Associate Professor Xiaohang Ren, a Researcher of the Base, has had his collaborative paper "Government procurement and corporate vertical specialization" published in the important academic journal Finance Research Letters.

Finance Research Letters is an internationally renowned journal in the field of finance, covering various research areas in finance including corporate finance, asset pricing, financial markets and institutions, risk management, international finance, behavioral finance, and financial engineering.

Abstract: Vertical specialization (VS) is crucial for enhancing enterprise competitiveness and upgrading industrial structure in the intense global market competition. We examine the impact of government procurement (GP) on the VS of Chinese A-share listed enterprises between 2015 and 2022. We find that GP significantly promotes VS, with a stronger effect observed in private enterprises, highly competitive industries, and high-tech industries. Reducing transaction cost is a key pathway through which GP enhances VS. This paper presents a novel perspective on GP's influence on enterprise behavior, offering empirical evidence in optimizing procurement policies and fostering enterprise VS.

Keywords: Government procurement;Vertical specialization;Transaction costs

Link:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2025.107059

Teacher profile

Xiaohang Ren is a Distinguished Associate Professor at the Business School, Central South University, an Elsevier China Highly Cited Researcher, and a Top 2% Scientist Worldwide. He mainly engages in research on energy finance, financial risk, and financial econometrics. He has published more than 100 papers in authoritative journals at home and abroad,including Journal of the American Statistical Association,Transportation Research Part A, Energy Economics, Quantitative Finance, Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, International Review of Financial Analysis, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Business Strategy and the Environment, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Applied Energy, Resources Policy, Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, Energy, Journal of Management Sciences in China (English Edition), Systems Engineering — Theory and Practice, and Chinese Journal of Management Science. Among these, more than 30 are ESI Hot Papers/Highly Cited Papers. He serves as Section Editor of Sustainable Communities (Taylor & Francis), Associate Editor of journals such as Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (the only humanities and social sciences journal under Nature), and Guest Editor of several SSCI journals including Climate Change Economics and Economic Change and Restructuring.