Agency hazards and alliance portfolios

Prior research over several decades has catalogued many positive motives underlying firms' decisions to engage in joint ventures and other forms of alliances. In this empirical analysis, we investigate whether agency problems brought about by the separation of ownership and control also stimulate the development of firms' joint venture portfolios. By focusing on joint ventures, as opposed to diversification in general or acquisitions, we address the recent debate on agency theory's domain. Results from a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms' alliance portfolios offer supporting evidence, and comparable findings are obtained for international and domestic joint ventures. Agency hazards are also found to bring about extensions of firms' nonequity alliance portfolios in both the international and domestic settings. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

我国银行业改革与引进外资的开放竞争策略

针对我国银行业面临的问题和外资银行进入后的竞争压力,本文通过分析几种不同改革思路后认为,我国银行业改革的核心问题是产权和公司治理,两者紧密相连,产权改革是为了获得良好的公司治理,私有化和引入外资都是可供选择的产权改革方式之一,理论上不存在何者更优.国有商业银行改革的关键在于改变国有独资所有权结构为多元投资结构,可供选择的方案有不改变所有权性质的多个国有投资主体的单一所有制和引进包括国有、民营、外资参股的多元所有制.鉴于我国银行业目前的特点,外资参股并不是一种最优的选择,引进外资银行的正确策略是:独资优于合作,合作优于合资.     

基于"综合谈判力"的企业所有权安排

现代企业理论打开了“企业”这一“黑箱”,为理解和创建现代企业制度提供了有力的理论支撑。本文通过对企业各要素所有者谈判力三个方面,即:签约人自身实力、签约人相互关系地位、签约外部环境的具体分析,阐释了各要素所有者对企业剩余的分享,并以此初步构建一个以企业要素所有者“综合谈判力”为基础的企业所有权安排分析框架。     

股权制衡、非国有股东委派董事与公司绩效

从公司治理层面完善国有控股企业的股权制衡是国企混合所有制改革的重点和难点,以往学者仅仅研究了股权制衡与公司绩效之间的关系,很少研究两者关系的作用路径和影响机理.因此,引入非国有股东委派董事这一概念,研究非国有股东委派董事在股权制衡与公司绩效之间发挥的中介效应.结果表明:股权制衡有利于公司绩效的提升,非国有股东委派董事在股权制衡与公司绩效两者之间发挥了中介效应.     

Ownership concentration and bank risk: international study on acquisitions

This paper explores the effects of different types of bank ownership concentration on changes in bank risk during acquisition years. Using multi-country data from 2000 to 2006, during which market failures caused by various crises and government interventions are less influential to acquisition decisions, we collect 505 banking acquisition deals from 23 countries to examine which type of ownership concentration (such as financial intermediary, capital investor, non-financial, and state ownership) brings larger changes to an acquirer’s risk from pre-acquisition year to post-acquisition year (including non-performing loans, capital adequacy ratio, loan loss reserve, and credit rating). The empirical analyses show that acquirer banks with a concentration of shares owned by financial intermediaries and non-financial firms experience larger risk changes during acquisition years. In contrast, the risk changes of acquirer banks with a concentration of capital investors and state ownership are lower. Robustness checks from the random effect estimation, instrumental variables model, reverse causality, and different subsamples of (non-)U.S. or different levels of regulation enforcement confirm these results.     

Can employee ownership and human resource management policies clash in worker cooperatives? Lessons from a defunct cooperative

The article analyzes the interaction between employee ownership, HRM policies and practices, and HRM outcomes in what was the world's biggest industrial worker cooperative for decades, and now defunct, Fagor Electrodomésticos. Using longitudinal internal data and detailed interviews with key stakeholders, this paper sheds light on how employee ownership conditioned HRM policies. HRM outcomes—such as job satisfaction and absenteeism—are also analyzed over a long period of time. Chronic nepotism when recruiting new members, failures in the training policy, impoverished and Taylorist working systems, and reverse dominance hierarchies are analyzed as factors that increased free riding and caused low satisfaction and the disengagement of working members. This case study contributes to the literature on HRM and worker cooperatives as it provides some insights that are rarely found in that literature. It also provides guidance to worker cooperatives about increasing the fit between employee ownership and HRM policies and outcomes.     

The effect of heterogeneous beliefs on mergers and acquisitions

This article investigates the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on firms’ mergers and acquisitions (M&A) decisions. Using data of China’s financial market, which is featured with great heterogeneity of belief, we find that heterogeneous beliefs are positively associated with the occurrence of M&A transactions, and firms with greater heterogeneous beliefs are more likely to pay the transactions with stock. Moreover, we show that government intervention, measured by state ownership, weakens the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on firms’ M&A decisions.     

Philanthropic giving of China’s hotel firms: The roles of state ownership,corporate misconduct and executive remuneration

This study utilizes value enhancement theory, agency cost theory and crisis management theory to scrutinize the philanthropic giving (PG) of China’s listed hotel companies from 2003 to 2018. The results of dynamic panel regression tests reveal that state ownership (company character), corporate misconduct (crisis management determinant) and executive remuneration (agency cost determinant) are influential factors in hotel firms’ PG, but none of the value enhancement determinants can explain PG. Specifically, state ownership is negatively correlated with PG, reflecting low PG in government dominated hotel firms in China. PG is negatively associated with executive remuneration, indicating that hotel managers care more about self-interest than social responsibility. PG is also positively related to corporate misconduct, suggesting that hotel firms use philanthropy to manage a crisis. Finally, the lagged PG has a positive effect on PG, implying that PG is intended to avoid damage to social image and reputation of China’s hotel firms.     

Modeling and Measuring Economic Reality: Reply to the Reviews

To begin with, we'd like to express our appreciation to our three commentators for their thoughtful and helpful reviews. Like the founders of the subject, we believe, and our reviewers seem to agree, that structural econometrics has the potential to enable us to develop serious working models of how different economies actually operate, and also to tell us something about the changing patterns of their growth and transformation. But both we and our reviewers agree that there is a great deal wrong with the way econometrics is practiced today.     

Government Stakes as an Insurance Policy: Evidence from Seasoned Equity Offerings of Chinese Firms

While privatization has attracted much more attention in the literature, one type of reverse privatization, a privately-controlled firm inviting government ownership as its minority shareholders, is neglected in the literature. Using large-scale census firm data from China, we investigate the determinants of this kind of reverse privatization and its impact on firm performance. We find that (1) the decision of reverse privatization by Chinese private firms is affected by local political risk, firm-level financial characteristics, and industry-level characteristics, (2) the reverse privatization significantly affects the firm’s performance, which is measured in different proxies but the effects are not consistent, and (3) moreover, we find that the benefit of reverse privatization decreases as government ownership increases. Our results suggest that the prevalence of reverse privatization in China is a political outcome, which is affected by the trade-off of political risk and political privilege. Our work suggests that political risk and political considerations are the main driving factors of privatization, or its opposite, reverse privatization. Reverse privatization, to some extent, is a rational choice in some transition economies. Our findings offer clear policy implications to the nationalization phenomenon taking place around the world recently.