Gary Gang Tian

• PhD
• Professor at Macquarie University

Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Question/Issue: This study examines the relevance of currently accepted best practice recommendations regarding board structure on the survival likelihood of new economy initial public offering companies. We argue that industry context determines governance outcomes. Research Findings/Insights: We study 125 Austr...

We examine how incentives for political promotion affect compensation policy and firm performance in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In contrast to the conventional wisdom that political incentives tend to be misaligned with value maximization, we find that the likelihood that the CEO receives a political promotion is positively related to...

This paper provides empirical evidence that political connection can hurt corporate governance by aggravating managerial entrenchment. CEO’s political connection lowers the probability of forced CEO turnover by about 20% on average in Chinese listed firms. This pattern is especially strong in privately controlled firms compared to state-owned enter...

This study examines the impact of top executives’ art exposure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of altruistic motivations. Utilizing data on artistic elements from China’s national intangible cultural heritage (ICH), we find a significant positive relationship between board chairs’ art exposure and CSR performance, particul...

While previous research has primarily focused on the impact of climate risk on corporate socially responsible behaviors, this study investigates how climate risk may influence corporate social irresponsibility. Using panel data from Chinese listed firms spanning from 2003 to 2020, we find that heightened exposure to climate risk correlates with an...

This study documents that Chinese non-state-owned enterprises have effective tax rates that are 1% lower during the tenure of corrupt regional tax bureau commissioners (i.e., regional tax bureau chiefs). The reduction in the effective tax rate persists even after controlling for political connections of firms, general local corruption, and a variet...

Unlike the reputation view on the governance role of the media, we propose that media coverage influences pre‐IPO earnings management through the regulation mechanism. Using the Chinese initial public offering (IPO) approval regulation setting, we find that negative pre‐IPO media tone is associated with lower abnormal accruals but with higher real...

Drawing on social identity theory, we investigate whether politicians exhibit hometown favouritism when allocating scarce capital resources, and we explore how the intensity of politicians' birthplace identity influences their tendency towards favouring hometown firms. Using the turnover of politicians responsible for the nationwide IPO approval pr...

This paper introduces and investigates the hypothesis that the crowding-out effect surpasses the collateral effect, suggesting that an increase in the value of real estate holdings by companies hinders their competitiveness in the product market within emerging economies. Through our analysis, we elucidate the underlying mechanism, demonstrating th...

Despite the key role played by banks in shifting the global economy toward sustainable development, little is known about how the integration of environmental considerations into their lending decisions affects their market valuation. Using a sample of announcements of bank loans issued by Chinese listed banks and an event study methodology, this s...

Limited research has focused on the influence of judge independence on firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR), despite extensive literature examining the impact of the legal environment on CSR. To address this gap, we analyze the staggered adoption of judicial delocalization reform in China. This reform aimed to enhance local judges' independ...

We propose that local corruption distorts the allocation of government-controlled resources and impairs the contract environment, thereby reducing firms’ use or suppliers’ provision of trade credit. We use a sample of Chinese-listed firms from 2007 to 2020 to examine the role of local corruption in firms’ access to trade credit and find that the le...

The roles played by independent directors have been extensively documented, but the question of how they are appointed remains insufficiently explored. We found that the likelihood of independent directors being appointed was higher when they were professionally affiliated with the departing independent directors, and this effect was more pronounce...

Purpose This study examines whether recruitment of local managers helps foreign venture capital (VC) firms mitigate the liability of foreignness measured by cultural differences and improves their performance in relationship-based emerging markets such as China. Design/methodology/approach From a data set comprising 1,939 Chinese portfolio compani...

This paper explores the effect of the presence of powerful CEOs on the quality of their workplace and finds that firms with powerful CEOs invest less in labor-friendly programs and that this does not significantly affect firm value. However, the effect is attenuated for firms in some industries such as those that are highly competitive, those with...

How does deleveraging affect the market liquidity of high-embedded-leverage securities issued by financial institutions and the funding constraints of these institutions? We use the forced deleveraging of structured mutual funds during the 2015 Chinese stock market crash to study the effects of deleveraging. Our regression-discontinuity analysis sh...

