As the Covid pandemic underscores global supply chain risks, there is a debate on whether to bring US manufacturing back from overseas. This paper provides insights into the heated debate on the global supply chain by examining the competitive manufacturing environments of China, Japan, and South Korea.More specifically, we conduct a cross-national survey and empirically investigate the manufacturing strategies employed by manufacturing managers in the top Asian players: China, Japan, and South Korea. We examine four dimensions of the manufacturing strategies: quality, inventory, flexibility, and top management involvement. Our findings indicate that Japanese manufacturers are more committed to the cumulative approach to quality management and see enhanced flexibility as a strategic priority. While Chinese managers are also committed to achieving quality, they are more delivery-driven and thus are more likely to occasionally accept slightly off-quality components from suppliers to "save" an order. However, in all three countries, managers with a high focus on quality also focus on just-in-time management and in turn, on flexibility. There is significantly less agreement among Chinese managers, compared to their Japanese and Korean counterparts, that the top management should be involved in operational planning, goal setting, and the provision of rewards.

This paper investigates whether the market values risk factor disclosures in the context of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and how the involvement of top‐tier investment banks affects the association. We complement previous research on risk factor disclosures by suggesting that the inter‐organizational relationship between companies and investment banks they hired in M&A transactions affects investors’ perceptions of M&A risk factor disclosures. Specifically, we find that while M&A risk factor disclosures are positively related to the firms’ market value, the involvement of a reputable investment bank advisor negatively moderates this relationship. Our research demonstrates that M&A risk factor disclosures are informative and the investment bank advisor as an intermediary would affect investors’ perception of the acquirer's risk factor disclosures. The study provides implications for regulatory policies relating to risk disclosures, which should be of interest to regulators, investors, and managers.

In 2018, California became the first state in the US to require gender diversity on public corporate boards in the state, and since then board gender diversity is a hot debate in the US. To provide timely evidence on this issue, we investigate the relation between corporate board diversity and financial performance and how shareholders' board gender diversity proposal impacts firm performance in the US. Consistent with the resource dependence theory and social identity theory, our findings show that the overall relation between board gender diversity and firm performance presents an inverted U-shaped nonlinear form. That is, when the corporate board becomes more gender-diverse, the gender-diverse board could incorporate different knowledge and non-redundant information in the decision-making process and gain a competitive advantage due to a better firm image of diversity. This indicates a positive effect of board diversity on corporate performance. However, while board diversity level reaches a turning point, the dysfunctional group processes (conflicts, miscommunication, and loss of trust caused by distinctiveness among different gender groups) outweigh the positive influences from gender diversity on firm performance through the deterioration of the quality of board decisions, showing that a negative relation between board diversity and firm performance emerges and becomes dominant. In addition, investors' active engagements through proxy proposals enhance the positive effect of diversity and alleviate the negative effect of diversity. Our study provides a different conceptual lens to evaluate the impact of board gender diversity on firm performance and provides insights for regulators to make proper decisions in increasing board diversity in the US.