Abstract | During the decentralization reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), China’s government has converted many SOEs into listed companies and established modern corporate system. However, most controlling shareholders of these listed SOEs still retain administrative governance system. With the development of Chinese economy, more and more studies have found that these two conflicting corporate governance mechanisms have made the SOEs still bear serious political burdens, and significantly affected the effectiveness of decentralization reform of SOEs. Therefore, a question is whether the improvement of corporate governance mechanism in controlling shareholders of listed SOEs can reduce the policy burdens of listed SOEs, and promote the incentive mechanism of listed SOEs?
In 2004, State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission(SASAC)decided to establish board of directors in some Central Government Enterprises(CGEs) and then give some important rights of government (such as major investment and financing decision rights, the selection and appraisal of managers) back to the boards. The construction of board of directors in CGEs has provided a good nature experiment for our study. Firstly, the board reform of CGEs is aimed at Central Government Enterprises, so it is a relative exogenous event for SOEs that are controlling by these CGEs. Secondly, the board reform of CGEs is implemented year by year, which can provide good experimental group and control group for empirical tests.
Based on this nature experiment, we examine how the perfection of controlling shareholders’ corporate governance mechanism affects the redundancy burden, incentive mechanism and value of listed SOEs. Using the listed SOEs controlled by CGEs from 2002 to 2016 and a difference-in-differences (DID) design, we find that the board reform of CGEs can reduce the redundancy burden of listed SOEs, and this effect is more significant in firms which have less pyramidal layers. Then we use several approaches to mitigate potential concerns regarding our DID estimation. First, we use alternative DID specifications by restricting our sample with propensity score matched (PSM) firms. Second, we use a dynamical DID estimation to test the effect of this board reform of CGEs Third, we drop the data of pilot year. We again find our results remain qualitatively similar. Furthermore, we find the board reform of CGEs can reduce the degree of compensation stickiness, and increase the value of listed SOEs.
Our study contributes to the literature in at least there ways.
First, we add to a large body of literature examining the valuation consequences of boards of directors. While a large body of literature has studied the role and influence of board characteristics, much of the literature focuses on the role of independent board members, composition of board, the size or the culture of board. Whether such intensified board monitoring is beneficial or detrimental to shareholder wealth is less clear. Besides, due to the omitted variables, reverse causality and other factors, existing research can hardly solve the endogenous concerns inherent in examining cross-sectional relations between board composition and performance. Recently, Fauver et al. (2017) use corporate board reforms in 41 countries and examine the effect board reform on firm value. Different from these studies which mostly focus on the effect of board in listed companies, we use the board reform of CGEs to examine how the board reform of CGEs, controlling shareholders of listed companies, affects the employee allocation efficiency of listed SOEs, which provide a direct empirical evidence for the role of board on corporate value.
Second, our paper enriches the literature of the redundancy burden in SOEs. Existing studies have found the factors of redundancy burden in SOEs, such as property right, political connections, and external employment environments and so on. Recently, some studies find that corporate governance mechanism can significantly affect corporate redundancy burdens. Based on widespread group company control characteristic in listed SOEs, we find that the improvement of corporate governance mechanism in controlling shareholders can reduce the redundancy burdens in listed SOEs.
Third, we also provide empirical evidence about the positive effect of reform of SOEs. We find that improvement of corporate governance mechanism in group companies can reduce the degree of compensation stickiness, and increase the value of listed SOEs.
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