We propose and test the incentive view—that the margin call pressure and ownership-control discrepancy associated with insider share pledging increase investors’ perceived risk, and thus also the cost of equity capital, in an emerging market. Using a controlling shareholder share pledging sample for Chinese listed firms, we find that firms with sha...

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms that are required to audit and disclose any internal control deficiency (ICD), this paper examines the effect of mandatory ICD disclosure on accrual quality (AQ) in China. We find that relative to voluntary ICD disclosure, mandatory ICD disclosure is associated with poorer AQ, as proxied by abnormal accruals,...

SYNOPSIS In this study, we propose a reciprocal rent-seeking game between politicians and individual auditors with political connections and examine how these auditors' political connections influence their audit quality. Using hand-collected data from China between 2008 and 2013, we find that politically connected auditors have a significantly low...

Two competing hypotheses have been developed for the relationship between internal corporate governance and external auditing. One proposes a complementary relationship, while the other suggests it is substitutable. This study takes advantage of China's recent anti‐corruption campaign as a quasi‐natural experiment to explore this relationship. Usin...

The effect of formal institutions on the monitoring behavior of independent directors has been recognized, but knowledge of informal institutions, which can help explain how independent directors act in different social and cultural environments, is lacking. Based on the conformity theory, we investigated the influence of regional guanxi culture, a...

In this study we examine how the regulation of director attendance disciplines directors’ behavior, and consider the governance effect of such regulations. This examination exploits the differences between the requirements for director attendance at board meetings enacted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE) and by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZS...

This paper examines whether and how firms influence regulatory decisions through media capture. Using the unique Chinese regulation setting, we find that higher public relations expenditure reduces a negative pre-IPO media tone and this relationship is weaker when both firms and media outlets face higher legal punishment risks. By linking the incen...

We investigate the effects of governors’ hometown favoritism on the corporate investments of Chinese listed firms. Exploiting the exogenous distribution of governors’ tenure in a difference-in-differences research design, we find that firms in an incumbent governor's hometown make higher investments by 10.26%. This favoritism effect is more pronoun...

Manuscript Type Empirical Research Question/Issue Using regulatory qualification requirements for being an independent director in China, we examine the effect of explicit norms of reciprocity between uncertificated independent directors (UIDs), who are not qualified at the beginning of their appointment, and insiders. Research Findings/Insights...

Drawing on human capital theory, this paper develops a contingency approach to explore how independent directors’ scarce human capital affects innovation investment intensity and innovation outputs in the Chinese context. Controlling for the presence of ordinary technical independent directors (TIDs) and a range of other factors, we find that acade...

We extend the current short selling literature on the disciplining role of short sellers by examining the effect of short selling on related‐party transactions (RPTs). Using data from Chinese stock exchanges over the post‐short selling deregulation period of 2010–2017, we find a two‐faceted effect of short sales on RPTs in that short selling restra...

Using hand‐collected derivative use data on publicly listed firms in China, we document that derivative use has a significant risk‐reducing effect, but this effect is 40% weaker in state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) than in non‐SOEs. We also find that soft budget constraints and information transmission inefficiency are two mechanisms through which sta...

This paper investigates whether the restriction on executive compensation in Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) imposed by the Government's say‐on‐pay schemes is conducive to corporate risk taking. Using a sample of listed SOEs over the period 2005–2018, we find that the restriction on executive compensation is negatively associated with corpor...

This study investigates how a CEO's early‐life experience of the Great Chinese Famine affects corporate accounting conservatism. We find that companies whose CEOs had experienced famines in early life adopted more conservative accounting policies. This famine experience effect is more pronounced in high uncertainty environments proxied by non‐SOEs,...

In this study, we investigate how informal institutions, namely, chief executive officers' hometown connections with suppliers, impact firms' access to trade credit. Using unique data manually collected from China, we find that hometown connections significantly increase access to trade credit. The hometown effect is more pronounced for non-state-o...

We examine the inducement effect of labor cost on corporate innovation in emerging markets. To establish causality, we adopt a difference-in-differences approach, based on the variations generated by the passage of the new Labor Contract Law in China, as well as an instrumental variable approach. We find the inducement effect of labor cost is more...

We propose and test whether adverse life events experienced by CEOs are associated with firms' stock price crash risk. Based on a large sample of Chinese companies from 2000 to 2015, we find evidence that companies whose CEOs experienced the Great Chinese Famine in early life have lower stock price crash risk than those with CEOs who did not experi...

