External Earning Pressure，Diversified Equity Investment and Firm Financialization

Abstract

In recent years, financialization appears in Chinese firms to inspire financial investment to exclude real ones, which also exists in the United States and other nations. As the microcosmic basis of financialization, the phenomenon of firm financialization whether exists and its causes have attracted wide attention of scholars. Previous research in firm financialization focuses on macroeconomic factors like monetary policies; therefore, it attributes financialization to general investment decisions in firms which are affected by macroeconomic background. However, research in internal factors especially in corporate governance has been ignored to some extent. Because of the complex background of financialization, the impact of internal governance factors on firm financialization is also in urgent need of effective analyses, and then effective supervision and policy guidance are generated to avoid potential risks of the real economy. This paper firstly uses a modified empirical model in measuring idiosyncratic effects on firm financialization from corporate governance. In this model, inefficient investment is settled as the object instead of total investment in order to measure idiosyncratic motivations in financialization, and then we use the PSM method to balance the effects from irrational factors in firms’ investment decisions. On this basis, we carry out an empirical analysis in using semi-annual data of listed companies in China from 2007 to 2016. We firstly measure excluding effects in real investment from financialization under the background of corporate governance, which carries out both at the parent firm level and conglomerate level to obtain comprehensive results. Then we measure the impact from external earning pressure and diversified equity investment on excluding effects to analyze impressions from internal shareholders and external ones. It comes to the following conclusions: First, On the basis of excluding irrational investment decision-making, firm financialization represented by financial investment returns and holding equity of financial institutions has produced significant excluding effects of real investment. Second, external earning pressure strengthens excluding effects to some extent. Third, the impact of diversified equity investment on financialization shows two-sided effects: one is to strengthen excluding effects at the parent firm level, while the other is to reduce the effects at the conglomerate level. The conclusions of this paper indicate that the shareholder value orientation in Chinese firms essentially strengthens excluding effects from financialization both in internal and external paths. On the one hand, financialization effects are relieved while the equity investment of parent firms weakens total shareholder values; on the other hand, outside shareholder values strengthen financialization effects by earning pressure from external capital markets. In short, this paper expands the existing research from the following two aspects. First, it provides new paths in analyzing how the shareholder value orientation influence financialization effects, which strengthens the financialization theory. Second, this paper also constructs an empirical model for measuring the impact of corporate heterogeneity on financialization, which provides a certain basis for the follow-up study of firm financialization in the micro-field.