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Catch-up phenomena have been studied intensively in many manufacturing industries, but they have not been well explored in creative industries. Moreover, the internal heterogeneity of different segments within a specific industry has also largely been overlooked in the catch-up literature. This paper fills these gaps by analyzing the catch-up of a creative industry—the online game industry in China— and by extending the "windows of opportunity" framework with due account to the differentiated knowledge bases underpinning the value chain of the games industry. The findings show that the differentiated knowledge bases underlying this specific creative industry are combinatorial, and such combinations of different knowledge bases have led to distinct firm strategies in the different segments of game production (i.e. game design and content creation, programming, artistic creation, marketing) and catch-up outcomes (path skipping, following and creating). The introduction of the differentiated knowledge bases approach helps to provide a more nuanced understanding of catch-up in many industries where added-value are based on cultural tastes and symbolic knowledge, and thus leads to better policy implications for latecomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high-growth, resource- and pollution-intensive industrialization model that China has pursued has caused severe environmental pollution and deterioration, particularly in a number of clusters in the coastal regions of East and Southeast China, where the Reform and Opening-up policies first started. The lack of uptake of environmental norms/values, deficit of regulatory enforcement of environmental policies, and insufficient institutional capacity have been compounding factors. As environmental standards were raised by China's central government, the enforcement of environmental regulation has been compromised more in inland China than in coastal regions, due to China's "decentralized governance structure" and regional disparity in terms of both economic development and environmental pollution. This paper therefore argues that rising environmental regulations, as well as firm characteristics, regional hub effect and political environment, have all been particularly important in forcing China's pollution-intensive enterprises to restructure their production, through innovation, upgrading, geographical relocation, outsourcing and plant closure, especially in China's coastal regions. It contributes to recent studies by developing a heuristic analytical framework that aims to be sensitive to the impacts of environmental regulation, political environment and regional hub effect over firm restructuring, but which does so by stressing these impacts are simultaneously inflected by the nature and attributes of firms. The empirical analysis suggests a roughly inverted "U"-shaped relationship between firm relocation tendency and firm size (or firm capability), resulting from complex interactions between political environment, regional hub effect and environmental regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper studies how firms strategically react to the 2021 U.S. capitol attack. • Corporate decision of speaking out against the capitol attack protects shareholder value and reduces firm political risks. • Corporate political activism largely affects politicians' PAC fundraising. This study explores firms' reactions to the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack. We find that firms donating more to the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election are more likely to speak out against the Capitol Attack to suspend political contributions. By doing so, firms mitigate negative stock market reactions and subsequently lower their political risk. Suspension of corporate political donations has profound impacts on the 147 Republicans that they almost lost all political contributions from private sectors right after the Capitol Attack. Our findings suggest that, when facing unexpected political catastrophes, firms make strategic political activist actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]