CEO's pay differentials and the location of IPOs : an empirical study for Chinese A-share and H-share companies

  • Yi LIU

Student thesis: MPhil Thesis (Lingnan)

Abstract

This thesis provides an empirical investigation on how different public listing locations affect the CEO (chief executive officer)’s pay of Chinese SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) and whether such a pay differential would in turn affect the listing location choice by those firms, which have not received much attention in the current literature. In particular, we focus on two stock markets, the mainland (including Shenzhen and Shanghai) A-share market and Hong Kong H-share market. Unlike what have been found in many other markets, where firms listed in the foreign markets can normally enjoy a price premium, Chinese firms listed in the Hong Kong market (H-share) usually face a discount in prices comparing to what they can get in the domestic stock markets (A-share). So it is a real puzzle why they are eager to be listed in Hong Kong. Explanations have been sought in the past regarding to access to international capital markets and reputation or image effects for the Chinese firms. Our study contributes to the current oversea-listing literature by examining CEOs’ personal factors that affect listing location choice of SOEs in China. In this thesis, we aim to examine the association between CEO’s pay and different listing locations. Our sample covers all the Chinese listed SOEs in both A-share and H-share over the period of 1990-2009. First, we examined the effect of different listing locations on CEO’s pay and found that a positive CEO’s pay differential exists for H-share listing other things being equal, which means a wage premium for H-share CEOs. Furthermore, our evidences also support the hypothesis that such a wage premium does provide an incentive for CEOs to choose to list in Hong Kong.
Date of Award2011
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Department of Computing and Decision Sciences
SupervisorXiangdong WEI (Supervisor) & Yifan ZHANG (Supervisor)

Cite this

'