This paper surveys how and why the share spilt reform enhance the corporate governance using agency cost as proxy from the perspective of stockholders’ conflict and liquidity increase in the process of share spilt reform respectively. We find that share spilt reform brings significant governance improvement. Besides, we use some governance effect and liquidity theory proposed by Edmans et al. (2011) to testify by which means the share split reform enhance the corporate governance. What is more, we find that the corporations with great difficulty, which represented for severe shareholders’ conflict, in carrying forward the reform tend to have severe governance problems while it was this kind of corporation that benefited most from the reform and formed the main driving force of the realization of the goal of reform. It has some implication on China’s current reform; that is, only when toughest problems have been overcome will the goal of reform be achieved.

Previous studies have typically found a negative relation between pyramidal ownership and firm value, and have interpreted it as supporting evidence of the incentive problems created by pyramiding. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for the endogeneity of ownership to factors that also affect firm performance, leaving the agency problem indistinguishable from the unfavorable fundamental shock. Using a unique sample of privately owned listed enterprises in China, this paper examines the effect of pyramidal ownership on returns in response to the announcement of the Share Split Reform in China. This reform triggered zero fundamental shocks but resurrected entrepreneurial incentives in proportion to the separation of ownership and control. Estimates of agency cost of pyramidal ownership are significant and material, and are robust against a range of alternative hypotheses. Moreover, institutional investors appear to appreciate the reform more when a firm’s pyramidal ownership is less separated. The findings suggest that, despite the endogenous determinant of ownership choice, agency theory alone successfully explains the pyramidal discount.