Retained state shareholding in Chinese PLCs: Does government ownership always reduce corporate value?

Government ownership of enterprises in China remains substantial. In this paper, we use a large data set of Chinese public listed companies between 1994 and 2004 to generate evidence on how government ownership influences company performance. We find the effect of government ownership on corporate value to be non-monotonic. In fact, the relationship is U-shaped; up to a certain threshold, corporate value decreases as government shareholding increases, but beyond this it increases. When its shareholding is large, the government can actually improve corporate value. We interpret this result in terms of ownership concentration and government partiality.