This paper examines the impacts of macroeconomic uncertainty, state ownership and board composition on firm performance. First, we find state ownership is negatively related to firm performance measured by return on assets and Tobin's Q. However, Tobin's Q increases with state ownership when...

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically connected than pre-listing IPO firms. Chinese RM firms also have...

This paper examines the investment terms of SWFs in respect of control rights in investee firms. Having reviewed extensive evidence from the China Investment Corporation from 2007 to 2015, I show that this SWF takes significant equity in investees, but often in the form of non-controlling...

Using a large sample of Chinese firms, we examine performance differences between firms with female and male chairs and the channels through which such differences arise. After controlling for the presence of female CEOs and non-chair female directors, we find that chairwoman firms perform...

This paper uses unique data on the shareholdings of both institutional and individual investors to directly investigate whether institutional investors have better stock selection ability than individual investors in China. Controlling for other factors, we find that institutional investors...

Previous theoretical and empirical studies suggest that CEOs' political connections are valuable to firms. We examine whether such connections become constraints if the expected political capital fails to materialize and the firm lacks other type of political power in place. Using a sample of...