This paper examines the impact of conditional order usage on the disposition effect in the stock market. Taking advantage of proprietary Australian stock brokerage data, we employ propensity score matching method to create a control group. Through this methodology, we are able to isolate the impact of conditional orders from other confounding facto...

Unlike the monitoring view in existing literature indicating that short selling constrains tax avoidance, we propose and test a financial constraint hypothesis that short selling triggers corporate insiders' incentive to avoid taxes for funding investment opportunities. Employing staggered short-sale deregulation on the Chinese stock market as a se...

We argue and provide evidence that instead of playing a monitoring role, venture capital (VC) investors collude with controlling shareholders in the IPO process of Chinese non‐state‐owned enterprises (non‐SOEs). We show that VC‐backed IPOs’ applications are more likely to be approved by regulators, especially in firms with excess control rights, bu...

This study examines how holding voting shares in banks can impact the improvement of firms’ investment efficiency in the Chinese capital market. We found that bank ownership improved firms’ investment efficiency by mitigating both overinvestment and underinvestment and by improving investment sensitivity to investment opportunities. We further foun...

This study investigates the effect of mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure on firms' investment efficiency in China. Using the CSR regulation that mandates a group of listed firms to disclose stand‐alone CSR reports after 2008 as a natural experiment, we find that firms subject to the mandatory CSR regulation have decreased in...

We examine whether equity incentive regulations help to reduce managerial incentives for manipulating earnings to gain trading advantages over shareholders. Using a sample of trading records for Chinese listed firms between 2006 and 2016, we find evidence that equity incentives reduce the positive association between insider trading and earnings ma...

This study investigates the role of princelings in Chinese listed firms. Our findings suggest that princelings ensure better access to bank loans for non-SOEs but bring no significant benefits to SOEs. Our empirical results further indicate that bank lending decisions are distorted for princeling-backed firms due to the privileges and protections t...

We investigate how the state's intervention in the investment decisions of Chinese local SOEs is affected by corporate control distance in the form of pyramidal layers and the geographical distance between the SOEs and their government controllers. Although both the corporate control distance and the geographical distance affect the state's costs o...

This paper examines how bank lending decisions are affected either by executives’ connections with banks, through their former banking experience, or by their political connections with governments, using a sample of bank loans granted to Chinese listed non‐state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) from 2003 to 2010. We find that bank loans are more closely r...

Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that managers’ career concerns can serve as an important source of implicit economic incentives. We examine how incentives for political promotion are related to compensation policy and firm performance in Chinese state-owned enterprises. We find that the likelihood that the CEO receives a political promot...

We find that state owned enterprises (SOEs hereafter) have lower (higher) mean-reverting rates when profitability is better (worse) than the norm; while non-SOEs with politically connected executives have lower (higher) mean-reverting rates when profitability is extremely better (worse) than the norm. In addition, SOEs controlled by the central gov...

This study examines the impact that political connections have on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) performance and the decisions of Chinese listed firms. We find that political connections destroy (create) value in SOEs (non-SOEs). Our findings show that connected SOEs are more likely to acquire local targets, especially when the local unemployment r...

Taking advantage of corruption scandals in China, we construct a natural experiment and identify the ousting of corrupt politicians, and firms connected with them through bribery and personal relationships (event firms). We find that the investment expenditure of event firms declines significantly after the ousting of the politicians compared with...

In this study we examine changes in audit opinions and auditor choice decisions in politically connected firms before and after the exogenous termination of their political connections. We use 84 anti-corruption cases involving high-level Chinese bureaucrats between 2004 and 2014 to construct a nature experiment, and identify a set of listed firms...

Previous theoretical and empirical studies suggest that CEOs' political connections are valuable to firms. We examine whether such connections become entrenched if the expected political capital fails to materialize and the firm lacks other types of political power. Using a sample of listed non-SOEs in China, we show that politically connected CEOs...

We examine the effect of corporate governance on the collateral requirements for firms' bank loans in China. We find that firms with lower excess control rights and other large shareholders face lower collateral requirements, which is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than in SOEs. Regarding board characteristics, we find that s...

