Does Granting Minority Shareholders Direct Control Over Borporate Decisions Help Reduce Value Decreasing Corporate Decisions? A Natural Experiment from China

Author(s):  
Zhihong Chen ◽  
Bin Ke ◽  
Zhifeng Yang
2013 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 1211-1238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihong Chen ◽  
Bin Ke ◽  
Zhifeng Yang

ABSTRACT 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 to reduce value-decreasing corporate decisions for firms domiciled in weak investor protection countries. We find that the regulation deters management from submitting value-decreasing equity offering proposals in firms with higher mutual fund ownership. There is also weak evidence that minority shareholders are more likely to veto value-decreasing equity offering proposals in firms with higher mutual fund ownership in the post-regulation period. Overall, our evidence suggests that in weak investor protection countries, the effect of granting minority shareholders increased control over corporate decisions on the quality of corporate decisions depends on the composition of minority shareholders. JEL Classifications: G32; G34; G38


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongming Kong

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to test a catering theory by examining impacts of minority shareholders’ pressures on earnings management (EM), and attempt to answer: what is the role of minority shareholders participation (MSP) in corporate governance? and does MSP serve as an external monitor to managers, or does it put excessive pressure on them?Design/methodology/approachUsing a novel online voting data set in China’s stock market, the author constructs the measure of MSP, and regress the EM on MSP. To address the endogeneity, the author introduces propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods, instrumental variables, and Heckman estimation to show that the results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures.FindingsThe author documents that: MSP plays limited role in external monitoring; and firms facing high MSP levels tend to manage earnings more actively. In addition, information asymmetry, proposals’ importance, managerial incentives, and CEO financial expertise significantly affect firms’ catering behaviors.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to different strands of the literature. First, the finding significantly supports the catering hypothesis from a new perspective of EM. Second, the author contributes to a hotly debated issue in corporate governance: whether minority shareholders should be granted increased participation in corporate decisions? The results also provide timely empirical evidence for government regulators who are concerned about the costs and benefits of granting minority shareholders direct control over corporate decisions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamran Shah ◽  
Attaullah Shah

This study analyzes the impact of corporate governance and ownership structure on earnings management for a sample of 372 firms listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange over the period 2003–10. We estimate discretionary accruals using four well-known models: Jones (1991); Dechow, Sloan, and Sweeney (1995); Kasznik (1999); and Kothari, Leone, and Wasley (2005). The results indicate that discretionary accruals increase monotonically with the ownership percentage of a firm’s directors, their spouses, children, and other family members. This supports the view that managers who are more entrenched in a firm can more easily influence corporate decisions and accounting figures in a way that may serve their interests. This finding is consistent with prior research evidence on the role of dominant directors in expropriating external minority shareholders in Pakistan. Further, our results indicate that institutional investors play a significant role in constraining earnings management practices. We do not find any evidence that CEO duality, the size of the auditing firm, the number of members on the board of directors, and ownership concentration influence discretionary accruals. Among the control variables, we find that firms that are more profitable, are growing, or have higher leverage actively manage their earnings, while earnings management decreases with the age of the firm. The results are robust to several alternative specifications.


Author(s):  
William Viney

Stephen Jay Gould, the biologist and author, once joked that were he an identical twin raised separately from his brother they could ‘hire ourselves out to a host of social scientists and practically name our fee’. In order to monetise Gould’s fantasy, one would want a form of twinship that could operate according to evidential, experimental, somatic and circumstantial ideals. And Gould admits that he and his brother would need to be viewed as ‘the only really adequate natural experiment for separating genetic from environmental effects in humans’. This chapter seeks to interrogate the evidential and experimental circumstances that may underpin the comic quips that guide modern biology. In human genetics, twins are used as experimental bodies that are made to matter in particular ways and for particular people; they become newly ‘animate’ for being enrolled into scientific research. Raised in cultures assumed to be alike or dissimilar, isolated by researchers for being valuable in the measured disentanglement of assembled molecular agents (which are sometimes distinguished from an assemblage referred to as an ‘environment’), twins achieve a status of experimental significance not just for what they do but also for what they are taken to be.


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