“妇女能顶半边天”——夫妻共治能抑制“掏空”吗?

The Power of Women: Does Husband-and-Wife Co-governance Inhibit Tunneling?

夫妻共治能抑制公司"掏空"吗?探究该问题对于中国家族企业治理意义重大。本文以2007—2017年中国A股上市家族企业为样本,考察了夫妻共治对公司利益侵占行为的影响。研究结果发现:(1)相比于其他类型的家族企业,夫妻共同控制的家族企业更少地侵占中小股东利益。(2)"夫唱妇随"共同参与经营管理,能显著降低利益侵占行为发生;而婚姻的破裂带来了极大的负面影响,会显著增加公司利益侵占水平。(3)女性的人力资本特质以及其在家族企业内外部的权力使其"监督效应"更为有效,降低了利益侵占行为发生。本文将社会学与公司治理理论相结合,探讨了"夫妻共治"家族企业在公司治理中的作用,研究发现有助于深入理解中国情境下家族企业内部的异质性对公司治理的影响,尤其是夫妻关系对抑制"掏空"的积极作用。

The existing literature shows that under the background of Chinese cultural tradition and economic institution, the institutional protection of investors is not yet mature, and the family business often presents the characteristics of the combination of ownership and management rights. This may not only cause the "supervision effect" under the centralized control right, but also lead to the"encroachment effect". The former believes that the family business has the ability to mitigate or even eliminate family favoritism and weak risk-taking, which will harm the efficiency, performance and even survival of family business. The family business is more concerned about reputation, showing a higher performance of internal governance. The "encroachment effect", on the other hand, holds that the family actual controller has a high opportunist motive, and the corporate decision-making operates entirely under the will of individual authoritativeness, which increases the risk of the expropriation of small and medium-sized shareholders, creditors and other external stakeholders. The loss of corporate governance quality and the shrinking of corporate value are brought about by the means of capital occupation, high related party transaction and special dividend policy. However, the existing research does not distinguish between husband-and-wife co-governance and family business co-governance formed by other kinship.The existence of husband-and-wife co-governance family business, which accounts for one third of the listed family companies in China, has brought a unique opportunity for this paper to study the corporate governance of family business. Compared with other family ties, husband-and-wife co-governance presents different characteristics in terms of goals, management methods, and communication and coordination in daily business activities. So, the husband-and-wife co-governance family business has more obvious opportunistic behavior of encroaching on non-family stakeholders, or less "tunneling"behavior? The exploration on this problem will help the academia and the industry to have a more rational and in-depth understanding of the impact of husband-and-wife co-governance on the survival and development of family business.In view of this, this paper takes A-share listed family enterprises as samples to empirically test the impact of husband-and-wife co-governance family business on corporate interest encroachment. It is found that, compared with other types of family business, the husband-and-wife co-governance family business has less encroachment behavior. After a series of robustness tests, the conclusion is still valid.Further research on the influence mechanism shows that, the wife’s human capital trait and the trait of endowing her with internal and external power have a significant "supervision effect" on corporate interest encroachment behavior, which highlights the governance ability of female entrepreneurs.Compared with the previous literature, the contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, it enriches the research on family involvement and corporate governance behavior of family business, and expands the research boundary of the corporate governance theory of family business, which provides new evidence and ideas for opening the "Black Box" of the internal governance of family business.Secondly, it expands the research on marriage economics, feminism and family entrepreneur behavior theory;in the context of Chinese culture and society, it makes a detailed study on the "flexible" synergic function of female entrepreneurs in husband-and-wife co-governance, and the positive effect of female entrepreneur governance.