We investigate how a firm’s political connections may affect its corporate policies. We propose and test the hypothesis that firms’ political connections enhance investors’ endorsement of managerial decisions, which elevates firm investment and encourages equity issuance and less cash payout. Using a sample of non-state owned Chinese firms, we find strong evidence in support of this hypothesis. Specifically, politically connected firms are less likely to pay dividends and pay less if they pay. The dividend announcement returns are significantly lower in connected firms than in otherwise similar but unconnected firms. Investors prefer firm investments to cash payouts by politically connected firms with high growth opportunities, and tend to value these firms’ investment decisions significantly higher. Finally, connected firms are also more able to tap public equity market for external funds. Our evidence is more consistent with political connections being an investor endorsement device rather than the expropriation device as suggested in the prior literature.

This study examines how corporate governance influences short-term and long-term bidder returns from China’s domestic mergers and acquisitions during 2001-2010. We examine a range of corporate governance measures covering ownership structure, board structure, insider ownership and managerial incentives while controlling for bidder and deal characteristics. Our initial results from events analyses show that market responses differ in ways which suggest a difference in how the market’s assessment of share price from the perspectives of short run and long run. Bidders obtain significant positive abnormal returns over the five-day event period but suffer significant wealth losses for two years following the deal completion. Our further analyses on factors driving the price difference show that executive ownership (positive) and state ownership (negative) exert opposite effects on the announcement period returns. The returns further differ by way of payments with positive (negative) effects from stock (cash) financing. Our long-term regression analyses show that the positive impact of executive ownership remains. Independent directors record a negative effect on abnormal returns. Nevertheless, board independence measured by the composite corporate governance index exerts a significant, positive effect on shareholder wealth. Our study highlights the need for the state to accelerate the share structure reform and formulate policies that encourage executive ownership and sound corporate governance.

Working with unique data on land values in 35 major Chinese markets and a panel of firms outside the real estate industry, we estimate standard investment equations that yield no evidence of a collateral channel effect. This is markedly different from previous work on the United States and Japan which finds economically large impacts. One reason for this appears to be that some of the most dominant firms in China are state-owned enterprises (SOEs) which are unconstrained in the sense that they do not need to rely on rising underlying property collateral values to obtain all the financing necessary to carry out their desired investment programs. However, we also find no collateral channel effect for non-SOEs when we perform our analysis on disaggregated sets of firms. Norms and regulation in the Chinese capital markets and banking sector can account for why there is no collateral channel effect operating among these firms. We caution that our results do not mean that there will be no negative fallout from a potential real estate bust on the Chinese economy. There are good reasons to believe there would be, just not through a collateral channel effect.

This paper examines the value of political connections in the Chinese IPO market. We find a positive relationship between CEO/chairman’s political connections and the probability of IPO approval of entrepreneurial firms. We further identify that minority shareholders value those connections and give a market premium to the connected firms after the firms go public. We provide evidence that connected independent directors and PE/VC investors bring important networks which facilitate firms’ access to the IPO market, albeit the former complements and the latter substitutes the CEO/chairman’s connections. We argue that in emerging markets where government intervention is still prevalent, the value of political connections does exist and entrepreneurial firms usually build political connections through different ways in order to facilitate their access the IPO market and obtain a higher market premium.

This paper examines the interactive effect of private equity (PE) and excess control rights on the process of firms’ going public. We find that firms with high excess control rights have more earnings management before IPO, and they are more likely to seek PE investors especially when the earnings management is high. We further show that the involvement of PE investors increases the probability of the firms’ IPO application being approved by the regulators in firms with high excess control rights. However, PE backed firms with high excess control rights are found to have a higher IPO fee, lower initial returns and lower long term post-IPO performance. We argue that in emerging markets where the protection of minority shareholders is weak and the economy is dominated by relationship and networks, ultimate owners have a strong incentive to have PE investors help them access the IPO market at the expense of minority shareholders’ interests, especially when they have excess control rights. In fact, instead of playing a monitory role, PE investors actually conspire with the ultimate owners to exploit minority shareholders’ interests and both PE investors and controlling shareholders become big winners, while minority shareholders are the only losers in the IPO process.

Using a sample of China’s listed private firms we investigate the relationship between control-ownership wedge, bank connections and collateral requirement. We find that while control-ownership wedge relates to more pledged collateral, it is mainly the firm’s bank connections rather than its political connections that reduce the collateral requirement and weakens the positive relationship between the control-ownership wedge and collateral. We furhter find that the split-share structure reform and regions with high lender competition also require less collateral and weaken the positive relationship between the control-ownership wedge and collateral. We argue that in an emerging market where legal protection for creditors and investors are weak and relationship is prevalent, bank connections is a substitute for collateral through mitigating the information asymmetry and agency concerns by creditors, which has been further exacerbated due to the tunnelling risk by the controlling shareholders.

corporate governance. We hypothesize that (a) Firms in more individualistic cultures should suffer more from agency problems and should use more corporate governance practices; (b) Firms in more individualistic cultures should use more debt since financing policy can also be used to control managerial opportunism, but the cultural effect should be smaller in firms with already higher corporate governance standards. Using the corporate governance scores from ASSET4, we find that individualism can explain a large variation in firm-level corporate governance and the empirical results are consistent with the our hypotheses.

Using a sample of 1250 companies listed in Shanghai or Shenzhen Stock exchanges for the time period from 1999 to 2010, we find that for firms with a higher level of uncertainty, the benefits of the connections and advice provided by directors outweigh the costs of the impairment in decision making related to having a large board size. In particular, the positive incremental effect of board size on Q, for firms with a higher proportion of State shares, suggests that connections provided by directors is crucial for firms to get access to greater resources and it is even more important to Stateowned than to Non-State-owned firms during the economic reform in China. Our results indicate that that both agency theory and resource dependence theory play an important role on board efficient research.

How do private equity (PE) investors affect a firm’s decision-making during the IPO process? The special IPO approval system for China’s stock market provides a unique setting to investigate this issue. In China, all IPO candidates need to submit an application to the China Securities Regulatory Commission and only approved firms can then be listed. Using data from ChiNext, we documented that pre-IPO PE investors, who invested in a firm less than a year prior to the IPO filing day, are associated with higher earnings management at the IPO, while longterm PE investors are associated with lower earnings management at the IPO. We propose that this is because long-term PE investors may prefer conservative financial statements to increase the probability of gaining approval in order to guarantee successful exit; on the other hand, pre- IPO PE investors are more likely to have political connections that can help the firms gain approval and they share the profits through a high IPO price. Consistent with this explanation, we find that local pre-IPO PE investors, who are more likely to have strong political connections, are associated with a higher probability of IPO approval. The evidence suggests that PE investors do have an impact on a firm’s decision-making during the IPO process. It also points to an important cost of the IPO approval system in China as well as the rent-seeking behavior associated with it.

The existing literature on political capital and bank lending has largely overlooked the role of political environment. Based on the theories of political marketplace, all-pay auction and political instability, we examine the conditional effect of political capital on access to bank loans with political environment surrounding private firms changing, using a nationwide survey of private firms in 2010. In particularly, we characterize the political environment with political capital inequality and political instability. We find that private firms have more difficulty gaining access to bank lending with the increase in the degree of political capital inequality. Furthermore, political capital exerts a positive effect on access to bank loans only when political capital inequality within a province exceeds 0.4775 and political instability does not exceed 0.7.