Corporate Performance of Mixed Enterprises

Abstract

We delineate Hong Kong listed corporations into three levels of privatization: the fully privatized blue chips, semi‐privatized red chips and the least privatized H shares. Both H shares and red chips are mixed enterprises that mimic private ownership with joint government and private stock ownership. We find that mixed enterprises are less profitable and lower valued than the fully privatized blue chips, but red chips are more efficient and perform better than blue chips when market confidence swings to their favor. Regression analysis suggests that increased stock ownership by the government and increased emolument incentives are counterproductive to profitability, especially in bad economic times of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis.