governance.

The pharmaceutical industry is typically driven by innovation, and is relevant to people’s livelihoods. How to effectively motivate pharmaceutical enterprises to engage in innovative activities is a hot topic. On the basis of the perspective of the combined effect of tournament theory and social comparison theory, this study explored the impact of internal compensation gap on corporate innovation by using data from China’s listed pharmaceutical enterprises during 2011–2018. The findings show a nonlinear (inverted-U-shaped) relationship between compensation gap and corporate innovation within the pharmaceutical industry, which illustrates that the role of the compensation gap is not endless. We also find the optimal compensation gap between executives and employees. Further analyses indicate that this association is more pronounced in regions with low marketization levels, and in large enterprises. Moreover, the practical significance of the results is explored with an expectation of providing theoretical references for the pharmaceutical industry to establish reasonable incentive mechanisms and promote innovative development, and for the government to introduce innovation incentive policies.

The innovation and development practices of the pharmaceutical industry are of great importance for the continual enhancement of public health. Industrial clusters are one of the important means by which the pharmaceutical industry can be transformed and developed, but there is a lack of research on the evolutionary path and development innovation of pharmaceutical industrial clusters. As a country with a major pharmaceutical industry, the transformation and development path of traditional pharmaceutical industrial clusters in China has important reference value for the sustainable development of the global pharmaceutical industry. Through an analysis of the evolution of traditional pharmaceutical industrial clusters in Shijiazhuang, this study explores the law of the dynamic evolution of pharmaceutical industrial clusters and the associated mechanisms. Specifically, we conclude that the evolutionary path of traditional pharmaceutical industrial clusters can be divided into the government-led pharmaceutical industrial cluster start-up stage, the government-guided pharmaceutical industrial cluster development stage, and the government-served pharmaceutical industrial cluster transformation stage. The operating mechanisms include a self-organization mechanism, an innovation-driven mechanism, and an outward associated mechanism, each of which plays different roles in the different stages of the dynamic evolution of the cluster, and the synergistic operation of the three mechanisms forms an important basis for the evolution of pharmaceutical industrial clusters. We found that the innovation development of traditional pharmaceutical industrial clusters is influenced by the synergy of the self-organization, innovation-driven, and outward associated mechanisms. The self-organization mechanism is a necessary condition for pharmaceutical industrial clusters to realize the transition from disorder to order. The innovation-driven mechanism is the core driving force for the innovative development of pharmaceutical industrial clusters. Finally, the outward associated mechanism is the main means by which pharmaceutical industrial clusters integrate into the global value chain.