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According to the late Maxime Rodinson, there exists a basic affinity between the economic scheme of Islam and the capitalist system. Although most Muslims, including pro‐capitalist ones, like to think of Islam as a unique way of life and one distinguished from both capitalism and socialism, there exist various Muslims who, like Rodinson, find important similarities between Islam and capitalism. One such similarity concerns private ownership of property and the means of production. According to Zubair Hassan of India, “Islam, like capitalism, permits private ownership of property including the means of production and grants freedom of enterprise”.

This paper aims to study how state ownership influences the innovation process in terms of allocating resources toward searching for new solutions and converting these efforts into economic value. On one hand, deep pockets of the state provide slack resources that may facilitate risk taking and innovation. On the other hand, soft budgets can create incentive problems and dampen the efficient use of resources. The authors suggest how accounting for competitive context can disentangle these countervailing forces.

The authors use a panel of over 240,000 Chinese firms over the years 2004–2008. The broad sample and period afforded substantial variability in terms of state ownership within and across firms. The authors use a two-stage model and a within-firm (i.e. fixed-effects) design, controlling for all time-invariant firm characteristics and the problematic unobserved heterogeneity that can often lead to erroneous inferences. Furthermore, the relatively short window limits the likelihood of time-varying unobserved firm characteristics biasing the empirical results.

The authors found that private-sector competition has the opposite effect on the relationship between state ownership and the second step of the innovation process. In industries where there is robust private-sector competition, state ownership diminishes the firm’s ability to convert R&D efforts into economic value. Private-sector competition competes away any advantages state-owned firms may have in terms of developing or accessing the complementary resources needed for commercialization. Ultimately, the inefficiencies of state ownership in terms of relatively undisciplined selection and monitoring of R&D activities outweigh any potential resource advantages derived from state ownership.

The state remains a prominent player in many economies throughout the world. The authors explored how state ownership of firms influences the resources they expend in searching out new solutions, and their success in converting such resources into economically valuable new products and services. State ownership has potentially countervailing effects on innovation. The authors disentangle these countervailing effects through consideration of how accounting for competitive context could determine whether the beneficial effects of state ownership dominate its detrimental effects for both searching for new solutions and converting these efforts into economically valuable new products. With a focus of market competition as an external force that drives the difference in innovation between SOEs and the private-sector, this study serves as a parallel effort to Jia et al. (2019) who investigate the joint effect of public and corporate governance on SOEs’ innovation performance, and Zhou et al. (2017) who concern the balance of the institution and efficiency logics on the comparative advantage of SOEs over privately owned enterprises in innovation performance.

This paper addresses the social value of commercial enterprises that are jointly owned by a government and private sector investors and where the shares are listed on a stock exchange: thus, “listed public–private enterprises” (LPPEs). The theoretical part of the paper addresses how differences in ownership patterns influence the behavior and performance of LPPEs.

We develop a conceptual taxonomy, drawing on the empirical evidence on the behavior and performance of public–private hybrid enterprises and on the application of agency theory to that evidence. The taxonomy discussion predicts how different ownership patterns affect enterprise productive efficiency and the ability of governments to achieve social goals through LPPEs. We review the empirical literature on government enterprise ownership and on the concentration of private share ownership to deduce how these matter for owner and managerial behavior and productive efficiency. We review the literature that considers the informational content that listing of an enterprise's shares on a stock exchange can provide to enterprise owners, managers and other domestic audiences with a policy interest. We employ a social welfare perspective to derive policy implications as to when the LPPE governance structure is most appropriate.

We show how the monitoring and performance weaknesses of state ownership are offset by some private ownership, particularly when combined with listing on a stock exchange. We demonstrate the effects of different governance structures on enterprise productive efficiency. We find that the LPPE structure is particularly appropriate as an alternative to nationalization or to full privatization and regulation of natural monopoly public utilities, and as an alternative to full private ownership and taxation of non-renewable natural resource extractive enterprises.

This paper explicitly addresses the question of why and how the combination of government ownership, private investor ownership and listing on an exchange is socially valuable in providing information on productive efficiency to governments.

