In response to the asking and requiring of stakeholders to be more environmentally responsible, firms must commit to green corporate social responsibility (CSR). Firms being green and responsible always can acquire intangible resources that are important for firm innovation. Given the scarcity of existing research addressing relevant issues in depth, this paper expands our understanding of green CSR by revealing its antecedent effects on firm innovation performance. We also include public visibility and firm transparency as contingency factors to explore the relationship between green CSR and firm innovation performance. Using data collected from publicly listed firms in China, we find that greater innovation performance is associated with an increase in firm green CSR, and the positive relationship between green CSR and innovation performance is moderated by public visibility and firm transparency. Based on the results, theoretical contributions and practical implications are outlined.

The global coronavirus pandemic has reignited a strategic debate among the business community of the necessity for corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement in the ever-dynamic social media. Considering the global economic downturn introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the present research is devoted to investigating whether CSR engagement in social media can help DiDi (a Chinese shared brand) at stake survive this overwhelming crisis. A theoretical model proposed to describe the hypothesized relationships was tested by a Structural Equation Modeling technique through the empirical online questionnaire. Through findings, we demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between CSR engagement of DiDi on WeChat, customer–company identification (C–C identification), and behavioral intention [purchase intention, brand loyalty, and e-word-of-mouth (eWOM)] of customers. With attention to psychological influence, our empirical statistics also evidenced the mediating role of C-C identification between CSR engagement and behavioral intention of customers. This study highlights the significant role of CSR engagement in a critical period theoretically and offers businesses more open innovation strategies to compete against the COVID-19 pandemic-induced market downturn.

Based on data from CHFS, this paper explores the mitigating effect of DFI development to enhance household entrepreneurship on residents’ income growth and asset poverty, and analyses whether there is significant diversity in the degree of impact between different regions and groups through a heterogeneity study. The study finds that DFI has a significant effect on poverty alleviation. In the mechanism analysis, the effect of DFI on income poverty and asset poverty alleviation through promoting household entrepreneurship is 2.97% and 9.27% respectively. In the heterogeneity, the development of DFI has a significant contribution to the alleviation of income poverty of rural residents and the alleviation of asset poverty of urban residents; among similar regions, the poverty effect alleviation effect is more pronounced for the group with higher education level. This paper enriches the research related to the promotion of entrepreneurship and thus poverty alleviation by DFI, and provides a theoretical basis and empirical reference for how to alleviate poverty by financial instruments.

Green development is an inevitable trend of sustainable development: how does it affect green economic growth as the main channel of green project financing and the core force of building a green financial system? The present article measures the relationship between green credit and sustainable economic growth using a benchmark regression analysis model and explores the main influencing factors and regional characteristics that affect the coupling development of green credit and sustainable economic growth by combining mechanism and heterogeneity tests. The results of the study show that: (i) Green credit has a significant positive contribution to sustainable economic growth. (ii) In terms of the transmission mechanism, industrial upgrading and environmental regulation have a significant impact on sustainable economic growth. (iii) In terms of heterogeneity, the effect of green credit on sustainable economic growth is the most pronounced in the west, followed by the central and eastern regions of China. The policy implications of this study are that green credit in China is an inevitable trend, and that a sound policy supporting the legal system and information communication mechanisms should be promulgated to ensure the effective allocation of resources, thereby promoting the coordinated, sustainable and stable development of environmental protection and the economy.

With the emergence and tremendous growth of text mining, a computer-assisted approach for capturing sentiment viewpoints from textual data is gradually becoming a promising field, particularly when researchers are increasingly facing the problem of filtering bunches of useless information without capturing the essence in the big data era. This study aims at observing and classifying the sentiment orientation in CEO letters, digging the main corporate social responsibility (CSR) themes, and examining the effectiveness of CEO letters’ sentiment on forecasting financial performance. A specific sentiment dictionary has been proposed to identify and classify the sentiment orientation in CEO letters by utilizing the appraisal theory. Additionally, the qualitative data analysis software NVivo is applied to explore the CSR topics. Furthermore, a modified Altman’s Z-score model and machine-learning approach are employed to predict financial performance. The results of preliminary evaluations validate that approximately 62.14% of the texts represent positive polarity even when companies are not in a promising economic situation. The CSR themes mainly focus on business ethical responsibility, particularly ethical activities. Among various machine-learning approaches, the logistic regression approach is appropriate for predicting financial performance with the state-of-the-art accuracy of 70.46 %. The encouraging results indicate that the sentiment information inCEO letters is a vital factor for anticipating financial performance. This work not only offers a new analytic framework for associating linguistic theory with computer science and economic models but will also improve stakeholders’ decision-making.

In an era of industrial transformation, manufacturing employees have faced significant threats (e.g., Artificial Intelligence technologies). Against such a backdrop, this study empirically examined the relationship between social responsibility toward the employees (CSRe) and career development sustainability, since non-contractual organizational supports are as important for employees’ career development as those outlined within contracts. We examined relevant issues in the Chinese manufacturing industry by using decision tree analysis coupled with grey relation processing. CSRe was conceptualized by four dimensions: working benefit, working environment, working hours, and training, while career development sustainability was captured from the perspectives of career growth and employability. The results indicated that four factors of social responsibility toward employees were positively associated with career growth and employability under career development sustainability. In addition, the strongest correlation was between training and career growth as well as employability. This study contributes by enriching the current research on corporate social responsibility from the standpoint of employees, and also generates implications for career development sustainability. Studying in a context of timely importance, this paper has practical implications for manufacturers to respond to the human resource dilemma under the impact of new technology, and thus could help employees embark on a long-term career path, which is conducive to socially sustainable development.