With the increasing executive-employee pay disparity in recent years, research on executive compensation has grown exponentially. This paper reviews all articles on executive compensation published between 2000 and 2022 in the six accounting journals with the highest impact index in South Korea and China (five journals in China), and evaluates and analyzes the research in both countries. The analysis results are organized as follows: First, the research on executive compensation started earlier in South Korea than in China; second, the focus of the research on executive compensation differs between the two countries; then, the study on the determinants of executive compensation varies between the two countries; forth, the proxies for firm performance are mostly the same in the two countries; and finally, most of the studies in the two countries assert that executive compensation has a positive impact on firm performance. Based on the above research, this paper confirms that the agency theory, which has been widely validated in Western countries, is also valid in Asian countries. In addition, it provides an essential reference for future research on executive compensation in Asian countries.

Using an extensive panel of Chinese firms from the Annual Tax Survey and relying on labor unrest as shock to local social stability, we show that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) react to nearby labor unrest by creating additional employment at the expense of firm performance. Each SOE exposed to unrest hires 3% more employees, which is a sizeable aggregated effect. This effect is larger when labor unrest occurs in the same industry as the exposed SOEs, when local governments have sound fiscal budgets, and when governing mayors have stronger promotion incentives. SOEs obtain more fiscal benefits when they absorb additional labor. In contrast, non-SOEs do not react to labor unrest, and their performance is unaffected. Similar effects are detected when we use the population of Chinese listed firms. This paper provides evidence that SOEs internalize the goal of maintaining social stability and contribute to the growth of the non-state sector.

This paper studies the effect of top management team (TMT) network centrality on bank loan contracts. We show that firms with high TMT network centrality obtain bank loans with lower loan spreads, larger loan size, longer maturity, and fewer collateral requirements. From the mediating effect analysis, we find that TMT interlocking networks affect loan pricing by reducing agency costs, improving the quality of accounting information, expanding resource channels, and enhancing the credibility of companies. In addition to easing financial constraints, TMT network centrality is also beneficial to investment efficiency and innovation output of corporates, but it will decrease firm performance.

This study investigates venture capital (VC) reputation impact on the pre-IPO performance of the entrepreneurial firms backed by three kinds of VCs. This study employs backward stepwise regression models following prior theoretical frameworks to examine the research question. Based on a database of the top 50 VC firms ranked during 2016 to 2020 and their portfolio firms. This study shows some contingent contribution to pre-IPO firm performance. Firstly, the reputation of the Chinese government-owned VCs is negatively associated with their portfolio firm performance. Still, there is a positive relationship between foreign and local private VCs. Secondly, entrepreneurial firm performance is significantly associated with industry policy and entrepreneur’s performance than VC reputation. This study has practical implications for entrepreneurs and limited partners regarding their corporation relationships with the Chinese VCs.

This paper examines a board's decision to hire a star CEO and analyzes the consequences of this decision for firm performance. We propose a new methodology to identify star CEOs by analyzing the texts contained in 18,240 Wall Street Journal news articles. Unlike previous measures, our new metric accounts for the time series variations of executives’ visibility as well as how favorably these executives are portrayed in the business press. The proposed measure indicates that boards with short industry tenure or busy boards are more likely to select a star CEO. Consistent with previous evidence, firms that hire star CEOs perform subsequently worse than firms that hire non-star CEOs. However, in contrast to previous work, we show that this underperformance is attributable to boards with short industry tenure or busy boards, rather than the inabilities of star CEOs. Furthermore, our event studies of stock market reactions to hiring news imply that investors prefer star CEOs selected by boards with long industry tenure. Our work contributes to the literature by offering insights into how board composition affects firm performance.

This study investigates the influence of equity characters characteristic on firm performance using panel data for 373 listed companies for the period from 2001 to 2009.We find that there is non-linear correlation between ownership characters and firm performance.(ii)the high state ownership has significant positive influence on performance but we have not found evidence that the small and medium state ownership have any influence on performance.(iii) the legal person ownership has negative influence on performance but the individual ownership is positive relation with performance.

Multiunit structure can internalize the managerial market to promote competition among subsidiary managers, and create an internal capital market within firms to alleviate external financing constrains, and it also may lead to diversification to lower the operation risk and regulation. While it brings in more agency problem created by subsidiary managers, causing the efficiency of internal capital market and diversification confusing. Using the data of listed firms in China, an emerging market, this paper examines the efficiency of multiunit structure within the firm, investigating the influence on capital allocation and firm performance. We find that multiunit structure is better in emerging market since it is efficient in capital allocation, reducing the inefficient investment by reducing the overinvestment and alleviating the underinvestment, and the bright side of multiunit structure dominates the agency problem associated, thus beneficial for firm performance, both short-term and long-term accounting returns. In less developed capital market under current situation, multiunit structure is better.

This paper investigates the impact of ownership and ownership concentration on the performance of China’s listed firms. By recognizing the differences between ownership and ownership concentration and between total ownership concentration and tradable ownership concentration, we conduct simplex, interactive and joint analyses. We find that ownership concentration is approximately associated with higher firm performance. Ownership concentration is more powerful than any category of ownership in determining firm performance. Firm performance is better when the state is the largest of the top shareholders and/or institutions dominate ownership among the top tradable shareholders. Our results support the theory that high ownership concentration mitigates the agency problem.

This paper investigates pay dispersion and its effects on firm performance in China’s listed firms. Due to weak investor protection and an inefficient legal system, China is expected to have a lower level of corporate governance. In this weak institutional environment, we argue that awarding sufficient power and high pay to CEOs is helpful to increase firm performance. Using data from 2002 to 2007, we find that pay dispersion is related to tournament incentives and agency factors. Importantly, we find evidence that pay dispersion is positively related to firm performance which is consistent with our primary hypothesis. In addition, the relation is more positive when the firm is controlled by the state. Our results are robust to corrections for endogeneity between pay dispersion and firm performance and to several alternative measures of pay dispersion and firm performance.

Recent researches suggest that private benefits of control of managers are a key predictor of acquisition performance and that there exists a negative correlation between measures of private benefits and acquirer announcement returns. However, empirical evidence has not confirmed such a negative relationship. The study in this paper shows that this relationship between private benefits of control of managers and acquisition performance may depend on the level of government shareholding. The study is based on an analysis of a sample of 246 M&A events from the listed companies of Chinese state-controlled enterprises, during the period 2001-2006 and it reveals that, under a low level of government shareholding, private benefits of control are positively correlated with the performance of acquiring firm; but private benefits of control are negatively correlated with the performance of acquiring firm under high government shareholding. Results also indicate that the private benefits of control of managers are important determinants of the acquiring firm performance. These findings sharpen the current understanding of the relationship between private benefits of control of managers and acquiring firm performance.