Purpose and Power: Predicting Differences in the Corporate Social Performance of Globalizing State-Owned Enterprises
Release time：26 August 2025
Aug
26
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Time & Date
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10:30 am
-
12:00 pm,
August
26,
2025
(Tuesday)
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Venue
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Room D403, Teaching Complex D Building
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| TOPIC | Purpose and Power: Predicting Differences in the Corporate Social Performance of Globalizing State-Owned Enterprises |
| TIME&DATE | 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, August 26, 2025 (Tuesday) |
| Venue | Room D403, Teaching Complex D Building |
| Speaker |
Jing Li 李静 Simon Fraser University |
| Abstract | We study how social media publicity affects the early-stage adoption of sustainable food technologies by local businesses. Understanding this connection is challenging because of the lack of empirical measurement of local business decisions at scale and, more importantly, the endogeneity of social media publicity to unobserved local demand shocks. Focusing on the case of impossible meat products, we devise a unique location specific adoption metric based on social media announcements between 2015 and 2019. We propose a novel identification strategy that leverages the quasi-random variations of county-quarter-level news production for different topics to causally identify the linkage between social media publicity and adoption. We find that local news coverage of impossible meat products increases local restaurants’ and stores’ adoption of the focal green food technology. Interestingly, the elasticity of adoption to news is higher among more liberal regions, and news content about producer financials was the main contributor to identifying the causal effect of news on local businesses’ adoption of impossible meat products. |
| Biography |
Prof. Jing Li is a Professor of International Business at the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, where she also serves as the Director of the Jack Austin Centre for Asia Pacific Business Studies. She received her BA in Economics from Peking University and PhD in Business from Indiana University. Jing has studied international investment strategies, emerging markets, state-owned enterprises, and the intersection of geopolitics, public policies, and firm strategies. She has published forty scholarly articles in various management and international business journals. Jing is equally passionate about teaching and fostering dialogue among researchers, business leaders, and policymakers. |
