Study On The Effect Of Ownership Structure On Investment Behavior Distortion Of The China Listed Companies

Investment, financing and dividend distribution are the three main issues about the enterprises' financial decision-making, among these three issues only investment decision can provide sustainable cash flows for the enterprises, rational investment decision-making will select the project which has a positive net present value, and then increasing the value of the enterprise. Financing can solve the financial needs of the enterprises, however, it also introduces the relevant interest parties into the financial decision-making mechanism of the enterprises in imperfect capital market conditions. When the various interest parties play the game based on their own interest, some projects whose NPV are negative may be selected, resulting in investment distortion and weaken the growth power of the enterprises. In this paper, relevant interest parties will be incorporated into the same framework, and then using the agent theory to study the impact of investment motivation of the various interest parities and interrelation of the various interest parties on business investment behavior under Chinese system background. The mechanism of the investment behavior distortion can be obtained through analysis of the incentives of the investment behavior distortion, so that the non-rational investment behavior can be controlled at its source. Taking into account the fact that the ownership structure is composed of ownership concentration and nature of ownership, any change of them can cause the change of the contents of the business agent relationship. The change of the control parties and other main parties on coordination and constraint relationship will affect the investment behavior of the enterprises, therefore, this paper will study it based on the classification of the ownership structure.Chapter 2 is literature review. First, the major theories about investment behavior distortion will be introduced, including information asymmetry theory, behavioral finance theory and agent theory. Second, I will review of the Chinese and foreign literature on relationship between controlling shareholders, managers, creditors, other interest parties and investment distortion under the principal-agent framework. Researches in this chapter have proved there are differences in investment motives between the main interest parties, the investment mode and degree of the major interest parties will be affected by other interest parties. The research of this chapter provides a basic theory and empirical evidence with regard to relationship between the various interest parties and investment behavior distortion based on the Chinese system backgrounds.In chapter 3, based on the classification of the ownership structure, theoretical analysis about the relationship between the various interest parties and investment behavior distortion will be introduced, and then some research hypotheses will be proposed based on Chinese system background. Taking into account the fact that the ownership structure is composed of ownership concentration and nature of ownership, any change of them can cause the change of the contents of the business agent relationship. The change of the control parties and other main parties on coordination and constraint relationship will affect the investment behavior of the enterprises, therefore, this paper will study it based on the classification of the ownership structure. Compared with the previous literature, this paper will use the classification of ownership structure as a starting point of research, which is conducive to incorporate the main interest parties into the same framework, rather than studying the relationship between partial interest parties and investment behavior distortion only from one certain agent relationship.First, based on the principal-agent framework, this chapter studies three ownership concentration status, investment motivations of the major interest parties of the enterprises, the effect mechanism between the different investment decision-making parties, and the prerequisite to play a role, including investment motivations of the management, controlling shareholders' influence on management and tunneling behavior for small and medium-sized shareholders, as well as the restraint of debt on excessive investment, thus derived that the theoretic relationship between various interest parties and investment behavior under these three ownership concentration status. Second, consider the governance characteristics that existed in Chinese state-owned enterprises, such as the absence of managers, managers affected by the economic "super-weak" control and administrative "super-high" control, and serious separation of powers in the private enterprises. Then study the enterprises with different nature of ownership, investment motivations and coordination-constraint relationship of various interest parties. Based on the above analysis, this paper proposes the research hypotheses about the relationship between ownership structure and investment behavior distortion. Study in this chapter shows any change in the ownership concentration or nature of ownership can cause the change of the control parties and other main parties on coordination and constraint relationship, which will affect the investment behavior of the enterprises. Study in this chapter is based on the classification of the ownership structure, and provides theoretic basis for the empirical analysis of the relationship between the various interest parties and investment behavior distortion.Chapter 4 introduces the econometric models for investment behavior distortion. This chapter will introduce the measure method for investment behavior distortion, including the investment cash flow sensitive coefficient method, changes in response to investment risk method, residual of the actual investment scale and expected investment scale method. On this basis, considering the factors of vertical range, such as the growth, cash flow, scale, and the horizontal factor, such as industry method. In this paper, we will use the Richardson (2006) and Hovakimian (2003) models to calculate the investment behavior distortion for Chinese listed companies, and detailed description of the investment distortion status will be presented in according to the nature of ownership, industry and year, and provides data support for analysis of the influential factors of investment behavior distortion.Based on the classification of the ownership structure, chapter 5 analyzes the influential factors of investment behavior distortion for Chinese listed companies from the internal governance factors and external governance environment perspective. Special attention is paid to the internal governance factors, including shareholding ratio of controlling shareholders, nature of ownership, and shareholding ratio of management, which can help us to judge the motivations behind the investment behavior distortion: the investment behavior distortion is rooted in the development of the enterprises, or it is the major shareholders who erode on the interest of the small and medium-sized shareholders; The liabilities contribute to the investment behavior distortion or it only plays a discretionary governance role. In addition, this chapter also makes additional tests for the economic consequence of the under-investment and the over-investment behavior that existed in Chinese listed companies, which is used to judge whether there are some differences between these two types of investment distortion on the profitability and operating risk, as a result, we can evaluate the economic consequence of the investment behavior distortion for Chinese listed companies.The empirical study in this chapter finds: (1) To the same nature of ownership, with the change in ownership concentration, investment preference will change as well. This phenomenon is clearly showed in enterprises directly under the central, locally held listed companies and private enterprises. (2) The enterprises with different nature of ownership have different investment preference. The enterprises directly under the central and central ministries usually avoid the high risk investment projects, while the local state-owned holding companies and private enterprises usually have obvious investment preference. (3) Managers of the state-owned enterprises have different investment preference, not all the managers in the state-owned companies prefer over-investment, for example, the managers of the enterprises directly under the central or central ministries prefer under-investment, while the managers of the local government-owned and local state-owned holding companies prefer benefits of control associated with the investment. The previous literature generally shows that managers of the state-owned enterprises tend to over-investment, but there is no classification of state-owned enterprises, compared with the previous literature, this paper is more specific and rational. (4) As creditor, commercial bank also owned by state, which causes debt will have different constraints on investment behavior distortion to enterprises with different nature of ownership. (5) Improvement of the governance environment can contribute to the suppression of investment behavior distortion of local listed companies and private enterprises. (6) Over-investment and under-investment are both non-rational investment behavior, which will have negative impact on the value of the enterprises. However, compare these two behaviors, the moderate over-investment will add to the profitability of enterprises, but the operational risk will increase as well.Generally speaking, this article studies the impact of the investment motivation of the main interest parties and their coordination-constraint relationship on the investment behavior distortion based on the classification of the ownership structure from the theoretical analysis and empirical testing perspective, confirms that with the change of ownership concentration and nature of ownership, the contents of the enterprise's agent relationship will change as well, and the relationship between the leading parties and other parties of investment decision-making will also change, therefore, the investment behavior of the enterprises will change. The conclusion of this paper will be helpful to improve the performance evaluation mechanism and management incentive-constraint mechanism of state-owned enterprises, it is also beneficial to strengthen the conduct supervision of the serious separation of the management and ownership and speed the reform of state-owned commercial banks.