This paper studies the impact of buyout sponsors’ initial public offering (IPO) timing on the leveraged buyout (LBO) restructuring process and subsequent exit strategies. I find that LBO duration is negatively related to hot IPO market conditions. Further, following IPOs, reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs) with shorter LBO duration experience greater deterioration of performance and higher probability of bankruptcy. This suggests that sponsors’ efforts to enhance operating efficiency succumb to market timing. IPO timing does not affect sponsors’ exit strategies and monitoring post IPO. Sponsors keep an active long-run presence with more reputable sponsors who are more likely to exit by facilitating takeovers.

We study the governance effect of institutional site visits and focus on corporate payout. Due to the weak investor protection and poor information quality in China, institutional investors resort to site visits as a form of soft activism. We show that site visits lead to an increase of corporate cash dividend, through the mechanism of disciplining management with exit threats. Such effect is more pronounced for visits by state-owned institutions. We further confirm the causal link with both difference-in-difference analysis and instrumental variable regression. The paper contributes to the research on soft activism and governance device of institutional investors in weak institutional environments.

Family business plays important roles to fuel economic growth in China. Due to the one-child policy, family firms are increasingly facing human capital constraints for within-family succession. Having only one heir decreases the probability of continuing family management by over 3%, reduces the probability of adult children working in family firms by 14%, and significantly decreases founders' expectations of having young heirs for succession. Having fewer children negatively affects founder's expectation to go public, reduces family firm's reinvestment rate and R&D. Overall, the evidence suggests that the human capital constraints due to the one-child policy impose significant negative impacts on within-family succession. Dynastic management of family firms remains an important challenge for first-generation entrepreneurs in China.

This paper examines the impact of ownership structure on executive compensation in China's listed firms. We find that the cash flow rights of ultimate controlling shareholders have a positive effect on the pay–performance relationship, while a divergence between control rights and cash flow rights has a significantly negative effect on the pay–performance relationship. We divide our sample based on ultimate controlling shareholders' type into state owned enterprises (SOE), state assets management bureaus (SAMB), and privately controlled firms. We find that in SOE controlled firms cash flow rights have a significant impact on accounting based pay–performance relationship. In privately controlled firms, cash flow rights affect the market based pay–performance relationship. In SAMB controlled firms, CEO pay bears no relationship with either accounting or market based performance. The evidence suggests that CEO pay is inefficient in firms where the state is the controlling shareholder because it is insensitive to market based performance but consistent with the efforts of controlling shareholders to maximize their private benefit.

We examine cross-border private equity (PE) sponsored leveraged buyout (LBO) transactions in 43 countries in relation to creditor rights and other legal and institutional variables. Cross-border LBO investment is more common from strong creditor rights countries to weak creditor rights countries. Club deals are less common in countries with stronger creditor rights, and less common in cross-border LBOs. Premiums are lower in countries with stronger creditor rights, and among cross-border deals.