This paper uses the differential game approach to construct a model of cooperative emission reduction involving the government, manufacturing firms, and retail firms under different power structures. It is found that the dominant player receives more subsidies; the development of a mechanism for horizontal technology R&D among enterprises can reduce the financial pressure on the government to implement compensation strategies and improve the effectiveness and performance of supply chain emission reduction; and the government can develop differentiated subsidy schemes to achieve Pareto optimality in the supply chain and environmental performance based on different game strategies and revenue-sharing agreements by enterprises.

This study aims to understand the potential relationship between water vulnerability and corporate financial performance for listed companies in China. Studies have argued that water risk has begun to affect the sustainability of firms, but few studies have included water conditions in the research framework to examine whether and how water conditions have a direct impact on firms. In addition, studies on environment governance have emphasized the impact of government environmental regulation on firms. This study focuses on both regulation and government investments that have been previously neglected. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2016 to 2020, this paper uses pooled cross-sectional regressions with year and industry fixed effects to examine the effects of water vulnerability on corporate financial performance and analyze the mechanism of government water governance (which can be divided into water regulation and water investment) on the relationship between water vulnerability and corporate financial performance. This study finds that water vulnerability could negatively impact corporate financial performance, and water regulation can intensify but water investment couldn’t significantly relieve the negative impact. The relationships above differ between SOEs and non-SOEs and water-intensive and non-water-intensive industries.

Under the background of the water crisis, there has been much research on corporate water responsibility (CWR), a subfield of corporate environmental responsibility (CER). Studies on CWR and CER are mainly focused on isolated factors, such as institutional pressure, corporate features, and managerial perceptions, with a notable lack of consensus. These studies have largely ignored the complex relationship between different contributing factors; thus, the internal mechanism of the multi-level synergistic influence of such factors on CWR or CER remains unclear. Configuration theory forgoes consideration of the correlation between variables and instead analyzes the synergistic effect between variables from the perspective of set theory. Thus, this paper focuses on formal and informal institutional pressure, unabsorbed and absorbed CSR slack, and economic and ethical perceptions, and uses fsQCA to investigate the configurations contributing or unconducive to a high level of CWR from a configuration theory perspective. The results show that three configurations contribute and two configurations are unconducive to a high level of CWR. Managerial perception is foundational for implementing CWR, and ethical perception is a necessary condition for high-level CWR, while a lack of benefit perception contributes to a lower level of CWR.