Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-104).

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references.

In recent years, the number of Chinese companies going public has grown significantly. Some of these companies have listed their shares locally in Shanghai and Shenzhen, while others have chosen a stock exchange with better access to international capital (e.g., Hong Kong). This thesis examines 1) the determinants of the firms’ choice regarding initial public offering (IPO) locations and 2) whether IPO locations might affect their subsequent performance. Our study focuses solely on firms in the real estate sector in which pre-IPO attributes as well as the underlying asset value can be identified and measured. Our dataset includes 29 Chinese real estate firms that have issued shares in Shanghai or Shenzhen and 28 Chinese firms with IPOs in Hong Kong during the period of 1992-2008. To explain their IPO location choice, the self-selection or signaling theory suggests that firms with higher quality would signal this information by issuing shares in Hong Kong. Given the more stringent listing requirements and better informational disclosure schemes in the Hong Kong market, if a firm has low quality, such information is more likely and quickly to be discovered in Hong Kong than in Mainland China. Therefore, it is costly for such firms to imitate good firms’ IPO location choice. Once the firms have been listed, the corporate governance literature suggests that firms listed in Hong Kong would demonstrate a greater performance increase than those listed in Mainland China, because Hong Kong has a mature system of information disclosure, analyst coverage, and law enforcement. We found that firms listed in Hong Kong achieved higher Return on Asset (ROA) than those listed in Mainland China. We then construct four proxies for firms’ unobserved quality based on ex post abnormal stock or profit returns after IPOs. We obtained support for the signaling and self-selection effects: firms having higher quality, non-state ownership, and larger leverage ratio were more likely to conduct IPOs in Hong Kong instead of in Mainland China. Also consistent with the signaling theory, we found that firms listed in Mainland China were more likely to use IPO underpricing as a signal for firm quality than firms listed in Hong Kong were. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Although Chinese economy has been growing remarkably, the development of the institutional, legal infrastructure and financial system remains a numbers of distinctive characteristics (Allen et al., 2004). One of the unique features is the dominance role of the government as shareholder of corporations, even for those listed on the stock exchange. This paper investigates empirically the impact of this significant characteristic on company performance. In particular, this dissertation presents an empirical study of the relationship between ownership structure and the company performance of listed property companies in China. Previous theoretical and empirical studies suggest government ownership is detrimental to company performance. Estrin and Perotin (1991) propose that corporations with the government as ultimate owner and/or with a large stake of government shareholding may not pursue profit maximization objective since the government tends to focus on its political objectives rather than the economic ones. Consequently, the firm performance in such government-related publicly listed firms will be inferior. Moreover, Shleifer and Vishny (1998) show that private ownership is preferable to state ownership because the government has a ‘grabbing hand’ that expropriates firm assets for the benefit of politicians and bureaucrats. However, the impact of state ownership on property company performance in China is more complicated and may not be always be negative due to (1) state owned company usually have better access to cheaper credit offered by major state banks; (2) state owned companies may be able to acquire development rights and can go through the development approval process more smoothly; (3) weaker institutions for protecting small investors in Mainland China’s as it is still a less developed equity market; (4) the government may have motive to demonstrate the efficiency of companies that the government has a major stake. By separating property companies into two groups according to the place of listing, namely Mainland listed group and Hong Kong listed group, based on a more recent panel data including 170 real estate firms between 2006 and 2011, this dissertation generates several distinctive results. Firstly, tradable ownership concentration has a significant positive effect on firm performance. Secondly, by separating the property companies into two groups, I found an initial positive but non-linear impact of state ownership on firm performance in Mainland listed property companies; whereas an initial negative but non-linear impact is found in those listed in Hong Kong. However, when the state’s stake of shares is relative large, the positive impact outweighs the negative impact in Mainland China. This is because the investor protection rules and regulations and their enforcement are relatively weak in Mainland China, the government shareholder can act as private block-holder and provide effective monitor on management in solving the traditional agency problems. This is not the case in Hong Kong where the market is more transparent and the interests of small investors are better protected. When the state owns a sufficiently large percentage of the shares, the relationship between state ownership and firm performance becomes positive for both groups. This empirical result suggests that the positive impact of state ownership on firm performance is always positive irrespective of the institutions for protecting the rights of minority shareholder when the state’s shareholding is sufficiently large. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Corporate diversification has received much attention from academics and management practitioners for over 30 years. Major work has been dedicated to determining if diversification creates or destroys a firm’s value across industries. This study examines the effect of corporate diversification on firm performance using a relatively homogenous sample of 70 publicly listed real estate companies in Hong Kong. Previous studies on the diversification of real estate companies or REITs mainly focused on diversification within real estate holdings across countries or asset types. This study contributes to the literature by examining real estate companies diversifying into other industries and assessing their performance from 2005 through 2010. The empirical findings indicated that Hong Kong real estate firms that chose to diversify into other industries performed better than those solely focused in real estate. Since the decision to diversify may be endogenous, the author used a number of estimation procedures to control for potential endogeneity. The results were robust in that the diversification effect remained positive and significant. Another contribution of this thesis is that it examined the impact of cash holdings on firm value and analyzed the value of cash for real estate companies and how corporate diversification affects the level of cash holdings. The author found that firms with larger cash reserves experienced decreases in their value. This result was consistent with the agency costs of free cash flows in that greater shareholder rights are associated with lower cash holdings. In addition, the author found that diversified firms hold less cash than their focused competitors. The findings supported the prediction of the internal capital market hypothesis that diversified firms are more efficient in allocating resources through internal capital markets and, therefore, reduce their need for large cash holdings. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (MTech. degree in Marketing)--Tshwane University of Technology, 2011. / Determines buyer's satisfaction with regards to the delivery of service by real estate agents in the Tshwane metropolitan area of the Gauteng province, South Africa.

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

published_or_final_version / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Philosophy