The voluminous strategy research on the determinants of corporate scope is often premised on a well-established property rights regime, which contrasts with the weak property rights protection that still characterizes most countries today. We address this gap by applying property rights theory to theorize and empirically examine how the strengthening of the property rights regime affects corporate scope. Our analysis exploits the enactment of a property law that enhanced the formal protection of private properties in China as a quasi-experiment. We show that with a strengthened property rights regime, the horizontal relatedness among private firms’ businesses increases, but their vertical relatedness decreases, compared with state-owned firms. Further, these effects are less prominent for politically connected firms that are afforded informal protection of property rights. Our findings shed new light on the property rights regime as a critical determinant of firms’ horizontal and vertical scope.

This paper uses the enactment of China’s 2007 Property Law (the Law), which reduces the risk of expropriation by local governments, as the setting to investigate the importance of property rights protection for private firm investment. Using propensity score matching and a difference-in-differences design, we find that firms facing weaker property rights protection prior to the Law significantly increase their investment and investment efficiency after the Law. Cross-sectional analyses document evidence consistent with a decrease in firms’ perceived expropriation risk as the main mechanism underlying the Law’s effect. Finally, we show that the Law improves local economic outcomes and employment.

We conducted an assessment of the impact of Property Rights on the toxic emissions of Chinese industrial firms. Specifically, we focused on the 2007 enactment of the Property Law in China and utilized difference-in-difference estimations to analyze firms’ pollutant emissions. Our findings reveal compelling evidence that firms with low net fixed assets considerably reduce their chemical oxygen demand (COD) emissions after the implementation of the Property Law. Moreover, the effect is more prominent in firms that face stronger financial constraints and are situated in areas with high external pressure on environmental protection or robust government monitoring. We concluded that the Property Law's influence on firms’ toxic emissions is through improving credit conditions and technology upgrades. Overall, our results indicate that a well-established Property Law has a significant impact on industrial firms' environmental policies.

Despite the importance of property rights protection, evidence of their impact on thebirth, survival, and operations of the whole universe of firms, and the broad impact on the economy, is limited. In this paper we address this important question by utilizing unique administrative firm-level datasets in China. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the China’s 2007 Property Law led to significant more new private firms, firms that eventually survive, firms with less shareholders, and more new exporters, whereas the impact is the opposite for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, we find that the switch in resources between private firms and SOEs contributes to higher economic growth without sacrificing environmental quality.