Split Share Structure Reform,corporate governance,and the foreign share discount puzzle in China

We examine the impact of the Split Share Structure Reform on the well-known foreign share discount puzzle in China. Existing literature confirms that foreign investors are more concerned about insider expropriation because of their information disadvantage relative to domestic investors. The split share structure of the ownership of Chinese listed firms created a conflict of interests between state and private shareholders. Since, before the reform, state shareholders held restricted shares that denied them any wealth effect from share price movements, they had a limited incentive to work with private shareholders to ensure that managers maximized the stock market value of the firm. By abolishing the trading restrictions for state shareholders, this reform has increased the incentive alignment between state and private shareholders, encouraging them to monitor managers. If foreign investors’ concerns over the corporate governance implications of the split share structure at least partly contributed to their discounting of Chinese listed firms, then this discount should be reduced following the reform. Indeed, our evidence confirms this prediction, especially among Chinese listed firms with more state ownership or restricted shares. Our findings imply that this significant institutional reform of the Chinese stock market has benefitted minority investors.     

The effects of trading rights and ownership structures on the informativeness of accounting earnings: Evidence from China’ split share structure reform

This paper examines how the removal of trading restrictions and ownership structures affect earnings informativeness by investigating the changes in the earnings-return relation around China’s split share structure reform. I find the reform has a negative impact on the relationship between controlling shareholders’ ownership and earnings informativeness, which is consistent with the idea that the removal of trading restrictions gives controlling shareholders incentives to influence the stock price through managing earnings. I also find that earnings informativeness decreases with the reduction in controlling shareholders’ ownership. This dilution effect is more significant for firms with non-state controlling shareholders or with controlling shareholders that are not monitored by other large shareholders. The results are consistent with the notion that controlling shareholders provide less informative earnings in response to the dilution of their ownership to avoid the constraints arising from the increased monitoring by outside investors.     

Fund ownership and stock price informativeness of Chinese listed firms

We examine the impact of mutual fund ownership on stock price informativeness in China. Existing evidence shows that stock price informativeness is low in China, and attributes this to firms’ lack of disclosure incentives under the weak investor protection institutional environment. Mutual funds are more sophisticated and influential than individual investors to monitor firms, and thus serve as an external governance mechanism to improve corporate transparency. However, the impact of mutual funds in China can also be moderated by state ownership of listed firms, which reduces firms’ dependence on outside investors for capital. Indeed, we find that mutual fund ownership is positively related to share price informativeness, but this effect is less pronounced among state-controlled firms. The main policy implication from our findings is that mutual funds contribute to the corporate information environment of emerging economies but further privatization of listed firms would be needed to realize greater benefit.     

Security Analysts’ Site Visits and Stock Price Synchronicity

This paper investigates how security analysts’ corporate site visits impact listed firms’ stock-price informativeness. Examining a sample of security analysts’ visits to Chinese listed firms from 2010 to 2019, we find that security analysts incorporate firm-specific information into share prices through site visits, significantly reducing the visited firms’ stock price synchronicity. This finding is robust to an alternative measure of stock price informativeness and a two-stage least-squares approach using the introduction of high-speed rail as the instrumental variable. We also find that the impact of analysts’ site visits on firms’ stock price synchronicity is more pronounced for firms with lower information disclosure quality and poor corporate governance than for other firms. Further analysis on firm characteristics documents that this effect is stronger for large-size firms, firms in the manufacturing industry, and state-owned enterprises.     

State Ownership,Political Institutions,and Stock Price Informativeness: Evidence from Privatization

In this paper, we examine the relation between government ownership and stock price informativeness around the world. Using a sample of privatized firms from 41 countries between 1980 and 2012, we find strong and robust evidence that state ownership is associated with lower firm-level stock price variation, i.e., stock price informativeness. Furthermore, we find that the relation between state ownership and stock price informativeness depends on political institutions. In particular, the adverse effects of state ownership on stock price informativeness are more pronounced in countries with lower political rights (i.e., lower political constraints on the government).     

Do share prices matter?

