This paper investigates the effects of largest-shareholder ownership concentration, foreign ownership, and audit quality on the amount of firm-specific information incorporated into share prices, as ...measured by stock price synchronicity, of Chinese-listed firms over the 1996–2003 period. We show that synchronicity is a concave function of ownership by the largest shareholder with its maximum at an approximate 50% level. Further, we find that synchronicity is higher when the largest shareholder is government related. We also find that foreign ownership and auditor quality are inversely associated with synchronicity. Finally, we show that the amount of earnings information reflected in stock returns is lower for firms with high synchronicity.
This article identifies an important channel through which excess control rights affect firm value. Using a new, hand-collected data set on corporate ownership and control of 3,468 firms in 22 ...countries during the 1996–2008 period, we find that the cost of debt financing is significantly higher for companies with a wider divergence between the largest ultimate owner’s control rights and cash-flow rights and investigate factors that affect this relation. Our results suggest that potential tunneling and other moral hazard activities by large shareholders are facilitated by their excess control rights. These activities increase the monitoring costs and the credit risk faced by banks and, in turn, raise the cost of debt for the borrower.
Employee stock ownership is one of the common medium and long-term incentive methods for state-controlled mixed ownership. As the current state-controlled mixed-ownership enterprise employee ...shareholding is still in the pilot stage, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council is still relatively strict on the implementation of relevant conditions for enterprises. Based on the analysis and research on the relevant policies and corporate practices of employee stock ownership, this paper puts forward the implementation path of state-controlled mixed ownership enterprises to carry out employee stock ownership, and gives reminders and early warnings of common risks in the implementation process.
By tracing the identity of large shareholders, we group China’s listed companies into those controlled by state asset management bureaus (SAMBs), state owned enterprises (SOEs) affiliated to the ...central government (SOECGs), SOEs affiliated to the local government (SOELGs), and Private investors. We argue that these distinct types of owners have different objectives and motivations and this will affect how they exercise their control rights over the firms they invest in. In particular, we contend that private ownership of listed firms in China is not necessarily superior to certain types of state ownership. To test our arguments we investigate the relative efficiency of state versus private ownership of listed firms and the efficiency of various forms of state ownership. The empirical results indicate that the operating efficiency of Chinese listed companies varies across the type of controlling shareholder. SOECG controlled firms perform best and SAMB and Private controlled firms perform worst. SOELG controlled firms are in the middle. The results are consistent with our predictions.
We employ a unique data set to explore the role of ownership structure and institutional development in debt financing of non-publicly traded Chinese firms. We show that state ownership is positively ...associated with leverage and firms’ access to long-term debt, while foreign ownership is negatively associated with all measures of leverage. Surprisingly, firms in better developed regions are associated with reduced access to long-term debt, suggesting the availability of alternative financing channels and the tightening of the lending standards under the on-going banking reform. The combination of ownership structures and institutions explains up to 6% of the total variation in firms’ leverage decisions, while firm characteristics alone explain no more than 8% of the variation. Further, we show that non-state-owned firms tend to have lower total and short-term debt than their state-owned counterparts in less developed regions. Finally, we show that state-owned firms’ easy access to long-term debt is positively associated with long-term investment and negatively associated with firm performance.
A public empire Pravilova, Ekaterina; Pravilova, Ekaterina
2014., 20140413, 2014, 2014, 2014-04-13
eBook
"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. ...Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership.A Public Empirerefutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly,A Public Empireshows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.
The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects-rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics-should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation.
Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property,A Public Empirelooks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.
This study investigates the effect of state ownership on Chinese firms' foreign direct investment (FDI) ownership decisions. It adopts a political perspective to extend the application of ...institutional theory in international business research. Specifically, it examines firms' heterogeneous responses to external institutional processes during foreign market entry, while taking into consideration the political affiliation of firms with the external institutions. We argue that state ownership creates the political affiliation of a firm with its home-country government, which increases the firm's resource dependence on homecountry institutions, while at the same time influencing its image as perceived by host-country institutional constituents. Such resource dependence and political perception increase firms' tendency to conform to, rather than resist, isomorphic institutional pressures. We tested our hypotheses using primary data for 132 FDI entries made by Chinese firms during 2000–2006, and we found that the effects of home regulatory, host regulatory and host normative pressures on a firm to choose a joint ownership structure were stronger when the share of equity held by state entities in the firm was high.
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