Taking advantage of the 2008 Sichuan Great Earthquake as a natural experiment, the purpose of this paper is to examine the motives and effects of corporate donations by focusing on how firm ownership identity as the first-order governance mechanism affects the motives and effects of disaster relief donations.

The authors conduct regressions and market event studies, and use matching to address the confounding effects of differences in firm characteristics.

The authors hypothesize that private firms that are better governed than state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are more likely to donate for value maximization. Consistent with this, the authors find that private firms are more likely to donate to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and donate more than SOEs. The effects of secondary governance variables in the donation determinant models (e.g. board independence and managerial ownership) are more consistent with the value maximization argument. While short-term market reaction to donation announcement is not significant for private firms, it is lower when SOEs make a large donation. Consistent with the hypothesis, the authors find that over the 24–36 months following the donation, private donors realize a higher abnormal stock return.

The study contributes to the debate over the merits/costs of corporate donations and helps better understand how SOEs and private firms (particularly family-owned firms) differ in their governance and financial decision-making.

Both managers from private firms and SOEs can use the findings of this study to better guide their donation and other philanthropic decisions.

This study is the first to examine both the motives and effects of corporate donations by both private and SOEs taking advantage of the 2008 Sichuan, thereby significantly extending prior related studies.

There is consensus among scholars on how political institutional imprinting interprets the unique management and practice phenomenon of Chinese enterprises. However, little scholarly attention has been given to the different political institutional imprints that shape firms’ internationalization. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how communist and market logic political institutional imprintings influence firms’ initial ownership strategies in outward foreign direct investment.

Based on the propensity score matching difference in difference method and a sample of 464 foreign investments from 2009 to 2020 for 310 Chinese private firms.

The results show that private firms with market logic political institutional imprintings tend to adopt higher ownership and vice versa. As institutional differences increase, private firms with market logic imprintings are more risk-taking and adopt higher ownership, whereas private firms with communist imprintings are more conservative and choose lower ownership. When diplomatic relations are friendlier, private firms with market logic imprintings prefer higher ownership to grasp business opportunities and vice versa.

This study not only identifies the net effect of political institutional imprinting on private firms’ initial ownership strategy but also investigates the different moderating effects of current institutional forces to respond to the call for research on bringing history back into international business research and the fit between imprinting and the environment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the type of ultimate controllers (i.e. private vs state) affects corporate disclosure quality and whether the relationship between the type of ultimate controllers and corporate disclosure quality is moderated by the separation of ownership and control.

This study employs the data of 405 Chinese listed firms in 2005. Annual reports were reviewed to collect the data including the type of ultimate owners, cash‐flow rights, and control rights; and the ratings of corporate disclosure quality were obtained from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange website. Ordered logistic regression tested the hypotheses.

It was found that corporate disclosure quality is lower for firms ultimately controlled by individuals than for firms ultimately controlled by the state. Also, the negative effect of private ultimate ownership on corporate disclosure quality is stronger for firms with high deviation of cash‐flow rights and control rights.

These findings suggest that privatizing state‐owned companies may increase the expropriation of minority shareholders by controlling shareholders if the privatization does not reduce the separation of cash‐flow rights from control rights. Thus, it may be necessary to strengthen the governance role of minority shareholders and constrain the divergence between cash‐flow rights and control rights of the ultimate owners when state‐owned companies are privatized.

This study contributes to the literature on the expropriation of minority shareholders by examining the main effect of the type of ultimate controllers and the interactive effect of ultimate ownership type and the divergence of ownership and control on corporate disclosure quality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate two related questions. First, is earnings management behaviour in private firms related to managerial ownership and if so, what form does the relationship take. Second, is there evidence of opportunistic earnings management behaviour in private firms.

This study uses univariate and multivariate (regression) methodologies to examine the association between managerial ownership and earnings management in private firms. The study employs a data set of 1,223 large private UK firms.

Evidence is presented indicating opportunistic earnings management behaviour in private firms. Specifically, firms with low managerial ownership appear to engage in more earnings management when faced with poor performance. Further, when firms report income-increasing discretionary accruals, the magnitude of abnormal accruals varies non-linearly with managerial ownership.

