My thesis examines whether corporate accessibility for minority shareholders, defined as the ease with which minority shareholders are able to contact corporate insiders, can be a signal of the severity of a firm’s agency problems. Using Chinese public listed firms as the testing group, I find that accessible firms are associated with less serious agency problems than is the case for non-accessible firms. Specifically, accessible firms tend to be associated with lower agency costs, lower cost of equity, higher firm valuation, and better operating performance. I also find that accessibility can signal agency problems in firms with different ownership and corporate governance structures, though the signaling effects are weaker in the firms where the incentives of insiders are tied less closely to stock price performance. Overall, my results indicate that corporate accessibility for minority shareholders is a value-relevant signal for investors to detect the quality of the publicly listed firms in China.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ln.edu.hk/oai:commons.ln.edu.hk:fin_etd-1007 |
| Date | 01 January 2013 |
| Creators | ZHAO, Xiaofeng |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ Lingnan University |
| Source Sets | Lingnan University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses & Dissertations |
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