Anti-corruption,government intervention,and corporate cash holdings: Evidence from China

We use China as an example to examine how anti-corruption and government intervention shape corporate cash holding decisions. The findings show that firms in provinces with less government intervention (weak anti-corruption intensity) hold smaller (larger) cash reserves than those in provinces with more government intervention (strong anti-corruption intensity). Furthermore, we find that the positive relationship between government intervention and corporate cash holdings is alleviated as the anti-corruption intensity increases, and this alleviation effect is more prominent for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), firms in high intervention areas and firms without political connections. These findings support the argument that corruption-free and low intervention governments can benefit firms in making more profitable corporate decisions.     

Bank shareholding and corporate cash management: Evidence from China

We study the effect of bank shareholding on corporate cash management in China. We document that for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with some of their shares owned by banks, the market value of cash holdings is less, and the overinvestment of free cash flow is more than those SOEs without bank shareholding. For non-SOEs, we do not find such an adverse impact. We also find that the adverse impact of bank shareholding is confined to state-owned banks owning SOE shares and stronger for pyramidal structure than those of non-pyramidal structure SOEs. The Chinese environment offers lessons that can help other emerging markets to review their bank shareholding regulations.     

International takeover laws and corporate cash holdings

We examine the impact on corporate cash holdings of international merger and acquisition (M&A) laws, which facilitate corporate takeovers. We use the staggered enactment of M&A laws from 1992 to 2005 and a sample spanning 34 jurisdictions, and find that levels of corporate cash holdings increase after passage of M&A laws. We also find that firms with better operating performance, higher earnings volatility, higher P/E ratio, and in jurisdictions with high M&A intensity hoard more cash after the enactment of M&A laws. These firms decrease dividends and capital expenditure and increase cash-based acquisitions in the post-M&A law period. Additional analysis shows that the effect is manifested in the subsample of firms in jurisdictions with better institutional environments. Lastly, we find that investor valuations of cash holdings decrease after the enactment of M&A laws. Collectively, our results suggest that managers hoard cash to finance M&A activities after the enactment of M&A laws, driven by the motive of empire-building, and that cash hoarding behaviors are viewed by investors as value-decreasing.     

Investment committees and corporate cash holdings

We investigate the association between the voluntary formation of a board investment committee (IC) and corporate cash holdings for a large sample of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) firms over the 2005–2013 period. We provide evidence that the existence of a specialized IC increases corporate cash holdings. We also find that several IC characteristics, i.e., member experience, independence, number of meetings, and committee size, are associated with an increase in firms’ cash holdings. Furthermore, the local and foreign institutional ownership of GCC firms moderates the IC-cash holdings relationship. These results remain robust to alternative specifications of cash holdings and endogeneity tests. We contribute to the literature on firms’ incentives to hold cash and to the literature on governance in emerging market contexts.     

Deregulation of short selling and corporate cash dividend policy: A quasi-natural experiment from China

This study takes China’s short selling deregulation as a quasi-natural experiment, employs a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2017, and tests the impact of a short selling pilot on firms’ cash dividends using a difference-in-differences model (DID). We find that China’s short selling pilot significantly increases the pilot firms’ cash dividends. The mechanism test shows that short selling can improve the pilot firms’ cash dividends by playing a corporate governance role to restrain dual agency costs such as management fees and major shareholders’ tunneling. Furthermore, we identify that short selling restrains the behavior of “large stock dividends” and increases the cash dividends of “large stock dividends” firms. Moreover, the governance effect of short selling is complementary to the external governance environment. The higher the degree of marketization and government quality, the more significant the governance effect of short selling to increase the pilot firms’ cash dividends. This study enriches not only the research related to cash dividends in emerging economies, but also provides new empirical evidence for the evaluation of China’s short selling deregulation and offers valuable lessons to other emerging economies.     

