We examine whether business groups' influence on cash holdings depends on ownership. Group affiliation can increase firms' agency costs or benefit firms by providing an internal capital market, especially in transition economies characterized by weak investor protection and difficult external...

My study examines how institutional features of transition economies, i.e., goverment ownership, legal investor protection, and government regulation distort the choice of directors, and the firm value impact of independent director and political-connected director in China. We find that SOEs...

Executive compensation in the U.S. banking industry has been criticized as a root cause of the recent financial crisis. This study examines the relationship between executive compensation, ownership structure, and firm performance for Chinese financial corporations during 2001-2009. The results...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...

Using a 2004 Chinese securities regulation that requires equity offering proposals to obtain the separate approval of voting minority shareholders, we examine whether giving minority shareholders increased control over corporate decisions helps reduce value-decreasing corporate decisions for...

One of the main aims of China's 12th Five-Year Program, which covers the period 2011-15, is to make Chinese industry more competitive. In order to achieve this, six key sectors have been designated for merger and restructuring, while seven have been designated for the creation of strategic new...

Has the value of firms' political connections declined during the course of China's market transition? Some argue that China has experienced a tipping point after which the importance of political connections in conducting business has diminished, whereas others expect the value of political...

We examine how political connections impact the process of going public. Specifically, we test how political connections impact the pricing of newly offered shares, the magnitude of underpricing, and the fixed cost of going public. Based on experiences of the new public firms in the Chinese...

Liquidity-constrained large shareholders often reallocate capital within business groups to finance their own projects, imposing credit constraints on other group members. Using microdata from Chinese customs, we study the impact of this negative externality on the transmission of exchange-rate...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in assessing the effectiveness of corporate governance in China. This paper examines the impact of internal governance mechanisms such as ownership structure and board characteristics and debt financing on agency costs making use of a large...