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

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