This study is limited by availability of data on sample firm ownership. This study uses cross-sectional data due to these limitations. Further research could investigate the relationships between earnings management and classes of shareholders other than managers in private firms.

Policy implications of this work suggest that non-managing shareholders in private firms face considerable agency costs, in particular where managerial ownership is very low or very high.

Pervasiveness of earnings management in private firms compared to public firms is well documented in the literature. There is limited extant research on the relationship between ownership structure and earnings management in private firms. The novel aspect of this study is to present findings on the association between this behaviour, managerial ownership and firm performance in private firms.

New ownership types in health care of welfare states raise concerns regarding psychosocial work conditions including different control dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how job demands, control over work and control within work (CWW) were related to job satisfaction in publicly administered, private non-profit and private for-profit hospitals.

Questionnaire data came from employees at three hospitals; a publicly administered (n=774), a private non-profit (n=1,481) and a private for-profit (n=694) hospital. Mean-level analyses and hierarchical regressions with multiple group tests were conducted.

Demands including workload were significantly lower at the publicly administered hospital while the control dimension CWW was significantly higher. Background factors and their associations with job satisfaction differed slightly between ownership types. Attitudes to privatization were not associated with job satisfaction within any ownership type. Overall, psychosocial work characteristics, including job demands and control, were significantly associated with job satisfaction while their interactions showed no consistent associations with job satisfaction. As for the strength of the associations, no consistent differences emerged between ownership types.

Using self-reports only, the associations between psychosocial work characteristics and job satisfaction seemed comparable across ownership types.

Associations between psychosocial work characteristics and job satisfaction seem comparable across ownership types. This may relate to societal demands on the structuring of costs, work and production efficiency being similar for all.

Contributions include researching different occupations and their attitudes to privatization and two control dimensions considered important for different ownership types.

This study aims to study the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the relationship between outsourcing and product innovation in entrepreneurial ventures in a transition economy.

The data of 10,296 Vietnamese entrepreneurial ventures from the four rounds of the survey conducted by the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam to investigate the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the association between outsourcing and entrepreneurial ventures’ product innovation performance. The Probit regression model is employed to estimate such associations.

Our research uncovered that the impact of outsourcing on the likelihood of product innovation is more significant for entrepreneurial operations characterized by a substantial degree of private ownership and government backing as opposed to those without.

The results of our research indicated that the resource-based perspective and extended resource-based view (ERBV) are essential in examining the impact of gaining resources or skills from external sources on the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. These ideas have significance and importance not just in industrialized economies but also in countries undergoing transition. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial enterprises should have the ability to manage a wide range of resources and make decisions about which activities should be handled internally and which should be delegated to other parties.

Our findings also imply that entrepreneurial ventures should be able to control many resources and choose which tasks should be performed in-house and which should be outsourced to third parties.

By adopting and leveraging the resource-based view (RBV) and extended resource-based views (ERBV), our study developed a theoretical model about private ownership and government support for moderate outsourcing’s impact on entrepreneurial innovation in a transition economy.

In the context of China’s efforts to build world-class enterprises through mixed-ownership reform, this study aims to build an agency theory framework to analyze the differential relation between ownership structure and firm performance in majority versus minority state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It also evaluates the differential influence that political connectedness has on firm performance in the two types of SOEs.

Using a panel data set of Chinese state-controlled mixed-ownership enterprises covering the period 2010–2019, this paper uses ordinary least squares, random-effects, fixed-effects and three stage least squares regression analysis to study the differential impact of ownership structure and political connectedness on firm performance in majority versus minority SOEs.

In minority SOEs, firm performance is positively related to the ownership share of the largest private shareholder and state ownership positively moderates this relation. Furthermore, minority SOEs with a politically connected chairman perform worse than those with a politically connected chairman. In majority SOEs, there is no relation between the ownership share of the largest private shareholder and firm performance. In addition, majority SOEs with a politically connected chairman perform similar to those without a politically connected chairman.

The theoretical framework demonstrates that agency problems are substantially different in minority versus majority SOEs and that this influences how changes in ownership structure and in the type of chairman that is assigned affect firm performance. The empirical analysis confirms these predictions.