Abstract

By tracing the identity of large shareholders, this paper groups China’s listed companies into four categories by different controllers and argues that these distinct types of owners have different objectives and motivations. As a result, this will affect how they exercise their control rights over the firms they invest in. In particular, the author contends that private ownership of listed firms in China is not necessarily superior to certain types of state ownership. To test the arguments the author investigates the relative efficiency of state versus private ownership of listed firms and the efficiency of various forms of state ownership. The empirical results indicate that the operating efficiency of Chinese listed companies varies across the type of controlling shareholder and the results are consistent with the predictions in the introduction.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.