We study how firms' ownership structure affects the cost of debt using evidence from Chinese corporate bond market. Our result shows state, institutional, and foreign ownership all help to reduce firms' cost of debt. The effect of state ownership is more pronounced if the issuer is headquartered...

In this paper, we show that the book-to-market decomposition described in Fama-French (2008) significantly improves the predictive power of the estimation for an important emerging market, viz, Chinese shares. Second, we show that this improvement comes mainly from the change in book equity and...