Contractual Hazard,Political Hazard and FDI Ownership Structure in Joint‐venture Enterprises in China

This paper investigates how institutional environments, especially the contractual hazard and the political hazard, affect foreign investors’ share ratios in joint‐venture enterprises in China. We build a model combining Transaction Cost Economics and Property Rights Theory to describe the tradeoff that foreign investors face between choosing a larger share ratio and a smaller one. We argue that when the contractual hazard increases, foreign investors request larger shares to avoid being held up by their domestic partners, and when the political hazard increases, they hold smaller shares to circumvent the local government's grabbing hand. Moreover, the effect of the contractual hazard is channeled through enterprises’ asset specificity. These theoretical predictions are verified by studying the relationship between the ownership structure of Chinese manufacturing joint‐venture enterprises and the provincial‐level institutions they are embedded in.