Study On The Effect Of Enterprises’ Cross-border Listings On Competitive Advantages:the Perspective Of Strategic Risk Governance

As one of the core components of strategic management, strategic risk management underline reducing and controlling strategic risks by optimizing the risk-control process and methods within the current institutional framework. Because of unable to touch the deep-seated problems, i.e, how to design a set of top-level institutional arrangements so as to ensure strategic decisions are made correctly by the right people, strategic risk management is doomed to unable to fundamentally reduce and control strategic risks. It is no longer a simple governance problem or strategic risk management problem when involving top-level institutional arrangements, but belongs to the cross field of strategic risk management and corporate governance, namely the strategic risk governance problem.After more than30years’s reform and opening-up, China has become the world’s second largest economy. However, China’s capital market are relatively underdeveloped, financing difficulties are common phenomena for Chinese companies. As the world’s largest economy, the United States has a more developed and more open capital market, so more and more Chinese companies choose to list in the U.S.. The internal and external environments such as legal system and firm’s stakeholders changed greatly after going public.As adaptive organizations, enterprises will adjust their top-level strategic-risk-control-related institutional arrangements according to internal and external environmental changes, at the same time, these adjustments will further affect enterprises’strategic behavior and performance. As a top-level institutional arrangement aimed to reduce and control strategic risks and then protect the long-term interests of all stakeholders, strategic risk governance is not the last piece of "dominoes" triggered by enterprises’cross-border listings. Based on the above analysis, this dissertation raised the core research questions as follows:whether the internal and external environmental changes caused by Chinese enterprises’ cross-border listings have caused changes in the top-level strategic-risk-control-related institutional arrangements, and then affected enterprises’ competitive advantages further?Focusing on the above research questions, based on the agency theory, resource-based view and upper echelon theory, and adopting the method of combining theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this dissertation analyzes the top-level institutional factors that affect enterprises’strategic risks, and then builds a strategic risk governance index to evaluate the quality of strategic-riks-control-related institutional arrangements; Secondly, based on the logic of "environment changes, strategic-risk-related institutional arrangements, and then the economic consequences", this dissertation analyzes the relationships between enterprises’ cross-border listings, strategic risk governance and competitive advantages; In the end, sampling with Chinese companies listed in the U.S. and its matching companies listed in China, adopting a more stringent sample matching method to control IPO effect more effectly, at the same time adopting Heckman two step regression method to control the self-selection problems and other endogenity controlling methods, this dissertation conducts a series of empirical studies and came to the following conclusions:First, Cross-border listings can help improve Chinese enterprises’competitive advantages. After going public, Chinese enterprises will be supervised by more qualified investors and stakeholders such as more developed capital market intermediaries, so there are stronger institutional guarantees for enhancing corporate governance and strengthening the protection of investors" interests, and then help to enhance enterprises’competitive advantages. The results also suggest that, as a part of internationalization strategy of "going out" advocated by Chinese government, capital internationalization strategy is an important means for enterprises to build and maintain competitive advantages.Second, the dissertation constructs a strategic risk governance index which can effectively evaluate the quality of companies’top-level strategic-risk-control-related institutional arrangements. Corporate governance evaluation is not only the traditional research topic in corporate governance field, but also a research topic that constantly infused by new knowledge and new ideas. By reviewing the connotation of strategic risk governance in previous studies, and by referring the mainstream principles and methods of corporate governance assessment at home and abroad, this dissertation builds a strategic risk governance index, and verify this index by the mainstream methods of effectiveness tests.Third, strategic risk governance is a mediator between Chinese enterprises’ cross-border listings and competitive advantages after controlling the endogenity problems. This suggests that, on one hand, due to the rigorous restrictions caused by more perfect laws and more developed capital market intermediaries, Chinese cross-border listed companies will strengthen shareholders’ interests protection related institutional arrangements, on the other hand, companies can optimize the configuration of the board of directors and management by making use of the more developed capital market system effectively, thus improve the abilities of strategic risk controlling and reduce the degree of risk appetites. These changes will help to reduce the level of strategic risk, which can further help companies to obtain more strategic resources under the same condition, or to obtain the required strategic resources at a lower cost, thus eventually contribute to the building and maintaining of competitive advantages.The contributions of this study are as follows:First, this dissertation adopts a tighter sample matching method to control IPO effect, this provids a good complement to existing cross-border listings related researches as sample matching methods as concerned. In the studies on the effects of enterprise cross-border listings on competitive advantages, most researchers adopted longitudinal comparison, or adopted horizontal comparison by matching samples according to the principle of "the same home country, the same industry, the similar size", The largest defect of this method is that it is difficult to control the potential IPO effect and leads to biased conclusion. This dissertation matches samples according to the principle of "the same home country, the same industry, the similar size, the close IPO date", so that this dissertation can control the interferences of potential IPO effect more effectively and improve the research’s reliability.Second, this dissertation builds a strategic risk governance evaluation index, thus provides a more operational theory reference and guidance for designing the top-level strategic risk control related regime. Summarizing the major factors of the strategic risk from multiple theoretical perspectives by combining theoretical analysis and empirical evidences, this study constructs a theoretical model of strategic risk governance. On this basis, this dissertation builds a strategic risk governance index used to measure the quality of strategic risk governance by referring the experience of existing corporate governance assessments, and then verifies the index by empirical studies, thus enriched contents of corporate governance assessments.Third, this dissertation tests the impact mechanisms of cross-border listings on competitive advantages from the perspective of strategic risk governance. Corporate governance and strategic risk management are two major challenges faced by newly listed companies, most of existing researches analyzed the economic consequences of cross-border listings from a single perspective of corporate governance or strategic risk management. Integrating the agency theory, resource-based view and upper echelon theory, This dissertation analyzes and testes the impact mechanisms of cross-border listings on competitive advantages from the perspective of strategic risk governance, thus enriched the perspectives of cross-border listings related researches, and provides new empirical evidences and theoretical guidances for the practices of competitive advantages’promoting for Chinese enterprises listed in the U.S..