Zeng Lian

This study examines how gender, language, and operating conditions shape firms' environmental practices. We test whether female ownership and top management interact with linguistic future time reference (FTR) and with resource constraints such as power outages and internet disruptions. Female‐led firms report lower environmental engagement than male‐led firms, suggesting that communal and long‐term expectations associated with female leadership do not automatically translate into organizational behavior. In weak FTR contexts, where the future is perceived as close to the present, this gap narrows and can reverse. However, under resource constraints, this alignment erodes, as disruptions narrow managerial attention to immediate continuity and the benefit of weak FTR diminishes, leaving female‐led firms comparatively more penalized. Overall, the results indicate a conditional role congruity effect in which female leadership supports environmental practice when cultural frames favor intertemporal commitment but weakens when operational pressures elevate short‐term priorities.

This study investigates how linguistic structures shape corporate sustainability behavior by examining the relationship between future time reference (FTR) and firms' adoption of environmental management practices (EMPs). Drawing on discounting theory, we argue that in weak‐FTR languages, where the future does not require obligatory grammatical marking and can be expressed using present‐tense forms, speakers perceive the future as more proximate. This reduces temporal discounting and encourages long‐term orientations, thereby increasing the likelihood of environmental investments. Using World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from over 220,000 firms across multiple industries, we find strong evidence that firms in weak‐FTR contexts are more likely to adopt EMPs. Yet, the effect varies across firms and sectors. Younger firms are more responsive than older firms, larger firms translate weak‐FTR influences more effectively into environmental action, and internationally oriented firms amplify the effect compared to domestically focused firms. Overall, the findings show that while linguistic structures shape intertemporal decision‐making, their impact on sustainability adoption depends on organizational characteristics and sectoral contexts. This highlights important boundary conditions for discounting theory and advances understanding of the behavioral foundations of corporate sustainability.

We study the money demand in China to quantify the welfare cost of inflation by considering different approaches to model the money demand function. The preferred money demand function, based on neoclassical demand theory, indicates that if the central bank of China follows the standard inflation target of 2%, the welfare cost would be equivalent to a loss of 0.0603% of GDP. Furthermore, compared to estimates in the literature, the welfare cost of inflation in China is relatively small at all different inflation levels.

The asymmetric matching pennies contradiction posits that contrary to the prediction of mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium, experimental subjects’ choices are, in practice, based heavily on the magnitudes of their own payoffs. Own-payoff effects are robustly confirmed in the literature. Closely following the experimental setups in the literature which support the contradiction, we conduct a series of asymmetric matching pennies games in China, hypothesizing play which is closer to equilibrium frequencies than previously found. Contrary to previous experiments which were conducted in the United States, we find that there are essentially no own-payoff effects among Row players who face large payoff asymmetry. In a Quantal Response Equilibrium framework allowing for altruism or spite, the behavior of our subjects corresponded to a positive spite parameter, whereas the results of previous studies corresponded to altruism. Our results may be consistent with recent psychology literature that finds people from collectivist cultures are substantially more adept at taking the perspective of others compared with people from individualist cultures, a feature of the reasoning needed to obtain mixed-strategy equilibrium.

Reward for altruism and punishment for selfishness are crucial components for the maintenance of society. Past studies have provided strong evidence that people are willing to incur costs to punish selfish behaviors and to reward altruistic behaviors, but how their willingness to do so depends on their relationship with the individuals conducting the anti-social or pro-social behaviors is much less explored. To probe into this question, we devised a three-stage experiment that combined a revised dictator game and third-party reward or punishment. We employed two payoff frameworks, alignment and conflict, and analyzed how third-party’s willingness to reward and punish differed when their interests were either aligned or in conflict with the first-party under observation. We found that due to considerations for personal interests, third-party’s reward and punishment levels deviated from what was deemed “legitimate” by society, that is, the level of reward and punishment that enhances society’s intrinsic motivations to comply with social norms and act pro-socially. When an anti-social behavior was observed, third-party punished less severely under the alignment framework than under the conflict framework; when a pro-social behavior was observed, third-party demonstrated self-serving reward under the alignment framework, but they rewarded altruistically under the conflict framework. These findings provided evidence for third-party’s self-serving reward and punishment.

This paper studies firms’ dynamic interaction in a Cournot market. In each period of the game, the firm decides whether to make a stochastic positioning investment (establishing or maintaining its position in market competition). The market demand is also stochastic (high or low). By adopting symmetric Market perfect Nash equilibrium, firms choose strategies to maximize the discounted present value of cash flow. By considering the cases with one, two, and three active firms in the market, respectively, we present the stage game market outcome, show the transition probabilities, find the steady state of the system, and discuss the speed of convergence. Our work allows for two types of uncertainty in firms’ interactions, which contribute to the dynamic oligopoly literature.