This study investigates how managerial professional connections, through executives' membership of an industry association, play a role in helping firms obtain trade credit, while political connections do not. We document that firms whose managers have professional connections receive more trade credit, especially in firms that are not controlled b...

We examine the impact of family control on the likelihood of accounting misstatements and on market reactions to subsequent restatements. Using a matched-firm approach, we find that family control overall reduces the incidence of misstatements, consistent with the notion that controlling families have a greater concern for reputation than nonfamily...

Using a panel of Chinese firms over the period 2003-2013, we show that, from the supply-side perspective, as a result of the implementation of the economic stimulus package in China, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) received more bank loans and invested more than non-SOEs. We further find that after the implementation of the economic stimulus package...

Using 29 recent high level anti-corruption cases in China as a natural experiment, we examine the patterns in merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions and performance in Chinese non-state owned enterprises (non-SOEs) before and after the exogenous severing of political connections. We identify a set of listed related non-SOEs whose managers bribed or...

Using a sample of 612 listed Chinese non-SOEs from 2006 to 2009, we show that the use of collateral is higher in family-controlled firms. This effect is more pronounced when family firms have a larger control-ownership wedge, family representation in management, and are led by a descendant chairman/CEO. We further document that having multiple larg...

This paper investigates how legal liability influences audit quality and audit fees, particularly in the presence of government intervention. Since 2010, all Chinese audit firms were required to transform from a structure of limited liability company (LLC) to limited liability partnership (LLP), which removes the cap on the liability exposure of ne...

This paper uses a sample of Chinese firms to examine the impact of corporate opacity on the relationship between family control and firms’ cost of debt. We find that family control is associated with a lower cost of debt on average, and a negative impact exists mainly in firms with relatively low corporate opacity. We further provide evidence that...

This study examines the effect of family control on the cash holding policy in China. We find that family firms with excess control rights tend to have high cash holdings that are tunneled rather than being invested or paid to shareholders. We further show that the incentive for controlling families to hold cash and for tunneling is exacerbated by...

This paper uses the natural experiment offered by the Shanghai Stock Exchange to investigate the impact of opening call auction transparency on market liquidity. We find that the dissemination of indicative trade information during the pre-open call auction session leads to an overall improvement in stock liquidity in the continuous trading session...

This paper examines the relationship between ownership structures and IPO long-run performance of non-SOEs in China. Although non-SOEs underperform the market in general after IPO but the poor performance is mainly caused by the IPOs with ownership control wedge. Non-SOEs with one share one vote structure outperform those with control-ownership wed...

Using the recent anti-corruption cases in China as a natural experiment, this study documents that connections with the government officials through bribing and personal connecting enable Chinese non-SOEs to increase their M&A activities, enjoy a better post-M&A performance, pay less M&A premium and conduct more local M&As before the connected gove...

This paper examines the relationship between ownership structures and IPO long-run performance of non-SOEs in China. Although non-SOEs underperform the market in general after IPO but the poor performance is mainly caused by the IPOs with ownership control wedge. Non-SOEs with one share one vote structure outperform those with control-ownership wed...

This paper investigates venture capitalists’ monitoring of managerial behaviour by examining their impact on CEO pay-performance sensitivity across various controlling structures in Chinese firms. We find that the effectiveness of venture capitalists' monitoring depends on different types of agency conflict. In particular, we find that venture capi...

This study investigates the effect of banks’ dual holding on bank lending and firms’ investment decisions using a sample of listed firms in China. We find that dual holding leads to easier access to bank loans, a result that is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) than SOEs. We also find that dual holding distorts banks’ lendi...

This paper examines how institutional characteristics of emerging economies influence the effect of control-ownership divergence on market liquidity. We find that the divergence is negatively associated with liquidity and that this negative relationship is more pronounced in firms with more severe agency problems and information asymmetry. We argue...

This study investigates the effect of banks' dual holding on bank lending and firms' investment decisions using a sample of listed firms in China. We find that dual holding leads to easier access to bank loans, a result that is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) than SOEs. We also find that dual holding distorts banks' lendi...

Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that managers’ career concerns can serve as an important source of implicit economic incentives. We examine how incentives for political promotion are related to compensation policy and firm performance in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We find that the likelihood that the CEO receives a political...