Daqing Qi

Shareholding structure and corporate performance of partially privatized firms: Evidence from listed Chinese companies

Abstract Equity ownership in a listed Chinese firm can have as many as five different classes: state-owned shares, legal-person (LP) shares, tradable A-shares, employee shares, and shares only available to foreign investors, a phenomenon that is unique to the Chinese equity market. In this paper, we investigate whether and how the corporate performance of listed Chinese firms is affected by their shareholding structure. The sample consists of all firms listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE) from 1991 to 1996. It is found that firm performance is positively related to the proportion of LP shares but negatively related to the proportion of shares owned by the state. Additional analyses indicate that firm performance increases with the degree of relative dominance of LP shares over state shares. Moreover, for the subsample of firms that do not have both state and LP shares, the return on equity (ROE) of firms with LP shares but no state shares is higher than that of firms with state shares but no LP shares by 3.84%, and this difference is statistically significant. On the other hand, there is little evidence in support of a positive correlation between corporate performance and the proportion of tradable shares owned by either domestic or foreign investors. These findings suggest that the ownership structure composition and relative dominance by various classes of shareholders can affect the performance of state-owned enterprise (SOE)-transformed and listed firms.

Timeliness of Annual Report Releases and Market Reaction to Earnings Announcements in an Emerging Capital Market: The Case of China

This paper examines the relation between firm performance and the timing of annual report releases in an emerging capital market. Based on the population of listed Chinese firms with A-shares for 1994-1997, we find that good news firms release their annual reports earlier than bad news firms, and loss firms release their annual reports the latest. Moreover, consistent with Chambers and Penman (1984) and Begley and Fischer (1998), these firms unexpectedly accelerate the release of good news and delay the disclosure of bad news relative to their previous reporting pattern. We also observe a significant price reaction to the annual earnings announcements for both early (good news) and late (bad news) reporting firms. Similar results are found for those A-share firms which have also issued B- or H-shares to foreign investors. Our study documents a systematic timing pattern of annual report disclosures, which is useful for investors to predict future earnings, especially in anticipating bad news in Chinas emerging market where information about future earnings is very limited.

THE NATURE OF INFORMATION IN ACCRUALS AND CASH FLOWS IN AN EMERGING CAPITAL MARKET: THE CASE OF CHINA

Abstract Our study investigates the relative and incremental information content of earnings, operating cash flows, and accruals in the emerging capital market of China. The issue is tested by regressing stock returns on the levels of earnings and their components. Based on a sample of 1516 firm-years for listed Chinese firms during 1995–1998, our results demonstrate that earnings have relative information content over operating cash flows. The autocorrelations and cross-sectional correlations also imply that earnings have greater persistence and predictability than operating cash flows. We also find that discretionary accruals provide incremental information beyond that contained in nondiscretionary accruals, consistent with the argument that discretionary accruals improve the relevance of earnings in reflecting the fundamental values of the listed Chinese firms. Unlike prior findings in the studies on developed markets, we find no strong evidence that the value attached to discretionary accruals is lower than the value attached to nondiscretionary accruals. This is consistent with the argument that managerial policy choices available for the listed Chinese firms were rather limited during our sample period under relatively uniform Peoples Republic of China Accounting Standards (PRC-GAAP), thus, producing fewer opportunities for earnings management. An alternative interpretation could be that Chinese investors are functionally fixated on earnings.

Value Relevance of Earnings in an Emerging Capital Market: the Case of A‐shares in China

This study investigates the value relevance of earnings in the emerging capital market of China by examining the information content of accounting earnings measured under the People’s Republic of China Accounting Standards (PRC-GAAP). Based on the A-shares of listed Chinese firms during 1994–97, a significant association is observed between annual market-adjusted stock return and the change of earnings. Also documented is a significant price reaction to the annual earnings announcement in a three-day window centered around the announcement date. Overall, the empirical results suggest that earnings reported in China are value-relevant to A-share investors.

Stationarity and Cointegration Tests of the Ohlson Model

This paper investigates the time-series properties of the Ohlson (1995) model and examines their implications for empirical studies that use time-series data but do not explicitly account for such properties. Based on a sample of 95 firms with complete data from 1958 to 1994, we show that the null hypothesis that market value and book value are nonstationary cannot be rejected for most of the sample firms. More importantly, book value and residual income do not cointegrate with market value for 80 percent of the sample firms. We demonstrate the importance and relevance of the time-series properties of the model to OLS regressions by showing that the OLS out-of-sample forecasts of market value are significantly more accurate and less biased for the cointegrated firms than for the non-cointegrated firms. We also explore methods to improve the specification of OLS regressions based on the Ohlson (1995) model and suggest that scaling the variables with lagged market value can significantly alleviate the problem with nonstationarity of the unsealed time-series data. While the generality of our results is limited by the survivorship bias of our sample, we believe that our paper has some important implications for studies motivated by the Ohlson (1995) model. First, because market value and book value are nonstationary and book value and residual income do not cointegrate with market value for most firms, the other information variable has to be nonstationary so that a linear combination of the independent variables can cointegrate with market value. Second, direct tests of the Ohlson (1995) model through OLS regressions using time-series data are questionable because they are likely to be misspecified. This may partially explain the underestimation of market value widely documented by previous studies and the significant difference between parameters predicted by the Ohlson (1995) model and estimated from OLS regressions. Third, our results also suggest that scaling the data with lagged market value can mitigate the problems with nonstationarity. For studies using unsealed time-series data, a cointegration test should be conducted first and a sensitivity analysis based on the cointegrated sub-sample should be performed to examine whether the results based on the full sample are robust.

The Economic Consequence of Voluntary Auditing

A number of Chinese firms voluntarily acquire auditing services for their interim reports, even though the auditing of interim reports is mandatory only for a subset of firms in circumstances that are specified by the state regulators. This unique institutional setting in the Chinese market provides a natural experimental setting to directly investigate why listed firms voluntarily have their financial reports audited, and whether investors place more value on voluntarily audited earnings than on unaudited earnings. Based on a sample of 2,458 semi-annual interim reports released by listed Chinese firms from 1996 to 1999, we find that the choice of voluntary auditing is positively associated with the percentage of tradable shares, profitability, and company size. We also find that the earnings response coefficients of audited firms are higher than those of unaudited firms, especially when the auditing is voluntary. Our findings are consistent with theoretical propositions that managers voluntarily purchase external auditing to enhance the credibility of accounting numbers. This study contributes to the literature, especially on the economic value of voluntary auditing.