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Are OECD-prescribed “good corporate governance practices” really good in an emerging economy?

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Abstract

This paper examines whether adopting OECD-prescribed corporate governance principles can solve the major corporate governance problem in an emerging economy—controlling-shareholder expropriation. We argue that “good governance practices” in OECD countries (e.g., an active board of directors, separation of chairperson and the CEO, significant presence of outside directors, and a two-tier board) cannot mitigate the negative effect of controlling-shareholder expropriation on corporate performance for two main reasons. First, most good governance practices are mainly designed to resolve conflicts between shareholders and the management but not conflicts between controlling and minority shareholders. Second, board directors are typically not independent to controlling shareholders, and supervisory directors often have low status and weak power in a firm. Using a panel of over 1,100 Chinese listed firms between 2001 and 2003, we find supportive evidence for our arguments. We discuss the implication of our study for public policy and strategies of investors.

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Notes

  1. Two proxies of direct approach used in studies of developed countries are unavailable in our context. For instance, one can track privately negotiated transactions by controlling shareholders (Barclay & Holderness, 1989). However, such information is available only in countries with well developed stock markets and high transparency of financial disclosure. The other proxy, which does not exist in most emerging economies, is value differences among multiple classes of shares (DeAngelo & DeAngelo, 1985; Lease, McConnell, & Mikkelsen, 1984; Rydqvist, 1987).

  2. Other studies that use the indirect approach include Bertrand, Mehta, and Mullainathan (2002) and Selarka (2005) on India, Song, Ali, and Pillay (2007) on Malaysia, Bae, Kang, and Kim (2002) on South Korea, Delios, Wu, and Zhou (2006) and Sheu and Yang (2005) on Taiwan, and Mitton (2002) and Lins (2003) on Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and others.

  3. The mean is based on all sample firms, and same hereafter.

  4. Because independent variables are lagged one-year, we have only two periods in the regressions. Therefore, here by “2001,” we mean independent variables take values in year 2001 and dependent variables take values in year 2002; similarly, by “2002,” we mean independent variables take values in year 2002 and dependent variables take values in year 2003.

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Correspondence to Victor Zitian Chen.

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An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Corporate Governance: An International Review International Symposium on Corporate Governance in India and China in Virginia Beach, US, October 2008, and the Asia Pacific Journal of Management Conference on Managing Corporate Governance Globally: An Asia Pacific Perspective in Vancouver, Canada, October 2009. We thank Segal Graduate School of Business of Simon Fraser University for organizing the special issue conference, and our session participants for helpful discussions. We thank editors Mike Peng and Steve Globerman for their comments. This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (752-2009-1880 05). All views and errors are those of the authors only.

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Chen, V.Z., Li, J. & Shapiro, D.M. Are OECD-prescribed “good corporate governance practices” really good in an emerging economy?. Asia Pac J Manag 28, 115–138 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-010-9206-8

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