This paper examines whether the cross sectional variation in Australian share prices is partially explained by measures of firm size and ownership characteristics in a manner that is consistent with firms behaving in accordance with Merton's (1987) model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information. Based on a sample of firms whose shares were traded on the ASX during 1995, we show that firms largely owned by less wealthy shareholders tend to have low stock prices, although this relation is not linear. In addition, larger, better–known, firms tend to have higher stock prices. These findings are consistent with prior evidence from US markets, and suggest the existence of a shareholder clientele effect in Australia that is related to the share price of the underlying firm.     

Controlling Shareholders’ Incentive and Corporate Tax Avoidance: A Natural Experiment in China

The split share structure reform removes a significant market friction in China's capital market by allowing previously non‐tradable shares to be freely tradable at market prices. Such a reform reduces the agency conflict between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders as the former now care more about stock prices. We find that state‐owned firms, but not non‐state‐owned firms, significantly increased their tax avoidance activities after the reform. We attribute this differential effect to the dual role of the government as state‐owned firms’ controlling shareholder as well as the tax claimant. Further, this effect is more pronounced for state‐owned firms that are more likely to be influenced by the government prior to the reform. Finally, the reform reinforces a positive association between tax avoidance and firm value. Overall, our study suggests that when controlling shareholders are more concerned about stock prices, state‐owned firms engage more in tax avoidance activities to enhance firm value.     

Information-based stock trading and managerial incentives: evidence from China's stock market

This paper uses stock price informativeness, or information-based stock trading, to help explain the pay–performance sensitivity (PPS) of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in China's listed firms. We argue that higher stock price informativeness, which we measure by the probability of informed trading, helps and encourages shareholders to incentivize the top management team based on stock market performance. The regression results support our argument and show that a higher level of stock price informativeness is associated with higher CEO PPSs. Moreover, the impact of stock price informativeness on CEO incentives is stronger for privately controlled listed firms than it is for state-controlled listed firms. The results also hold when information asymmetry is approximated by the accuracy and dispersion of the earnings forecasts made by financial analysts.     

The effect of the split share structure reform on working capital management of Chinese companies

Before the introduction of the Split Share Structure Reform (SSSR) of 2005, a dual stock system characterized Chinese-listed firms. The states owned non-tradable shares and private owners held tradable shares. The dual system generated agency problems because state owners enjoyed all the rights reserved for tradable shares but escaped the stock market risk faced by non-state shareholders. Because executives of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) received rewards based on the book value of assets rather than the market price of shares, they had no incentive to maximize the share price. The SSSR led to the conversion of non-tradable shares to tradable shares, with two major implications: (1) the interests of government and private owners are now more closely aligned and (2) government agents of SOEs are now rewarded and punished based on a firm's market performance. Thus, the expectation is that government agents turn their attention to improving a firm's market performance rather than its book value during the post-reform era. We examine the impact of the SSSR on Chinese firms' investments in working capital. Based on 511 manufacturing firms between 2003 and 2011, we find that the SSSR is associated with significant reductions in working capital investments during the post-reform period. The reduced investment in working capital is associated with improved market performance of these firms.     

Equity ownership segregation, shareholder preferences, and dividend policy in China

We investigate how listed Chinese firms pay different types of dividend to satisfy shareholders, different dividend preferences shaped by institutional factors such as share tradability and asymmetrical taxation. We find that the cash dividend level is significantly and positively related to the proportion of non-publicly tradable shares and this relation is mainly driven by legal person shareholders' preferences for cash dividends. In contrast, the stock dividend level is significantly and positively associated with the proportion of publicly tradable shares. These findings provide an empirical rationale for the current reform on the segregation of equity ownership rights in China.     

The ownership structure of UK firms and the informativeness of accounting earnings

This paper provides evidence that in the UK, a firm's ownership structure is related to the informativeness of its accounting earnings for price. Evidence is reported that concentrated outside ownership is negatively related to the contemporaneous price-earnings association. This is interpreted as indicative of more non-accounting information being collected and disseminated for firms whose ownership includes large outside (non-managerial) blocks and a consequential loss of informativeness of contemporaneous accounting earnings. Having controlled for the information environment, we provide evidence that the overall relation between return and earnings is attenuated for firms with diffuse outside ownership. This is interpreted as evidence of the market anticipating opportunistic managerial manipulation of earnings when outside ownership is diffuse.     

