In this paper, we investigate the problem of controlling shareholder Non-Operational Fund Occupancy (NOFO) in China, where controlling shareholders directly take funds away from listed firms without matching business transactions. The NOFO problem was an evident and widely used tunneling activity in China and was identified by the securities market regulators. Unlike previous literature that used indirect measures of tunneling, we directly collect the actual amounts of NOFO from mandated disclosures and utilize this direct measure of tunneling in a series of empirical tests. First, we examine and find that various mechanisms such as ownership structure, corporate governance and institutional environments could restrain tunneling activities. Second, we find significantly positive market reactions to regulations that aimed to solve the NOFO problem. Third, we find evidence that the operating performance and valuation of firms with a NOFO problem improved after the regulations went into effect. Our study sheds light on the severe issue of minority shareholder expropriation and the effectiveness of regulators' policy to remedy the tunneling problem.

We examine how public enforcement and private enforcement interact to contain self‐dealing activities in emerging markets. Using data from China, we find that firms receiving comment letters concerning related party transactions (RPTs) from stock exchanges significantly reduce their RPTs in subsequent years. We further find that (1) the subsequent reduction in RPTs is more pronounced when independent directors have higher career or reputation concerns and (2) independent directors are more likely to dissent or resign if their firms do not significantly reduce RPTs after receiving RPT comment letters, especially if they have high reputation concerns. Our study sheds light on a within‐firm mechanism through which public enforcement takes effect. Our empirical findings also illustrate how “sunshine enforcement”—maintaining timely transparency of the enforcement process—can significantly enhance the effectiveness of regulatory programs.

Credit borrower concentration arises when a bank or financial institution lends a large amount of its funds to a few large borrowers. We find that borrower concentration is positively related to non-performing loans and negatively related to financial performance. We also find that the voting power of bank’s controlling shareholder is positively related to the borrower concentration. The evidence is consistent with the view that controlling shareholders divert resources away from banks by extending a high volume of loans to a few related parties, which leads to high borrower concentration. Further evidence indicates that some seemingly unrelated large borrowers, as reported in the financial disclosure, are actually related to the controlling shareholders. We also provide evidence that going public mitigates the tunneling activities of controlling shareholders.