The idea behind a minimum wage is to raise the income of those who earn it, but it also changes the costs faced by small and medium enterprises. This article reviews evidence on how increases in the wage floor affect the survival of smaller firms and how they respond. It synthesizes firm-level and worker-level evidence from the United Kingdom, Hungary, China, Germany, South Korea, and the United States, with emphasis on studies from 2022 to 2026. The evidence is organized around wage-cost exposure, prices, revenue, employment, productivity, profitability, business exit, and business entry. The review finds that the immediate impact is strongest for labour-intensive, financially constrained firms, where a large share of payroll is affected by wage increases and limited reserves restrict adjustment. However, not all effects are negative. Some firms offset higher costs through higher prices, retention, productivity gains, or revenue. Productivity, finance, demand, and the ability to pass costs to customers shape survival outcomes. In some contexts, less productive and very small firms are more likely to exit, while U.S. evidence suggests that reduced firm entry may matter more than incumbent exit. Higher wages can raise household income and demand, but high exit or low entry may weaken entrepreneurship, competition, and regional resilience. Minimum-wage increases therefore redistribute income and reallocate workers and market shares across firms. Policy should combine clear wage trajectories with measures that improve productivity and access to finance without supporting chronically unproductive enterprises.

Show more

Growing importance of software, data, R&D, brands, and organizational capital might affect the monetary policy transmission channel because intangibles cannot be easily pledged and innovative expenditure can be prohibitively expensive to undo. This paper examines whether firms with high intangible intensity are more or less vulnerable to contractionary monetary policy shocks in the US. The dataset encompasses Compustat Global, annual monetary-policy shocks for firms from Jarociński and Karadi aggregated by firms' fiscal year, and DealScan syndicated loan data. The sample includes an unbalanced panel of international firm-year observations from 2001–2023. Models with interactions between firm- and year-fixed effects and annual policy shocks lagged one period and six other lagged firm control variables are estimated. Following contractionary shocks, high-intangible-intensity firms experience a comparatively low sales growth, which means they face a relatively higher risk of being more vulnerable. However, they show a relatively higher increase in R&D intensity, R&D share, and R&D expenditure, suggesting that R&D is preferred and comparatively resilient, but not necessarily increases in total R&D expenditure. Financing restrictions exacerbate the sales decrease. Results from the loan market indicate that syndicated loan spreads do not change differentially. Greater commitment volume is seen only in annual models and weakened using monthly shock measurement and does not provide evidence of actual credit usage. The value of the paper is twofold: first, vulnerability and resilience as outcome-dependent phenomena are combined, and secondly, loan pricing, loan origination, and credit commitment are separated as channels of monetary policy transmission.

Show more

Amid the rapid expansion of digital trade, China's Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones (CECPZs) represent a key institutional innovation to boost urban foreign trade. Using the CECPZ rollout as a quasi-natural experiment in a prefecture-level city panel (2000-2024) and a multi-period Difference-in-Differences design, baseline TWFE estimates indicate that designation substantially raises urban exports. The point estimate is about 0.24 log terms (roughly 27% increase) and remains robust to excluding pandemic years and municipalities, using alternative clustering schemes, and conducting spatial placebo tests. Province-level clustering yields around 0.244 (p < 0.01); robustness checks with municipality and pandemic-year exclusions give about 0.236-0.258 (p < 0.05–0.01). Heterogeneity shows larger gains in eastern coastal cities (~0.247, p < 0.01) and in regions with lower government intervention (~0.208, p < 0.05); inland and high-intervention areas display smaller effects. Subsample analyses suggest stronger effects where digital infrastructure and policy absorption are most developed. The results reveal spatially differentiated macro-level benefits and imply that policy design may need regional tailoring. Limitations include potential measurement error and residual endogeneity concerns; future research could employ alternative identification strategies and investigate downstream export composition and firm-level mechanisms.

Show more

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in advertising since 2022 has transformed content production while raising concerns about the preservation of brand authenticity, a critical foundation of consumer trust and brand relationships. This study examines how AI-generated advertising influences perceived brand authenticity, identifies the mechanisms driving authenticity erosion, and explains the contextual factors that account for inconsistent findings in prior research. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this review synthesizes 13 studies published between 2022 and 2026 retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and EBSCOhost databases. Through thematic synthesis, this study identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which AI-generated advertising may undermine brand authenticity: disclosure effects, failed anthropomorphism, and sincerity erosion. The findings further reveal that the effects of AI-generated advertising on authenticity perceptions are contingent upon individual characteristics, product and brand contexts, and source-related factors, including AI capability beliefs, product type, luxury positioning, and communicator characteristics. This study develops an integrated framework explaining when and why AI-generated advertising enhances or undermines brand authenticity, thus providing theoretical insights for consumer research and practical implications for AI-enabled marketing decision-making.

Show more