Ownership Concentration,State Ownership,and Effective Tax Rates: Evidence from China’s Listed Firms*

This paper examines the effect of ownership concentration and state ownership on the tax reporting practices of China’s publicly listed firms. I argue that ownership concentration and state ownership are important for tax reporting practices in China because listed firms have high ownership concentrations and high levels of state ownership. Using a sample of 758 listed Chinese firms over the 1998–2008 time period, I find that firms with concentrated share ownership have lower effective tax rates. I also find that firms whose largest shareholders are government‐related have higher effective tax rates compared to firms whose largest shareholders are nongovernment related. In other words, the nature of the largest shareholder (government vs. nongovernment) matters. I also show that ownership‐concentrated firms are able to achieve preferential statutory tax rates compared to firms with low ownership concentration regardless of the identity of the largest shareholder.     

Valuation of restricted shares by conflicting shareholders in the Split Share Structure Reform

The recent Split Share Structure Reform launched by the government in the Chinese stock market terminates trading constraints on restricted shares. In exchange for the consent of freely traded shareholders, restricted shareholders offer them consideration mainly in the form of restricted shares. We estimate the implied discount of restricted shares to be 38.22% on average, which is in line with the empirical and theoretical findings in the literature, suggesting that the consideration is not systematically underpaid and the reform is fair at the market level. At the firm level, however, freely traded shareholders receive less consideration when their bargaining power is weaker. The impact of state shareholders on the size of consideration has been found to be non-monotonic. Consistent with the literature that state shareholders exaggerate the agency problem, they tend to exploit freely traded shareholders by offering less consideration when the latter's bargaining power is weaker. Meanwhile, state shareholders are under political pressure to carry out the reform as quickly as possible and to set a good example for other firms. They therefore refrain from offering underpaid consideration when their freely traded counterparts have strong bargaining power and are more capable of rejecting unfair schemes and substantially delaying the progress of the reform.     

Shareholding structure and corporate performance of partially privatized firms: Evidence from listed Chinese companies

Equity ownership in a listed Chinese firm can have as many as five different classes: state-owned shares, legal-person (LP) shares, tradable A-shares, employee shares, and shares only available to foreign investors, a phenomenon that is unique to the Chinese equity market. In this paper, we investigate whether and how the corporate performance of listed Chinese firms is affected by their shareholding structure. The sample consists of all firms listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE) from 1991 to 1996. It is found that firm performance is positively related to the proportion of LP shares but negatively related to the proportion of shares owned by the state. Additional analyses indicate that firm performance increases with the degree of relative dominance of LP shares over state shares. Moreover, for the subsample of firms that do not have both state and LP shares, the return on equity (ROE) of firms with LP shares but no state shares is higher than that of firms with state shares but no LP shares by 3.84%, and this difference is statistically significant. On the other hand, there is little evidence in support of a positive correlation between corporate performance and the proportion of tradable shares owned by either domestic or foreign investors. These findings suggest that the ownership structure composition and relative dominance by various classes of shareholders can affect the performance of state-owned enterprise (SOE)-transformed and listed firms.     

The real effect of partial privatization on corporate innovation: Evidence from China's split share structure reform

We examine the real effect of partial privatization on corporate innovation. To establish causality, we explore plausibly exogenous variation in the expectation of further partial privatization generated by China's split share structure reform, which mandatorily converts non-tradable shares into freely tradable shares and opens up the gate to the further privatization of state-owned enterprises. We find that partial privatization prospects have a positive effect on corporate innovation. A better alignment of the interests of government agents with those of private shareholders and improved stock price informativeness appear to be two plausible underlying mechanisms. Our paper sheds new light on the real effects of partial privatization.     

