A configuration analysis of the driving path of corporate physical investments: Necessary condition analysis and qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy sets

Corporate physical investments are an important foundation for sustainable economic development. This study investigates the causal relationships and complex mechanisms of the five antecedent conditions under the “Merger–Organization–Environment” (MOE) framework with corporate physical investments. These antecedent conditions include green mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financing constraints, main business performance, corporate governance capacities, and government environmental concerns. Combining the necessary condition analysis and fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis, a sample of 40 heavily polluting listed enterprises in China's A‐share market from 2016 to 2020 is used. The results found that (1) individual antecedent conditions do not constitute the necessary conditions for corporate physical investments; (2) there are four configurations that generate high corporate physical investments, i.e., proactive change‐oriented type, main business focus‐oriented type, performance‐driven oriented type, and passive change‐oriented type; and (3) there are four configurations that generate non‐high corporate physical investments, i.e., performance‐bound type, funding‐bound type, M&A‐bound type, and strategically bound type. This demonstrates the asymmetry of the configurations that generate high and non‐high corporate physical investments, which helps to formulate incentives for corporate physical investments from multiple perspectives.