**6. Conclusions**

An important strategy for corporate sustainability is R&D investments. This study is concerned with the event of cross-listing, and this affects the decisions of both financial leverage and R&D investments. This article chooses a competitive perspective to address this issue. It provides empirical evidence that the cross-listing event has significant impacts on financial leverage and R&D expenditure.

There are some findings in this study. First, we find that the foreign firms who undertook cross-listings in the U.S. stock exchanges on average significantly increased their debt financing. Second, we find that cross-listing firms take advantage of the reputation brought about by successful ADR issue to increase their financial leverage ratio to an even higher proportion than before the ADR issue. Finally, we find that the aggressive R&D financing strategy of cross-listing firms arouses a contagion effect to make industrial rival firms raise their R&D investments in response significantly.

**Author Contributions:** All the authors contributed to the conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, writing of the original draft, and writing review and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This study was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, R.O.C. under gran<sup>t</sup> MOST 110-2410-H-141-011-.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data available on request due to restrictions, e.g., privacy or ethical.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers at *Sustainability* for their valuable comments and suggestions that have significantly improved the quality of this study.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