我国上市公司现金持有水平研究

现金持有决策是公司面临的重要财务决策。本文以2012年我国A股上市公司作为研究样本,分析了各个行业上市公司现金持有水平的状况。研究表明,我国上市公司现金持有水平的数据分布基本呈现右偏态分布,公司间的现金持有水平有较大的差异,行业特征是影响公司现金持有水平的重要因素。     

多元化经营与现金持有水平——基于中国制造业上市公司的实证研究

本文采用2007～2009年446家A股制造业上市公司的平衡面板数据,基于静态权衡理论,利用两个维度的多元化经营指标分析了中国制造业上市公司多元化经营对现金持有水平的影响。研究结果显示,多元化与专业化上市公司的现金持有水平存在显著差异,多元化经营的上市公司现金持有水平更低,而且多元化经营水平越高的上市公司现金持有水平越低。     

The role of state ownership and institutions in the innovation performance of emerging market enterprises: Evidence from China

Although it has been suggested that institutional context influences a firm's innovation performance, the role of regulatory institutions has been underexplored. Extending previous research, this study investigates whether and how regulatory institutions (i.e. state ownership, region-specific marketization and industry-specific institutional policy) affect innovation performance of emerging market enterprises (EMEs). Evidence derived from a large sample of Chinese manufacturing firms demonstrates that state ownership positively moderates the effect of R&D intensity on innovation performance. However, state ownership is not equally beneficial for all firms. Our analysis shows that region-specific marketization and industry-specific institutional policy enhance the innovation-enhancing effect of state ownership. By revealing the role of regulatory institutions, our study points to the importance of looking beyond firm boundaries to understand why EMEs are able to innovate despite their weak internal capabilities.     

Herding in Open-end Funds: Evidence from China

This paper aims to detect the herding of Chinese open-end fund managers and examine the role that structural features of their industry play in their herding. The herding behaviour is investigated by employing the cross-sectional absolute deviation (CSAD) model, drawing on the Chinese open-end fund market for the 2007–2020 period. Our findings suggest that the presence of herding has been confirmed in all other types of funds except for income funds, with their herding being mainly driven by non-fundamental factors. Most types of funds show more pronounced herding when the market is rising and the fund flow is positive. Up markets foster positive fund flows, which promote herding to a certain extent. The structural characteristics of fund networks of common asset holdings produce an impact on the fund herding. Herding is observed in the network with larger centrality index and the disassortative network. Moreover, we also find that herding in most types of funds is more pronounced under conditions of high volatility and high economic policy uncertainty, and the fund herding tends to grow inversely with fund-size.     

治理环境、控制权与现金流权分离及现金持有量——我国民营上市公司的实证研究

利用我国民营上市公司披露的2003年-2006年的终极控股股东数据和樊纲、王小鲁(2007年)编制的中国各地区市场化进程数据及其子数据构建各地区公司治理环境指数,检验治理环境、控制权与现金流权分离及现金持有量的关系.研究发现,治理环境与现金持有量正相关;终极股东控制权与现金流权偏离度与现金持有量显著负相关,治理环境的改善有助于减轻这种负向影响.     

Reprint of "The role of state ownership and institutions in the innovation performance of emerging market enterprises: Evidence from China"

Although it has been suggested that institutional context influences a firm's innovation performance, the role of regulatory institutions has been underexplored. Extending previous research, this study investigates whether and how regulatory institutions (i.e. state ownership, region-specific marketization and industry-specific institutional policy) affect innovation performance of emerging market enterprises (EMEs). Evidence derived from a large sample of Chinese manufacturing firms demonstrates that state ownership positively moderates the effect of R&D intensity on innovation performance. However, state ownership is not equally beneficial for all firms. Our analysis shows that region-specific marketization and industry-specific institutional policy enhance the innovation-enhancing effect of state ownership. By revealing the role of regulatory institutions, our study points to the importance of looking beyond firm boundaries to understand why EMEs are able to innovate despite their weak internal capabilities.     

Customer concentration and corporate innovation: Evidence from China

This paper investigates the impact of customer concentration on corporate innovation in China. We hypothesize that a more concentrated customer base increases a supplier’s operational risk and causes firms to become more cautious with regard to investment in innovation. Moreover, a more concentrated customer base gives such customers stronger bargaining powers and makes suppliers less willing to make relationship-specific investments. Hence, the hold-up costs of customer concentration in China exceed the benefits that accrue from the economies of scale associated with such concentrations, which impede a supplier’s corporate innovation. Our results reveal that suppliers with higher customer concentrations produce fewer patents and invention patents. Moreover, our results are robust after adopting an instrumental variables approach. We further show that the effect is more pronounced in firms with lower business diversification and in firms that have lower stability in their major customers. Our paper sheds lights on the hitherto underexplored unfavorable impact of customer concentration on innovation.     

