Corporate Headquarters Relocation Motive And The Relocation Performance

In the past30years of development, Chinese enterprises have achieved rapid development, and the utilization of resources is becoming more and more diversified and regional. Corporate headquarter has key function so that it plays an important role in the process of enterprise growth. Since the21st century, a large number of firms have realized that headquarters’ location were important to companies’development. Therefore, in order to obtain the location resources Relocating headquarters becomes an important strategic choice of enterprise, and headquarters migration has began to rise, and caused the extensive concern of policymakers and academics.In this paper, based on the study of the scholars at home and abroad, we study on the relocating tendency and the headquarters migration performance under the process perspective. In the process of research, we use the method that theoretical combined with empirical analysis. Our dataset includes150the relocations of corporate HQ and280the matching-sample. After the empirical analysis, the main conclusions are concluded as follows:First, in the control of the factors of the geographic and industrial level, listed companies in which controlling shareholder has changed and mergers and acquisitions has taken place have the tendency to relocate their HQ.Second, the power of the controlling shareholders has regulating effect on the relations of policy maker changing, enterprise merger, acquisition and reorganization, and the corporate headquarters migration. The greater the power of the controlling shareholder, as the controlling shareholder alteration or the behavior of enterprise’s assets purchase occurs, the more tendency of shifting the company has.Third, corporate headquarters relocation do not significantly influence the management performance for migration and the migration of the same home-location enterprises. Both of their performance have improved after the migration behavior, but there were no significant differences between the sample and the match-sample. This suggests that the migration behavior has no significant influence on the promotion of enterprise performance and the resource gain in the ingoing ground wouldn’t happen overnight. In addition, the controlling shareholder of enterprise level change and enterprise merger, acquisition and reorganization behavior are important factors affecting corporate headquarters’relocating decisions, but under the premise of considering decision-makers behavioral differences, enterprises with headquarter move do not create great difference in the performance compared with the immigrated ones.Compared with existing research results, this paper has identified the motives of corporate headquarters migration from the microscopic enterprise level. The existing research has more focused on the regional level characteristics’ influence on migration intention. This study focuses on the influence of enterprise’s decision makers, enterprise merger, acquisition and reorganization on the relocating decisions, expands the existing research content to some extent. However, this paper research is still at the preliminary stage, there are some deficiencies:the research object and the selected variables are relatively single, sample selection and data collection have certain deviation, external validity of the empirical conclusions and other factors require further study and so on.