The Central Economic Work Conference in 2018 first proposed "institutional opening-up," marking a shift in China's opening-up strategy from the flow of goods and factors to institutional dimensions such as rules and regulations. The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China reaffirmed this core pathway. At the same time, improving export technological complexity has become an inevitable choice for the high-quality development of foreign trade. As an institutional opening-up pilot platform, the Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones provide a practical carrier for institutional innovation, accumulating replicable and scalable experience through pilot reforms and strongly supporting high-level opening-up. Against this background, this paper adopts a micro-firm perspective and uses data on the establishment of Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones (2012–2023) and Chinese listed firms to empirically examine the impact of such pilot zone establishment on firms' export technological complexity. A multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model is employed for in-depth analysis. The empirical results show that: (1) The establishment of Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones significantly promotes the improvement of firms' export technological complexity. (2) The effect of pilot zone establishment on export technological complexity varies across geographic location and industry characteristics. Compared with coastal cities, the establishment of such zones in inland cities has a significantly stronger positive effect on export technological complexity. From the perspective of industry classification, the establishment of the pilot zones has a significant positive effect on export technological complexity for capital-intensive and technology-intensive manufacturing firms, while the positive effect is not significant for labor-intensive manufacturing firms. (3) Mechanism analysis indicates that the establishment of Cross-border e-commerce pilot zones enhances firms' export technological complexity by promoting firms' innovation input, innovation output, and innovation efficiency.

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Green innovation has become an important way for companies to achieve high-quality development under the supervision of the country's "dual carbon" goals. But the cost of funding is high, and the return on investment for green innovation is uncertain. ESG ratings have had discrepancies that are becoming more frequent lately, making it harder for businesses to make decisions about what they should do. The study takes Chinese A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2024 as samples to experimentally investigate how ESG rating divergence impacts corporate green innovation. From the results of this research we can see that ESG rating difference greatly promotes corporate green innovation; analysts’ attention partially mediates the relationship between them; the level of corporate governance positively moderates the relationship between ESG rating difference and green innovation; good corporate governance can enhance the positive promoting effect of rating difference on green innovation. To assist businesses in dealing with ESG rating differences and improving their ability to innovate greenly, this paper provides a theoretical basis and relevant references.

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In recent years, social media has changed consumer behavior and digital marketing in many ways, especially in the beauty industry. Short-video platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Douyin have become important spaces for product promotion and consumer engagement. This paper looks at how short-video marketing influences consumer preferences for beauty products, with a focus on visual content, recommendation algorithms, influencer marketing, and online reviews. The research mainly uses secondary data, academic literature, industry reports, and figure analysis. The findings suggest that short-video marketing has a strong influence on consumer preferences, especially among younger consumers such as Generation Z and Millennials. Influencer credibility also seems to play an important role in building consumer trust. Overall, short-video marketing not only changes the way consumers buy beauty products, but also affects beauty consumption culture in the digital age. The findings not only help explain how short-video marketing shapes consumer behavior in the beauty industry, but also provide useful insights for beauty brands and digital marketers developing marketing strategies in online environments.

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Digital technology is widely seen as a key tool to enhance supply chain transparency and prevent accidents. However, findings indicate that technical compliance alone fails to reduce safety accident risks. This study attributes the paradox to deep institutional logic conflicts from forced digital supervision embedding. Safety-first regulatory logic conflicts with market-efficiency logic in high-risk industries, shifting physical operational risks to digital risks. This paper selects 13 cases of risk regeneration of fireworks and firecracker enterprises that have introduced digital supervision in the past three years, and uses grounded theoretical methods to explore how the fracture of institutional logic changes the trend of risk in the context of forced embedding of digital supervision, which eventually leads to the re-emergence of risk in another form. It is expected to provide a new theoretical perspective for understanding the paradox of digital governance in high-risk industries and practical enlightenment for designing more compatible intelligent regulatory policies.

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