CABE Research Seminar - Pulling You Up or Pushing You Out: Political Connections and Firms’ Export

PRESENTER Assistant Professor Zhengyu Li (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics)  
TOPIC Pulling You Up or Pushing You Out: Political Connections and Firms’ Export

DATE Friday 26 July 2019
TIME 10:30am – 12.00pm
VENUE The Spot (198 Berkeley St), Level 10, Room 10.039

ABSTRACT

This study examines the relationship between political connections and firms’ exporting strategies. As political connections not only can provide support but also can exert pressure to export, we argue that these two manifestations of political connections drive firms to export towards different foreign markets. Using a dataset containing the exporting behaviors of 1,052 Chinese public firms between 2005 and 2013, we find that local governments’ temporal orientation can shed some lights on the mixture of supports and pressures in firms’ political connections. Specifically, we document the following results: (1) Politically connected firms in more turbulent political environments export more to existing foreign markets. (2) Politically connected firms export more to new foreign markets when the local government leaders have longer career horizons. (3) The impacts of political turbulence and government leaders’ career horizon are weaker when local marketization level is higher.

BIO

Dr. Zhengyu Li is a CABE Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the College of Business, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE) in China. Zhengyu joined SUFE in September 2015 from Tilburg University, where he received his PhD in management. In 2014, he was a visiting PhD in strategy at the Ross School of Business, the University of Michigan. He is a Strategy Research Foundation (SRF) Dissertation Scholar of the Strategic Management Society (SMS).  His research interests include corporate governance, CEO compensation, corporate misconduct, inter-organizational relations, and multinational firms from emerging economies.