Abstract: For the past years, it has been particularly common for listed companies to become economically connected because of institutional cross-owners. According to statistics, institutional investors in the U.S. market served as majority shareholders in an average of five different companies at the same time from 1993 to 2010. In China, as an emerging economy, the proportion of listed companies that are economically linked to institutional cross-owners increases year by year, and by 2020, it had increased to 12%, with the average shareholding of institutional cross-owners reaching 22%. With the proportion of shares held by institutional cross-owners and the development of shareholder activism, institutional cross-owners have a stronger desire and motivation to participate in corporate governance and active supervision, and exploring how to play a positive effect of institutional cross-owners on enterprise value is of great significance for promoting the benign development of the capital market and realizing the sustainable development of enterprises. Academics has not yet formed a consistent conclusion on the economic impact of institutional cross-owners, and therefore, exploring the impact of institutional cross-owners on corporate governance and capital market is still one of the more concerned topics in the academic community.
Based on this, this paper uses the data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2005 to 2020, and employs hierarchical analysis to deeply examine the intrinsic correlation between institutional cross-owners and corporate value. The conclusions of the study are as follows:Firstly, the relationship between institutional cross-owners and firm value exhibits a typical inverted U-shaped relationship. Specifically, when institutional cross-owners are controlled within a certain range, institutional cross-owners favor firm value growth. However, when they exceed a certain threshold, the resulting limited attention significantly inhibits firm value growth. Secondly, CEO affiliation has a significant negative moderating effect on the above inverted U-shaped relationship. Finally, institutional cross-owners are categorized into stable and trading institutional investors, and it is found that there is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between stable institutional cross-owners and firm value, while there is no such inverted U-shaped relationship for trading ones.
This paper has the following two main contributions: On the one hand, it enriches the research on the monitoring effect of institutional cross-owners and the limited attention of institutional investors. The research on the monitoring efficiency of institutional cross-owners has not formed a unified conclusion, and there are two opposite views: “cross-shareholding will reduce the monitoring efficiency of institutional investors” and “cross-shareholding will improve the monitoring efficiency of institutional investors”. This paper attempts to explore these two possible effects in the same industry, revealing the “double-edged sword” effect of institutional cross-owners on corporate value, and supplementing the related research on the role of institutional cross-owners in monitoring corporate behavior. On the other hand, most of the studies on CEO affiliation focus on the similarity of demographics and social network relationships, based on the employment of executives. Most studies on CEO affiliation focus on the similarity of demographic characteristics and social network relationships, and there are relatively few studies on the impact of CEO affiliation on corporate governance based on the hiring of executives or the suggestion of nominating directors. This paper provides an in-depth examination of the value benefits and internal logic of CEO affiliation to provide a theoretical basis for institutional cross-owners behavior on corporate governance and monitoring.

Key words: institutional cross-owners; corporate value; CEO connectedness; institutional investor heterogeneity

摘要： 企业间通过交叉持股形成经济关联的现象尤为常见,但学术界关于连锁机构投资者对企业制度监督的影响仍然没有形成统一的观点。本文对连锁机构投资者与企业价值之间的非线性关系进行了理论探索与实证研究。基于2005—2020年中国A股上市公司数据,本文采用层次回归方法对相关假说进行了检验。研究结果表明,连锁机构投资者与企业价值之间呈现出典型的倒U型关系。而且,CEO关联对上述倒U型关系具有显著的负向调节作用,更进一步将连锁机构投资者划分为稳定型机构投资者和交易型机构投资者,结果发现稳定型连锁机构投资者与企业价值之间存在显著的倒U型关系,而交易型则不存在这种倒U型关系。本文丰富了现有研究,并为企业如何更好地通过机构投资者交叉持股来提升自身价值提供有益指导。

关键词: 连锁机构投资者, 企业价值, CEO关联, 机构投资者异质性