Like other major countries in the world, Chinese listed firms have recently experienced a dramatic rise in executive compensation. However, the arguments that could explain the same phenomena in developed countries can not be extended to the case in China. First, most Chinese listed firms are controlled by the state, thus management cannot set their own compensations through captured boards as suggested by Bebchuk and Fried (2004). Second, very few listed firms in China granted stock options and/or common stocks as part of executive compensations prior to 2005. There is little possibility that executives increased their own compensations by offering stock-option plans implied by Bolton et al. (2006). Based on the facts that the legal investor protection has been improved in China, we argue theoretically and empirically in this paper that the rise in executive compensation of Chinese listed firms can be attributed to the enhancement of legal investor protection. Since the management has to give up part of their private benefit with the improvement of legal investor protection, some private benefits extracted by management before have to be paid in an explicit way in order to make management incentive compatible. This finding partially leads to the increasing trend in executive compensations. It therefore provides a new perspective to explain why executive compensations keep rising in this emerging market where legal investor protection has been improving.

This paper empirically investigates the determinants of financing decisions in Chinese listed firms, using 3,196 firm-year observations from the Shanghai Stock Exchange during the period 2001–2005. Thereby, we investigate the effects of differences in institutions across Chinese provinces and municipalities, and compare the financing choices of state-controlled and private-controlled enterprises. We find that a better legal environment negatively affects the debt ratio and the proportion of debt that consists of bank loans in SOEs as well as private enterprises. Conversely, regional banking development positively influences these two variables. If anything, these effects of the rule of law and regional banking development on leverage are stronger for private-controlled firms. SOEs have lower debt ratios in regions with better stock market access, while private firms rely less on bank loans in regions with more government intervention in business. Finally, we document that SOE bank loans have a longer maturity, while their overall debt ratio and debt mix are comparable to those of private firms.

The issues concerning the governance mechanism of board independence and its determinants remain controversial in the field of corporate finance. Particularly, the association between the properties of family power and board independence is yet comprehensively discussed and is crucial important for the financial market in Europe and Asia. We set out in our study to identify the determinants of board independence with the sample of listed firms in Taiwan from 2002 to 2006 based on the notions that independent boards play an important role to enhance corporate governance mechanism. The argument that the higher involvement of family power in the board room is harmful to the board independence is expected. The evidence shows that firms with larger size and greater opportunities of managers to consume private benefits tend to hire more independent directors. Besides, higher growth opportunities, as well as greater outsider influence provide the same positive effect on appointing independent directors. Regarding to the most important evidence, firms with greater proportion of family members on the directorship reduce the tendency to appoint more independent directors; moreover, the higher percentage of shares owned by family members provides the positive effect on board independence. However, firm age is found to have a contradictory effect to that reported in the prior studies and firms which are more seasoned do not necessarily tend to hire more independent directors. Furthermore, we also compare board structures across different firm sizes and find that board composition in small and large firms is extremely divergent. We tend to contribute to the literatures with the evidence that firms with greater influence of power of family directorship on the board meeting are burdened with severe problem of less independence of the board.

In the last decade hundreds of companies from emerging markets have listed and issued their shares on American and European stock markets. Brazil, Russia, India, and China have been the main origins of issuers, and stock exchanges in the US, UK, and Luxembourg the main destinations involved in the process. These four home and three host markets are the empirical focus of our paper. We present an economic geography perspective on foreign listing, grounded in the geography of finance and the world city network approaches, emphasising the sub-national origins of foreign listed firms, the role of intermediaries, and competition for foreign listings. Our analysis, based on comprehensive up-to-date datasets on foreign listings and foreign equity issues, shows that issuers listing their shares abroad are predominantly large firms, coming from relatively high-growth, internationally oriented sectors, and headquartered overwhelmingly in the leading economic centres of their home countries. Key intermediaries in the foreign listing process are the global investment banks, operating out of the very same centres where the cross-listing firms and the host stock exchanges are located. Competition between host stock markets is affected significantly by the direct and indirect costs of foreign listing, including disclosure and corporate governance requirements. Both host markets and intermediaries exhibit a significant degree of specialisation in terms of the size, sector, and geographical origin of the issuers they serve. The market for foreign listing differs significantly between the BRIC countries, with the Chinese market offering the greatest potential, but facing considerable uncertainty.

