多个大股东与企业金融化

In recent years, as the demands from traditional industry decline, the rate of yield of investment in this field also witnessed a downward trend. What′s more, as the financial market develops rapidly, the rate of yield of financial investment is increasingly high and even exceeding that of physical investment, and this gap is widening. Against such backdrop, many entities choose to enter popular industries like the financial market and the real estate market, trying to find new profit growth point through cross-industry arbitrage, which could be called “financialization of entities”. On the one hand, the financialization of entities has accelerated the declining of investment in physical industries, which thereafter weakened the internal demands for innovative development and hindered the development of physical economy; on the other hand, excessive capitals pouring into the financial sector has become idle assets, which expanded the bubble in the financial market and led to the accumulation of systemic financial risks, which undermined the stable operation of the macro economy. In this light, studying the motivation of the financialization of entities could help curb the trend and guide such entities back to their primary business, which could reduce systemic financial risks and make the financial sector more conductive to the development of the real economy. Stock equity structure, the logical starting point of corporate governance, would exert significant impact on the decision making of enterprises. At present, “major shareholders have the final say” is a common problem in Chinese capital market, which means controlling shareholders always lead in decision-making and has led to a series of inefficient governance behaviors. Given such fact, scholars begin to turn their eyes to the influence major shareholders may have on corporate governance, and this is why this paper studied major shareholder′s influence on decision-making in financialization of entities and its internal mechanism from the perspective of multiple major shareholders. Theoretically speaking, the relationship between multiple major shareholders and the financialization of enterprises has many possibilities. Firstly, having multiple major shareholders may suppress the financialization of enterprises: on the one hand, the existence of multiple major shareholders may reduce the financing constraints faced by enterprises, weaken the endogenous demands of decision-making concerning financialization of enterprises and thereby slow the financialization progress; on the other hand, the existent of multiple major shareholders can improve the performance of primary business, which could narrow the gap between the rate of yield of the primary business and the rate of yield of financial investment, and thereby make the decision-making for financialization less urgent to reduce the financialization level. However, having multiple major shareholders may also facilitate the financialization progress: on the one hand, reduction of financing constraints and improvement of primary operating performance could help the management obtain more resources with lower costs to make decisions concerning financialization. On the other hand, having multiple major shareholders would increase the pressure the management faces in maintaining sound performance, which would add to the shortsighted behaviors of the management and make them engage in more financialized events to obtain excess profit. Therefore, the relationship between multiple major shareholders and the financialization of enterprises is an issue to be verified and studied in practice. This paper, taking companies listed as Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares from 2007 to 2018 as the study samples, used the ratio of financial asset allocation and the rate of return on financial investment as the index to measure the financialization level of enterprises, and defined major shareholders as those holding over 10% of shares of a company. After studying the influence the co-existence of multiple major shareholders has on the financialization of enterprises, the paper concluded that comparing with companies with a single controlling shareholder, the financialization level of companies having multiple shareholders is lower. Mechanism verification showed that co-existence of multiple major shareholders could reduce the financialization level of enterprises by easing financing constraints and improving primary operating performance. Through further study, the paper found that the restricting impact multiple major shareholders have on the financialization of enterprises is much more significant in non-state-owned enterprises and enterprises with institutions holding, attention from analyst, the management holding less shares or facing weak industry competition. Co-existence of multiple major shareholders could also facilitate the physical investment of enterprises. The paper, serving as a new reference for studies of the motivation of financialization of entities as well as the economic influence of multiple major shareholders, is of great significance to realizing proper equity structure, optimizing corporate governance system, slowing down the financialization of enterprises and curbing the “virtual-oriented” development trend of the macro economy.