A Study On The Growth Of Domestic Listed Family Enterprises: An Ownership Structure Perspective

Since the reform and opening policy launghed in 1978,private enterprises in China play more and more significant role in the development of domestic economy.Family businesses in different industries are one of the core components of the private economy.In order to refine financing functions from capital market,optimize business management,and promote corporate identity,many family enterprises choose to go public in China and beyond.Family businesses are facing complicate challenges from external environment.Their sustainable development influence not only the industry,but also the whole economy and society.In listed companies,ownership structure is the most significant fact in decision-making,corporate governance and corporate performances,and have caused keen attention among the academics.Nevertheless,previous studies of the influence of ownership structures on the growth of family enterprises have limitations: Firstly,most studies focused on the correlation between the ownership structures and the performances,while few have explored the growth capacity of the enterprises.Secondly,empirical studies prefer single financial indicators which can barely reflect the overall growth capacity of the enterprises.Furthermore,Samples' scope and time span are severely limited.Finally,differences among the industries are rarely taken into account.Based on the above-mentioned considerations,this dissertation intends to discover the correlation among ownership structure,corporate governance and corporate growth based on the principal-agent theory.The author combs the principal-agent related issues in family enterprises by referring to literature review,builds the theoretical model to reveal the impact mechanism of ownership structures on corporate growth,verifies the model with the data of the listed companies in A-Share market between 2009 and 2017,and finally renders policy suggestions about how to promote the development of family enterprises.Samples of this dissertation are from the Guotaian CSMAR database,from which the ownership structure information and financial indicators of listed family companies in the A-share market from 2009 to 2017 are selected.The information of non-family companies in the same range is also collected for comparison.In order to explore the impact of the ownership structure of family enterprises on their corporate growth,the research combines the linear regression model and control variables so as to illustrate the effect of different ownership structure indicators on the growth of family enterprises by verifying the significance of indicators.Considering that indicators used in previous studies of the growth capacity of enterprises are relatively simple,the study delivers the neural network models for feature extraction,and constructs comprehensive enterprise growth capacity indicators with the variational self-coding model VAE.Compared with the principal component analysis(PCA)model,the neural network models can fulfil better signal-to-noise ratio with non-linear information.Finally,panel data are used to perform regression analysis with control variables.In order to maintain robustness and make comparisons,the net equity return growth(ROEG)and Tobin Q growth rate(QG)are also introduced as enterprise growth criteria.Major conclusions of the dissertation include: Firstly,in Chinese family enterprises,the proportion of the actual controller's control right and the proportion of the actual controller's ownership have a significant positive correlation with corporate growth.Secondly,the increase in the shareholding ratio of management can promote corporate growth,that is,the shareholding ratio of management has a positive correlation with corporate growth.Thirdly,the equity balance rate of family enterprises plays a significant role in corporate growth.Fourthly,the concentration ratio of the control right and the ownership of family enterprises has a positive correlation with corporate growth,indicating that with the unification of ownership and control,corporate growth has increased.Based on both theoretical and empirical studies,the study puts forward three policy recommendations: build an ownership structure that promotes corporate growth;establish a talent mechanism with incentive compatibility;and promote the fairness and standardization in market economy.Major innovative contributions of this dissertation include:First of all,the dissertation constructs the analysis framework between ownership structure and corporate growth.Corporate growth analysis is a fusion of multi-dimensional indicators such as debt repayment ability,operating ability,profitability,and sustainable growth capacity.It is a comprehensive reflection of execution strategies such as investment and financing,operation,profit distribution and cash flow management.This dissertation analyzes the interaction mechanism between ownership structure,corporate governance and corporate growth capacity,which to some extent has added insights to the existing researches.Secondly,this dissertation builds eleven growth indicators that reflect the corporate growth,including valuation indicators,profitability indicators,operating quality and other indicators with reference to previous literature.Using the variational self-coding model for feature extraction,a comprehensive corporate growth indicator is constructed.Thirdly,the dissertation puts forward suggestions on how to improve listed family enterprises' ownership structure to promote their sustainable development,which will provide some references for the enterprises to choose their development strategies and for the government to take measures to push forward the development of the private economy.