The Effect of Development of Social Good Products on Market Value: Evidence From Vaccine Manufacturing Enterprises

As a typical social good product, COVID-19 vaccine demonstrates the vaccine manufacturing enterprises' social responsibility. This article thus aims to empirically test whether the event of the COVID-19 outbreak provides an opportunity for vaccine manufacturing enterprises to achieve social good, contributing to the social good stream of the new product development (NPD) literature. We then conduct an event study for 45 Chinese listed vaccine manufacturing enterprises by considering two panels, abnormal returns (ARs) and cumulative ARs, and cross-sectional regression modeling to determine how the NPD environment-related factors affect the magnitude of market value. Compared with their average returns over past estimation periods, vaccine manufacturing enterprises experienced short-term positive ARs. This article fills the gap in the social good stream of the NPD literature by providing an empirical investigation of the positive impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the market value, and providing evidence that the magnitude of market value change varies across NPD environments when a major public health event occurs. This article also provides insights for manufacturing enterprises and their stakeholders as to how they can leverage opportunities provided by public health events and their NPD resources to improve their social good and market value performance.