We empirically examine the role of venture capital in VC-backed listed firms in Mainland China. It is found that the VC-backed firms experience higher underpricing as the investors in the second market are too optimistic about the prospect of the VC-backed firms, but not about the lower pricing in the primary market. In addition, the pre- and post-IPO operating performance of VC-backed firms are found to be significantly better than that of non VC-backed ones. The result supports the monitoring model. Meanwhile, there is no evidence to support the certification model. Furthermore, it is consistent with the grandstanding model proposed by Gompers that high-reputation VC-backed firms have a better post-IPO operating and market performance compared to low-reputation VC-backed ones.

Lin, Cai, and Li (1998) argue that under information asymmetry, SOE managers can use state-imposed policy burdens as excuses of poor performance and make the State accountable for it. The argument implies that turnover-performance sensitivity of SOEs decreases as policy burdens increase and that such impact depends on the extent of information asymmetry. Accordingly, this paper empirically explores how policy burdens affect top management turnover of Chinese listed firms between 2000 and 2005. We find that high surplus labor significantly reduces the sensitivity of chairman turnover to performance for state-controlled firms, while private firms do not exhibit such a pattern. Furthermore, our results show that high surplus labor reduces the turnover-performance sensitivity more for firms with greater information asymmetry. Overall, we find strong evidence supporting the implications of Lin, Cai, and Li (1998). In addition, we find that chairman turnover of Chinese firms is sensitive to different performance measures for state-controlled firms and private firms.

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.

In China, regional disparities are important. We examine the difference in the sensitivity of investment to cash flow between firms in inland regions and those in coastal regions. By using the financial data of Chinese listed firms, we found that firms in inland regions rely more on their internal funds in terms of their investment activities than those in coastal regions and that the sensitivity gap between inland and coastal firms widened in the recent contractionary monetary policy period. This suggests that firms in inland regions are harder to obtain outside funds due to unfavorable social and economic environments for inland firms. Our findings suggest that capital markets in China respond rationally to the potential impact of regional disparities on a firm’s performance.

This article tests several predictions of tournament theory on executive compensation in the context of a transition economy. Using an unbalanced panel which consists of a total of 34701 executives in 450 publicly listed firms in China during 1999 and 2006, we find that (1) pay increases as executives move up the corporate hierarchy into higher ranks; (2) pay gap is the largest between the first and second tier executives, although it does not increase monotonically across all executive ranks; and (3) pay dispersion increases with the number of tournament participants and the level of noise in the business environment. In addition, we find evidence that state ownership of shares reduces executive compensation and pay gap, and corporate governance structure affect pay dispersion. Overall, our study shows that listed firms in China, as they become more and more market-oriented, have adopted a pay structure that is largely consistent with the predictions of tournament theory, and that it is important to consider both ownership structure and corporate governance in analyzing executive compensation structure.

In this paper, we investigate the agency costs of government ownership and their impact on corporate governance and firm value. China is used as a laboratory because of the prevalent state shareholdings in exchange-listed firms. In this context, we specifically consider the trade-offs involved in the voluntary formation of an audit committee when the controlling shareholder is the state. The decision to improve corporate governance (in this case, introduce an audit committee) is shown to be value relevant and a function of existing agency relationships and non-trivial implementation costs. Our findings are robust to the level of pyramid groups, the ownership-control wedge, and financial leverage. The research adds to the debate regarding the effect of government shareholdings on corporate culture and performance - a topic that has taken on renewed importance in recent times.