Minghai Zhou

Same or Different? The CEO Labour Market in China's Public Listed Companies

Using linked employer–employee data for all Chinas public listed firms over the period 2001–10, we find top executive compensation exhibits many of the traits familiar in the Western literature, although sometimes in a more muted way, and with some clear exceptions. We also find a role for managerial power in executive pay setting which may reflect the recency of the stock market and regulations underpinning corporate governance. Nevertheless, there appear to be some elements of executive compensation which transcend national economic, political and cultural differences. The implication is that the Western model is not as idiosyncratic as critics suggest.

China’S Economic and Trade Development: Imbalance to Equilibrium

The rapid pace of China’s economic and trade development has been considered as a great success since the entry of WTO in 2001. Most recently, China has succeeded in coping with the global financial crisis and achieved a rapid V‐shaped recovery which rebounded to two digit growth rate and lead to strengthening its international status. Nevertheless, China has exposed many potential problems in face of the financial crisis which due to international and domestic unbalanced features of China’s economic operation system. The pattern of ‘China Manufacturing and World Consuming’ is a game with no winners, while the investment leaded economic development mode achieves high growth rate but without enriches its own residents. The current imbalanced economic development mode cannot be sustained and shall be changed in the future which is not only the consensus of economists at home and abroad, but also a striving goal for the Chinese government for its ‘12th Five‐Year Plan’. However, China will face great and formidable challenges by changing the economic development mode to achieve an equilibrium state.

China’s Economic and Trade Development: Imbalance to Equilibrium

The rapid pace of China’s economic and trade development has been considered as a great success since the entry of WTO in 2001. Most recently, China has succeeded in coping with the global financial crisis and achieved a rapid V‐shaped recovery which rebounded to two digit growth rate and lead to strengthening its international status. Nevertheless, China has exposed many potential problems in face of the financial crisis which due to international and domestic unbalanced features of China’s economic operation system. The pattern of ‘China Manufacturing and World Consuming’ is a game with no winners, while the investment leaded economic development mode achieves high growth rate but without enriches its own residents. The current imbalanced economic development mode cannot be sustained and shall be changed in the future which is not only the consensus of economists at home and abroad, but also a striving goal for the Chinese government for its ‘12th Five‐Year Plan’. However, China will face great and formidable challenges by changing the economic development mode to achieve an equilibrium state.

CEO Incentive Contracts in China: Why Does City Location Matter?

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and the rate at which state owned enterprises (SOEs) were privatised. CEO incentive contracts are negatively correlated with foreign ownership and with the introduction of FDI via SEZs. However, the SEZ effect disappears having accounted for the city-level composition of firms and executives. Rapid SOE privatisation is associated with higher city and firm-level adoption of CEO incentive contracts, irrespective of the firms own current ownership status. The positive effect of privatisation is robust to various estimation techniques and model specifications.

Do only children have poor vision? Evidence from China's One-Child Policy

This paper examines whether only children have poor vision by exploiting the quasinatural experiment generated by the Chinese One-Child Policy. The results suggest that being an only child increases the incidence of myopia by 9.1 percentage points. We further investigate the mechanisms through which being an only child affects the myopia and find that only children, as the only hope in a household, receive higher expectations in terms of academic performance and future educational attainment and pressure to succeed in life from parents, which contribute to the increased myopia. We also find that the school quality of only children is significantly higher than that of non-only children. This study provides new insights into an important health consequence of One-Child Policy in China.

How much influence does the Chinese state have over CEOs and their compensation

Abstract All that we know about the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) labour market in China comes from the studies of public listed companies and State-owned Enterprises (SOEs). This is the first attempt to examine the operation of the CEO labour market across all industrial sectors of the Chinese economy. We find that the influence of the State extends beyond SOEs into many privately owned firms. Government is often involved in CEO appointments in domestic firms and, when this is the case, the CEO has less job autonomy and is less likely to have pay linked to firm performance. Nevertheless, we find that incentive schemes are commonplace and include contracts linking CEO pay directly to firm performance, annual bonus schemes, the posting of performance bonds, and holding company stock. The elasticity of pay with respect to company performance is one or more in two-fifths of the cases where CEOs have performance contracts, suggesting many face high-powered incentives. We also show that State-owned and domestic privately owned firms are more likely than foreign-owned firms to use incentive contracts.