机构投资者持股与上市公司违规行为的实证研究

本文采用部分可观测的Bivariate Probit估计方法,对2001年至2009年中国1729家上市公司进行回归检验,发现机构投资者持股比例降低了公司违规行为倾向,同时增加了公司违规行为被稽查的可能性。该结论在控制了机构投资者变量内生性的因素后仍旧稳健。进一步研究表明,相比公司经营违规,机构投资者对信息披露违规倾向的影响更强。另外,相比证券机构投资者,养老保险基金、社保基金、企业年金持股的公司中违规公司比例更低。除此以外,机构投资者对公司违规的抑制与检举作用并不受其它公司治理变量的影响。本文的研究表明中国机构投资者在预防与打击上市公司违规行为方面发挥了重要的作用,并且也为上市公司与监管部门提供了治理和防范企业违规的线索。

Institutional Shareholding and Corporate Fraud: Evidence from China

Accusations of corporate wrongdoing have dominated headlines over the last decade and have generated a great deal of research inquiry.This paper identifies an important factor in assessing a firm’s likelihood of engaging in wrongdoing.To address the issue of the partial observations of corporate fraud,we estimate the Bivariate Probit model with the data of the 1729 Chinese listed firms over the period of 2001-2009.We find that institutional shareholding ownership is positively and significantly related to fraud detection,and is negatively and significantly related to fraud propensity after controlling for firm characteristics,other corporate governance factors,industry factors and economics environmental factors.These findings are robust after addressing the endogenous problem on institutional shareholding by employing the instrumental variable regression method.In addition,the impacts of the institutional shareholding on corporate fraud detection and propensity vary in terms of the types of corporate frauds and the types of institutional shareholding.Specifically,the investigation reveals that the impact of institutional shareholding on fraud propensity related to information disclosure is stronger than that related to operating issues.Also,the proportion of fraud firms is higher in securities investment funds holding firms than in insurance companies holding firms,social security funds holding firms,and enterprises annuities holding firms.Besides,we also examine the interactive effects of institutional shareholding with other widely documented internal corporate governance mechanisms including state ownership,ownership concentration,board size and percentage of independent directors of the board,respectively.The results suggest that the monitoring benefits from institutional investors are independent from these other firm’s internal governance mechanisms including state ownership,ownership concentration,board size and percentage of independent directors of the board.Overall,the above results imply that institutional investors help to prevent and reveal corporate fraud in China.This study provides important implications for institutional investors,firms and government in acting against corporate fraud in Chinese financial market.