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.

This paper uses a dataset of more than 100,000 firms over the period of 2000-07 to assess whether and why Chinese firms overinvest. We find that corporate investment in China has become increasingly efficient over time, suggesting that overinvestment has been declining. However, within all ownership categories, we find evidence indicating a degree of overinvestment by firms that invest more than the industry median. The free cash flow hypothesis provides a good explanation for China’s overinvestment in the collective and private sectors, whereas in the state sector, overinvestment is attributable to the poor screening and monitoring of enterprises by banks.

Using a panel of listed Chinese firms over the period 2001-2008, we investigate the interactions among corporate investment, financing, and payout decisions within a simultaneous equations system, where each decision is treated as endogenous and is subject to the constraint that sources much equal uses of cash, as implied by the flow-of-funds framework. We find that capital investment and dividend payout, being the competing uses of limited funds, are negatively interrelated, whilst both of them are positively connected to net amount of new debt issued, suggesting the existence of a joint determination of corporate decisions under financial constraints. In addition, we find that the simultaneity among the corporate decisions becomes more intensified for firms that are more financially constrained, which may reduce managerial flexibility of Chinese firms. Therefore, our result reveals new insight into the complex interdependence of corporate behaviour under financial constraints.

We investigate the power structure of the Chinese political system and explore its implications on corporate finance. With a large sample of firms from 1999-2007, we document large-scale ‘re-nationalization’—local governments re-establish controlling ownership stakes in previously privatized firms. We find that firms located in provinces with newly appointed, top-ranked Party leaders who do not belong to any of the three dominant political factions are more likely to be renationalized. With a number of instrument variables, including the political status of the top-ranked provincial party leaders, we find that re-nationalization leads to lower sales and labor productivity for the firms. We also find some evidence that re-nationalization temporarily lowers the unemployment rate in the region without any significant, long-term economic benefits.