Expropriation Of Large Shareholders In Listed Corporations: An Empirical Study In Shanghai And Shenzhen Stock Market

The stock exchange bourses have been established in Shanghai and Shenzhen since the early 1990s, Chinese stock market gradually developed during a few years. Even though the stock market develops rapidly, actually it develops abnormally. Large shareholders expropriating the assets of listed companies occurs frequently. The Stock Supervisory Committee of China has ever taken the census of 1175 listed companies and found that such a problem existed in 676 listed companies. And it inflences the development of listed companies, harms the interests of middle-and-small shareholders, and also weakens the development of stock markets. The research shows that the main reason why financial crisis in Asia broke out from 1997 to 1998 is this kind of furious behavior of large shareholders.This paper adopts A-stock listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market as samples, collecting the relevant data from 2005 to 2006. The author studies the problem of big shareholders expropriating the assets from four aspects, namely, the degree of concentration of stock ownership, checking and balanceing of stock ownership, dividend distribution and audit. The conclusion is as follows:There is a negatively relevant relationship between the stock rate of top 1 shareholder and the rate of expropriating the assets. When the stock rate of top 1 shareholder rising, the rate of expropriating the assets is falling. Checking and balancing of stock ownership of listed companies has restrainable impact on large shareholders' expropriating behavior. There is a negatively relevant relationship between cashing dividends of listed companies and big shareholders' expropriating the assets, demonstrating that large shareholder often won't pay middle-and-small shareholders profits of the company in the shape of cash dividend. There is a negatively relevant relationship between the presentation of standard and clean auditing opinion and large shareholders' expropriating the assets, demonstrating that the openness of information disclosure has restrainable impact on the expropriating behavior of large stockholders to some extent.