Research On The Influence Of Controlling Shareholders' Equity Pledge On Cost Stickiness

In recent years,equity pledge has become a common way of financing for listed companies.The examination and approval process of equity pledge is few and fast,and the pledge period is flexible.After the pledge,the pledger still retains the voting right and decision-making right of the corresponding equity.Although it has greater convenience,it also brings risks to the listed companies,especially when the pledged person is the controlling shareholder,if the stock price of the listed companies falls to a certain extent,and it will face the risk of control transfer.Because of the special status of the controlling shareholder,his behaviors are closely related to listed companies.Scholars have found that the equity pledge will affect information disclosure quality,innovation behavior,investment decision-making,dividend policy,enterprise value,stock price and so on,but did not explore the impact on cost management.Cost stickiness is an important discovery in the field of management accounting in recent years.The traditional cost habit model believes that the cost is related to the change in the business volume and has nothing to do with the direction of the business volume change.However,scholars find that this is not consistent with the actual situation.The change in the cost when the business volume increases and decreases is asymmetric,that is,Cost stickiness.Some studies have suggested that cost adjustment,managers' optimistic expectation and opportunism are the main factors to form cost stickiness,and little attention has been paid to the influence of shareholders.There is a “onedominated” ownership structure in Chinese companies.The controlling shareholder has a significant impact on the companies.Scholars have different views on the governance effect of the controlling shareholder,such as incentive effect and entrenchment effect.What effect will the controlling shareholders have on the cost stickiness? This article takes the controlling shareholder's equity pledge as the cut point,and dynamically examines the effect of controlling shareholder's behavior on cost stickiness.This article uses the data of China's A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2018 as a sample to explore the effect of controlling shareholder equity pledge on corporate cost stickiness,and examines whether the above relationship has changed during companies with different property rights,and analyst concerns.The research results show that Chinese enterprises have cost stickiness.After controlling other variables,controlling shareholder's equity pledges can reduce the cost stickiness.Compared with state-owned enterprises,the weakening effect of equity pledge on corporate cost stickiness is more significant in non-stateowned enterprises.Among companies that analysts pay less attention to,equity pledges have a stronger effect on reducing the cost stickiness.In the further study of the mechanism,it is found that equity pledge will affect the Cost Stickiness through financing constraints.The research in this article expands the research on the economic consequences of equity pledges,enriches the literature on the factors of affecting cost stickiness,and helps to understand the impact of equity pledges on corporate expense decisions and improve the level of expense management.It has certain theoretical and practical significance.