Purpose – In recent decades, related party transactions have been assailed by scholars and regulation authorities since related parties of a listed company may “tunnel” its resources, damaging the interests of other stakeholders. One kind of “tunneling” is capital impropriation, which...

This paper investigates how the state-controlling ownership and the ownership through corporate pyramid structures affect the dividend policies of publicly listed firms in China. We find that the state-controlled firms in China pay higher dividends (measured by the dividend yield and the...