Financial Crisis, The Nature Of Ownership And Cost Stickiness

Cost stickiness is common in Chinese enterprises, and it becomes a hot research topic in recent years in theory fields. Cost stickiness is also called cost asymmetry, because business volume and cost have different variations of amplitude. When the rising cost amplitude caused by the increase of business volume is more than the reducing cost amplitude, the cost has the characteristic of stickiness. Cost stickiness breaks the linear relationship between cost and business volume in the Cost Behavior Theory, it reveals the nonlinear relationship between these two elements. The research of cost stickiness can offer the managers cost information, and it can help them realize cost control, moreover, cost stickiness can make stakeholders better understand and analyze the business tactics about cost. In a word, cost stickiness can improve the operational efficiency of the enterprise.Through the literature review of cost stickiness, we find many of the study from abroad and home focus on the characteristics, the cause, the influencing factors and the economical effects of cost stickiness, furthermore, many of them are on the hypothesis of normal economy environment and one specific kind of cost. The global financial crisis in 2008 decreases China’s economic growth, while it provides us an opportunity to study cost stickiness in such an abnormal economy environment. This paper will study the differences and changing laws among enterprises of different ownership properties, and we will study them in the context of the global financial crisis in 2008, then we will compare the differences and changing laws before and after the crisis.This paper’s study objects are the sample data from the year 2003 to 2013 of 9880 listed companies from Shanghai and Shenzhen Stocks, we can get the following conclusions by the positive test:1) cost stickiness is common in Chinese enterprises, and different enterprises have different cost stickiness, moreover, we also find that period expense stickiness is the highest, and total cost stickiness and operating cost stickiness are the second and the least highest; 2) enterprises of different ownership properties have different cost stickiness. The cost stickiness of state-owned enterprises is commonly higher than the one of non state-owned enterprises, and the cost stickiness of state-owned key enterprises is higher than local state-owned enterprises, and the cost stickiness of different ownership properties has extremely differences; 3) the global financial crisis affects the cost stickiness of Chinese enterprises, the operating cost stickiness after the financial crisis is higher than itself before the crisis, while the total cost stickiness, the period expense stickiness, the selling expense stickiness and the management expense stickiness are lower after the financial crisis; 4)the cost stickiness of enterprises of different ownership properties have different variations of amplitude, and they have differences. The selling expense stickiness of state-owned enterprises is higher than the one of non state-owned enterprise, other cost stickiness have no extremely differences. All of the total cost stickiness of state-owned key enterprises are higher than the ones of local state-owned enterprises, and the total cost stickiness and the operating cost stickiness between these two kinds of enterprises have extremely differences. This paper finally gives the future study directions of cost stickiness, and we also point out the study limitations of this paper.