State ownership and corporate performance: A quantile regression analysis of Chinese listed companies

Abstract

This study assesses the impact of government shareholding on corporate performance using a sample of 643 non-financial companies listed on the Chinese stock exchanges. In view of the controversial empirical findings in the literature and the limitations of the least squares regressions, we adopt the method of quantile regression and report a robust and significant negative relation between government shareholding and corporate performance among, and only among, the more profitable firms. This new finding, which the conditional mean-focused regressions do not capture, suggests that while Chinese government still exerts influences on the performance of these partially privatized firms, the relationship parameter changes across quantiles of the distribution of performance variables.