Insider stock pledging and stock price informativeness: Evidence from India

Insiders’ shares can act as collateral while raising funds from lenders. This study examines the impact of insiders’ stock pledging activities on stock price informativeness using a sample of 1835 Indian firms. Our findings report that insider stock pledging increases the informational efficiency of stock prices. This informational efficiency increases for larger firms with: (1) financial constraints (high leverage and low cash holdings); (2) greater reliance on trade credit; and (3) higher indulgence in related party transactions. We also provide evidence on abnormal share turnover as a trading mechanism through which insider stock pledging is related to stock price informativeness. Our findings are robust across different specifications and after accounting for endogeneity issues.     

信息披露与国有股权私有化中的盈余管理

国有股权私有化是我国国有企业改革的重要措施。国有股权私有化过程中是否存在影响国有股权转让价格的盈余管理行为,以及如何抑制这种盈余管理,是我国国有企业改革中需要予以回答的重大问题。本文以我国通过控制权转移进行私有化的上市公司为样本,研究了国有股权私有化过程中的盈余管理以及信息披露对盈余管理影响的问题。研究发现,国有企业在国有股权私有化前1年和当年的操控性应计项目显著小于0,而私有化后的第1年显著大于0;及时披露国有股权私有化信息的公司在私有化前的操控性应计项目显著大于滞后披露信息的公司。以上结果表明,国有企业在国有股权私有化前存在降低收益的盈余管理行为,信息及时披露对私有化前的盈余管理有显著的抑制作用。本文的研究结论对规范我国国有企业改制和国有产权转让行为具有重要启示。     

Large controlling shareholders and stock price synchronicity

This paper examines the effect of controlling shareholders on stock price synchronicity by focusing on two salient corporate governance features in a concentrated ownership setting, namely, ultimate cash flow rights and the separation of voting and cash flow rights (i.e., excess control). Using a unique dataset of 654 French listed firms spanning 1998–2007, this study provides evidence that stock price synchronicity increases with excess control, supporting the argument that controlling shareholders tend to disclose less firm-specific information to conceal opportunistic practices. Additionally, this study shows that firms with substantial excess control are more likely to experience stock price crashes, consistent with the conjecture that controlling shareholders are more likely to hoard bad information when their control rights exceed their cash flow rights. Another important finding is that firms’ stock prices are less synchronous and less likely to crash when controlling shareholders own a large fraction of cash flow rights. This is consistent with the argument that controlling shareholders have less incentive to adopt poor disclosure policies and to accumulate bad news, since high cash flow ownership aligns their interests with those of minority investors.     

中小企业板上市公司股权结构、公司治理与企业绩效:基于随机前沿生产函数的分析

本文通过构建深圳中小企业板上市公司股权结构影响企业绩效的复合随机前沿生产函数,利用2006—2008年面板数据对中小企业的股权结构和企业绩效的关系进行了经验研究,结果表明中小企业的股权集中度与企业绩效之间显著正相关,这与国内文献中对大公司的经验研究结果一致,表明当前上市公司的股权集中有利于公司治理改善和企业绩效的提高。但是第一大股东持股比率却与绩效负相关,这与对大公司的研究结论相反,表明在中小企业中存在较为明显的"隧道挖掘"现象,"一股独大"在中小企业中并不利于公司治理。研究结果还表明,国家、法人、外资或个人对公司治理的绩效无显著差异;流通股比重、高管持股、研发人员投入等都与企业绩效不相关;中小企业具有较强的股权融资倾向,不符合"啄食顺序"的资本结构理论。     

Does international cross-listing improve the information environment

We investigate whether cross-listing in the U.S. affects the information environment for non-U.S. stocks. Our findings suggest cross-listing has an asymmetric impact on stock price informativeness around the world, as measured by firm-specific stock return variation. Cross-listing improves price informativeness for developed market firms. For firms in emerging markets, however, cross-listing decreases price informativeness. The added analyst coverage associated with cross-listing likely explains the findings in emerging markets, rather than changes in liquidity, ownership, or accounting quality. Our results indicate that the added analyst coverage fosters the production of marketwide information, rather than firm-specific information.