In emerging markets, the deviation between the ultimate controlling shareholders' voting rights and their cash flow rights (hereafter “DVC”) in the listed firms is quite prevalent. DVC could be introduced due to the ultimate controlling shareholders' opportunistic incentives, as well as by...

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...

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 examines the benefits and costs associated with rookie independent directors (RIDs) in Chinese public companies from 2008 to 2014. We find that RIDs attend more board meetings. Boards with more RIDs tunnel less to controlling shareholders, suggesting that RIDs are efficient monitors....

This paper examines how the institutional features of emerging economies (i.e., government ownership, political connections, and market reform) influence CEO pay-dispersion incentives. Consistent with our expectation, we find that CEO pay dispersion generally provides a tournament incentive in...

This paper examines executive compensation in the subsidiaries of business groups in China. Analyzing a sample of China business groups (the so-called “XiZu JiTuan” in Chinese) from 2003 to 2012, we find convincing evidence of the use of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) in the executive...

While US companies mainly list their board of directors alphabetically, this is not the case for Chinese companies, most of which list their independent directors last. We interpret the listing order of Chinese directors as board hierarchy, reflecting power allocation within the board. Based on...

Chinese listed firms recruit independent directors in order to build up connections with people who can provide useful sources and/or protection rather than for their monitoring of top managements. It is found that Chinese listed firms particularly prefer two types of Guanxi provided by...

This article reviews empirical studies on the relationship between independent directors and firm performance in Chinese listed companies. The purpose is to generalize empirical evidence on the theoretical claim that independent directors can improve firm performance by performing their...