Mixed Ownership Reform, Government Intervention, and Earnings Quality: Empirical Evidence from Pilot Enterprises in China

Non‐state shareholder governance and corporate sustainability: Evidence from environmental, social and governance ratings

“…However, the existing research has not reached a consistent conclusion on the advantages and disadvantages of non‐state shareholder governance. Previous research mainly focused on the impact of non‐state shareholder governance on corporate financial performance (Guan et al, 2021; Li, Li, & Wang, 2022; Wu et al, 2022). However, in the concept of sustainable development, policymakers and investors pay more and more attention to non‐state shareholder governance, and it may have an impact on non‐financial performance.…”

“…Most scholars believe that non‐state shareholder governance has a positive impact and can improve firm value (Guan et al, 2021). In addition, state‐owned enterprises can curb excessive consumption (Li, Xu, et al, 2022), improve quality of corporate earnings (Wu et al, 2022), and enhance innovation performance (Lo et al, 2022) through non‐state shareholder governance. Some scholars believe that non‐state shareholder governance has a negative impact on enterprises.…”

“…In October 2017, the Chinese government further clarified that developing 'mixed ownership economy is the direction of SOEs reform. With the depth of mixed ownership reform, scholars have studied the effects of non-state shareholder governance on executive on-the-job consumption (Li, Li, & Wang, 2022), earnings quality (Wu et al, 2022), and excessive on-the-job consumption (Shang et al, 2022), and so forth. These studies have confirmed the positive role of non-state shareholders.…”

A study on the impact of the degree of mixed ownership reform of state-owned enterprises on corporate environmental response

“…Both the depth and restriction of mixed equity reflect the dynamic changes in equity power of state and non-state capital in the process of mixed equity reform. Drawing on Li et al and Wu et al (Li et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2022), the depth of Corporate environmental response equity in the mixed reform (Mix-share) is measured by the shareholding ratio of non-state shareholders among the top ten shareholders; the mixed reform equity checks and balances (Mix-rate) is calculated as follows, firstly, the proportion of state-owned shares and nonstate-owned shares (the sum of the shareholding ratios of shareholders of other nature besides state-owned shareholders) to the total equity in SOEs is calculated as ES and EP, respectively; And the larger of ES and EP is used as the denominator and the smaller as the numerator; the resulting ratio is defined as the degree of equity checks and balances, and the larger the ratio, the higher the degree of restriction between state-owned and non-stateowned capital in the enterprise and the more obvious the checks and balances are. 3.3.2.2 Moderating variables.…”

“…The increase of mixed ownership depth reduces the pursuit of environmental responsiveness by reducing government intervention and soft budget constraints in SOEs, discouraging non-economic goals and constraining management’s self-interested behaviour. Firstly, the increase of ownership depth means the proportion of state-owned shareholders will be reduced, a reduction in the degree of government control over the operations of SOEs and helping to reduce the level of government intervention in the enterprises (Wu et al , 2022; Lin, 2021; Megginson et al , 2014). Moreover, the operational objectives of the enterprises are more market-oriented and the pursuit of economic interests of both state-owned and non-state-owned shareholders has become more aligned (Yuan et al , 2023; Zeng et al , 2023).…”