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.

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.

Comprehensive data on corporate announcements of Chinese firms allows us to examine the preference for, and determinants of, cash and stock dividends. The results indicate that Chinese public investors prefer stock dividends over cash dividends, which are preferred by large state and legal person shareholders generally. Stock dividends, which do not require an explicit cash outflow from a firm, are found to be positively related to higher earnings, supporting the signalling hypothesis of dividend policy. In an imperfect market, these results have some implications for government regulation of financial markets.