This paper investigates two successive reforms in China -- 2001 board independence and 2005 share structure -- to study their joint effects on corporate performance as ownership concentration declines. We find that both independent directors and ownership concentration ratios are individually...

Using a hand-collected dataset of city-level local official turnover in China, I find that average cash holdings of listed firms decrease significantly upon turnover of city heads, and this effect concentrates in privately owned enterprises. Such effects are more pronounced in firms located in...

This study examines the role of institutional common owners on a firm's cost of equity capital. Following the theoretical and empirical literature on common ownership, we hypothesize that common owners could reduce a firm's cost of capital by reducing product market competition and improving...

Employing the news-based economic policy uncertainty (EPU) Index of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) and quarterly data of Chinese listed companies, we find that an increase in EPU raises the average debt-to-asset ratio of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but lowers that of private-owned enterprises...

This paper shows that agency problems result from controlling-minority shareholder conflicts have a nonlinear causal relation with firm cash holding, and this relation hinges critically on the strength of investor protection. Using a direct measure of controlling shareholder's entrenchment...