Customer concentration and corporate charitable donations: Evidence from China

This study examines the impact of customer concentration on corporate charitable donations. Drawing on stakeholder and resource dependency theories, we argue that when firms rely on a small set of customers for a significant proportion of sales revenue, they will reduce corporate charitable donations. State ownership and industry competition moderate this relationship. Using data on corporate donations from Chinese listed firms between 2009 and 2019, we find support for our hypotheses. Our study contributes to the literature on customer concentration and corporate philanthropy in emerging economies.     

产品市场竞争与现金价值:掠夺理论还是代理理论

本文利用2000～2009年沪深两市上市公司的非平衡面板数据来考察产品市场竞争与现金价值之间的关系。检验结果表明,比行业竞争对手持有更多现金的企业具有较高的价值,垄断程度较高的行业企业所持现金的价值更高。基于倾向得分理论的检验结果表明垄断性行业子样本的现金价值显著高于竞争性行业子样本。进一步的检验结果表明成长性、市场化程度和现金持有量的区间效应因素并不影响文章的研究结论。这些实证结果都支持了掠夺理论的分析。     

现金持有与研发投入的相关性研究——基于我国A股上市公司数据

采用2007—2013年沪深两市A股上市公司作为样本,对现金持有与研发投入的关系进行分析,结果显示:研发投入越多的企业的现金持有水平越高;期初现金持有越多的企业研发投入越多,研发-现金敏感性越显著,而且随着现金持有量的增加该敏感性会逐渐下降;相比于成熟期公司,成长期公司现金持有与研发投入之间的正相关性更强,而且成长期公司的研发-现金敏感性不会随着现金持有水平的增加而下降。     

我国房地产上市公司过度投资行为实证分析--存在性与现金股利约束

近年,房地产企业都在进行投资规模和范围的扩展,不仅使投资效率下降,更造成了社会资源的浪费。从理论上分析我国房地产上市公司存在着过度投资行为的因素,提出相关假设,再选取房地产行业上市公司2003-2009年的样本数据,构建模型进行实证检验得出,我国房地产上市公司普遍存在着过度投资行为,但由于目前国内企业发展环境的限制,现金股利的发放还不足以成为抑制过度投资的主要机制。     

Environmental leaders: making a difference. A typology of environmental leaders and recommendations for a differentiated policy approach

In the literature, environmental leaders are often implicitly considered as a homogeneous group of companies. In addition, this proposition underlies much public policymaking that is aimed at supporting companies that go green'. A recent exploratory study conducted in the Netherlands however revealed that environmental leaders are often rather heterogeneous – even if they operate in the same sector. Differences are particularly related to incentives for and barriers to environmental leadership. In this paper we develop a typology of environmental leaders and provide recommendations for a differentiated and more effective public policy approach to supporting environmental leaders. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Board size,social trust,and corporate risk taking: Evidence from China

This paper examines the relationship between board size and corporate risk taking, as well as the moderating effects of regional‐level social trust. Results show that larger boards have greater difficulty in achieving consensus on extreme decisions and thus tend to reduce firm risk taking in a Chinese context. Moreover, social trust had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between board size and corporate risk taking. This study contributes to the risk taking literature by testing the board size‐risk taking linkage in a Chinese context and offering an explanation based on internal board governance and external informal institution heterogeneity.     

Digital finance and misallocation of resources among firms: Evidence from China

The resources misallocation among firms is serious in China, our calculation shows it has resulted in the total factor productivity (hereafter, TFP) loss of over 200% and has been gradually increasing in recent years, based on the firm-level data from National Tax Survey database from 2007 to 2016. This paper further investigates empirically the impact of digital finance on resources misallocation, by measuring resources misallocation with firm’s capital deviation and labor deviation, as well as measuring digital finance with the number of searches for fintech keywords on Baidu's webpage. Results suggest that digital finance can significantly mitigate resources misallocation among firms to improve the aggregate TFP by redistributing resources from over-resourced firms to under-resourced firms, although it cannot improve the TFP within a representative firm. The findings remain robust after addressing the endogeneity and using alterative variables of digital finance and value of labor output elasticity. Moreover, digital finance can rectify the credit-market discrimination, where its mitigating effect on resources misallocation prefers to non-state-owned firms and small and medium-sized firms. However, traditional finance, as measured by the number of offline bank branches, can also optimize resources allocation, but this effect is gradually diminishing and it also fails to rectify the credit discrimination.