New Frontiers of Ownership in China: Beyond the Agency Model

Éditeurs invités

• Shuping Li, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• Martin Conyon, Bentley University
• Hanqing Chevy Fang, Missouri University of Science and Technology
• Junxiong Fang, Zhejiang University of Finance & Economics
• Lerong He, State University of New York at Geneseo

Synthèse

Michael Jensen and William Meckling's article, 'Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure', published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, laid the foundation for modern corporate governance scholarship. Grounded in the Anglo-American model of dispersed ownership and professional management, the paper framed the firm as a nexus of contracts, highlighting how agency costs arise when the interests of owners and managers diverge. As of August 2025, the article has been cited over 145,000 times, making it one of the most influential contributions in management and economics literature.

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Thèmes proposés

• How do hybrid ownership arrangements (e.g., mixed state–private ownership, pyramidal control structures) affect the emergence and management of agency conflicts in Chinese firms?
• How do regulatory reforms, such as the implementation of "golden shares," reconfigure ownership concentration and control rights in listed Chinese firms?
• How do the presence of 'golden shares' or cross-ownership arrangements dampen or enhance strategic autonomy in Chinese private enterprises?
• How do political cycles or changes in national development strategy (e.g., 'state advances, private retreats') influence firm-level ownership restructuring and shape performance and other outcomes?
• To what extent does common ownership exist in Chinese capital markets, and how does it affect competition, monitoring, and firm performance?
• How do sovereign wealth funds influence ownership structures and governance practices in firms where they hold significant stakes?
• What forms of shareholder activism have emerged in China, and how do they shape managerial behavior, firm policies, and the protection of minority investors?
• How and why do firms in China actively reshape their shareholding over time?
• To what extent is ownership structure in Chinese firms an outcome of strategic bargaining among state actors, business elites, and capital markets?
• What are the motives of different types of owners in China? Under what conditions do controlling shareholders in Chinese firms internalize agency costs, and how does this influence their governance behaviors?
• What informal monitoring practices (e.g., political ties, relational contracts, network-based reputation mechanisms) substitute or complement formal governance mechanisms in different types of Chinese ownership structures?
• How do different types of owners (e.g., state, family, institution, etc.) interact within the firm, and what costs and benefits do each type of owner bring to the organization?
• How do shareholder–stakeholder interfaces operate in China, particularly where shareholder priorities may conflict with broader social and environmental objectives of the state and local government?
• How do ownership structures in China differ from those in other emerging and developed economies, and what does this reveal about the boundary conditions of agency theory?
• How can big data analytics and network analysis uncover patterns of ownership concentration, crossholdings, or relational ties that are not visible in traditional datasets?
• What insights can ethnographic or qualitative methods, such as grounded theory and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), provide into the informal norms, political connections, and social relationships that underpin ownership arrangements in China?
• How can mixed-method approaches combine archival data, surveys, and fieldwork to capture the multi-level dynamics of ownership in Chinese firms?
• Other methodological innovations in the study of ownership to capture evolving and complex patterns of governance.
• How do the other theoretical frameworks, such as behavioral theory of the firm, upper echelons theory, resource dependence theory, and managerial cognitive perspective, complement agency theory to explain ownership mechanisms in China, and under what circumstances?
• Research that develops an indigenous theory of ownership structure rooted in the Chinese context.