The Twin Agency Problems in Corporate Finance - On the basis of Stulz's theory

Financial globalization is an inherent feature of today’s economies. But the positive impact of financial globalization has been limited and some puzzling evidence has been found recently. To explain these puzzles, Stulz argued that finance is critically affected by Twin Agency Problems: firstly, the controlling shareholders can use their power for their own benefit but at the expense of outside investors. Secondly, the state rulers can use their power to improve their own welfare at the expense of all shareholders. When these agency problems worsen, diffuse ownership is inefficient and ownership concentration is the best choice. Ownership concentration inversely limits a country’s ability to benefit from financial globalization. On the basis of Stulz’s theory and remaining the central role of the Twin Agency Problems in fostering ownership concentration, this study relaxes some simplified assumptions in Stulz’s model and develops a more practical one. According to this developed model, the following solutions from the theoretical research are suggested for the government to solve the agency problems: improving the legal sense through education; increasing the expected profitability with active economic policies; strengthening the constraint on the expropriators through laws and regulations; implementing the above three strategies together; lastly, improving the investor protection during the development of financial market. This paper also makes an empirical investigation in China. On the basis of the data from 1481 Chinese companies listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen or New York, it is found that more than 70 % of the companies are ownership concentrated. More than halve of them are controlled by the state and nearly 20% are controlled by families. The average degree of ownership concentration in China is more than 30%, which is higher than most other Asian countries. It was argued that listing abroad can decrease the ownership concentration, but the evidence in China shows that the companies listed abroad are more concentrated than those listed only inland. The investigation of the profitability reveals that the companies listed abroad are not more profitable than those listed inland, but the difference of the profitability between these companies is much less, which means the companies listed abroad are more reliable as a whole, because bad companies are strictly forbidden to step into the market.The investigation of the relationship between capital scale and ownership concentration shows that the companies with greater capital scale are more concentrated and most of the giant companies are controlled by the government. Because in a country without advanced financial market the capital can be collected from the public is limited and the huge companies could only be financed by the state. The smaller companies are easier to become ownership dispersed.The research of the relationship between ownership concentration and profitability reveals that family held companies are more profitable than state held ones; the widely held companies have the lowest profitability. Although most of the dispersed companies have a poor performance, some of them are really good. The research of the ownership structures finds out that the companies with indirect dispersed structure or foundation held structure are more profitable and the deviation of profitability of these companies is much less than the pyramid structure. Another discovery is that most of the companies with indirect dispersed structure are held by hundreds of or even more than thousand of the employees of the listed company. The reasons why these companies are more profitable are the lower separation of voting rights from cash flow right and the more ownership encouragement. In the employee held companies, the ownership is dispersed to all the managers and almost all employees, and all of them are encouraged to do well and to act as monitors for each other. So, it is difficult for the top managers to steal from the company.Through all these empirical research the following suggestions to resolve the twin agency problems are obtained: not relying on foreign financial market but concentrating on the advancement of legal sense, laws and regulations inland; strictly examining the companies which apply to be listed on the exchange and prevent the bad companies from going into the market; beginning the decentralization of ownership with relative smaller companies; transforming the state holding company into employee holding dispersed company; eliminating or decreasing the separation of voting rights from cash flow rights; encouraging and supervising the managers by given more managers stocks or shares of the company.