As market economics entity, enterprises brew numerous social problems while producing wealth for our country, because of excessive pursuit of benefit. Enterprises should fulfill its social responsibilities in the meantime contributing wealth and the most basic and oldest form of performing enterprises’ social responsibilities is charitable donation. As the most basic and important part of enterprise management structure,ownership structure possesses very important influence to the establishment and performing of a firm’s strategic decision, operating performance and supervision and administration systems. Being an important strategic decision, the charitable donation of company is always influenced by various factors. This paper mainly researched influence to charitable donation caused by ownership structure through the angle of enterprise life cycle.The financial data of manufacture enterprises listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares are selected as this paper’s research sample. This paper firstly adopts methods of theoretical analysis and empirical study to state its research significance, threading and methods starting form research background. And then from three different levels, this paper analyzes the factors which can influence an enterprise’s charitable donation through sorting and summarizing available references and taking enterprise social responsibility theory,principal-agent theory, stakeholder theory and strategic charitable donation theory as springboards. This paper attempts to study and analyze these issues from the view of enterprise life cycle and adopt Dickison’s cash flow combination method to differentiate sampled enterprises’ life cycle stage. The specific partition standards are: this paper assumes an enterprise being at growth stage if the sum of its investment activity flow net amount of 3 consecutive years is negative value; this paper assumes an enterprise being at mature stage if the sum of its investment activity flow net amount of 3 consecutive years is positive value. Finally after putting forward research hypothesis and setting research variable and model, this paper studies the influence to listed companies’ charitable donation created by ownership structure from view of company life cycle and obtains final empirical conclusion, through combining empirical analysis of actual data and employing regression model.Through theoretic analysis of the influence to listed company charitable donation created by ownership structure from the view of enterprise life cycle and combiningempirical study on effective data, this paper reaches following conclusions:(1) enterprises’ ownership structure exist difference at different life cycle stage, which indicate the necessity to research charitable donation per life cycle stage;(2) the ownership concentration ratio and share ratio of the largest shareholder of enterprises which are at growth stage all present prominent negative relationship with charitable donation.Enterprises at growth stage must conquer drastic market competition, adapt to mutative external environment and maintain higher operation flexibility and efficiency of decisionmaking so that they can seize the opportunity to develop into stable mature stage.Enterprises at growth stage have higher ownership concentration ratio than those at mature stage, thereby avoiding that management level reach excessive-donation decision for personal reputation and social status to reduce potential earnings;(3) the ownership concentration ratio and share ratio of the largest shareholder of enterprises which are at mature stage don’t present prominent relationship with charitable donation. For enterprise at mature stage, it owns relatively stable external environment and dispersive ownership structure. Each shareholder expects different repays: some shareholders want to reduce charitable donation to pursuit maximized wealth; while managers are inclined to charitable donation to establish maximized personal value. These two different expectations and the fact that sample of enterprises at mature stage is small all may result in non-prominent relationship. |