The Influence Of Employee Stock Ownership Plan On The Performance Of A-share Listed Companies

Employee Stock Ownership Plan(ESOP)has existed for decades since it was introduced into China in 1980s.During this period,the development of ESOP in China is not smooth,and it has experienced many failures and restarts.On the basis of summing up past experience,China Securities Regulatory Commission(CSRC)issued the Guiding Opinions on the Pilot Implementation of ESOP in Listed Companies in June,2014,for the sake of the compliance of ESOP in China.Since then,in order to improve employees’ sense of belonging and company performance,many companies have implemented ESOP every year.Employee Stock Ownership Plan(ESOP)is an innovative development of equityincentive,which has many advantages:it can enhance employees’ sense of belonging,reduce the agency cost of the company and ease the financing constraints of the company,thus promoting the company’s performance.However,scholars at home and abroad have not reached a unified conclusion on whether ESOP can improve the company’s performance,and few scholars have analyzed the mechanism of ESOP affecting the company’s performance.Therefore,it is meaningful to study whether ESOP can improve the company’s performance and the mechanism analysis of ESOP’s influence on the company’s performance.Its significance is not only reflected in the theoretical level,but also in the practical level.Based on this,this paper selects the listed companies that implemented ESOP from 2014 to 2020 as the experimental group,and makes a double difference analysis.However,in order to eliminate the self-selection and endogenous problems of samples,this paper then uses the double difference tendency score matching method(PSM-DID)to make an empirical study.The specific method is:firstly,the listed companies in the experimental group are matched with a reasonable control group by PSM,and then the matched listed companies are integrated.On this basis,this paper then examines the intermediary transmission effect of innovation ability and agency cost between ESOP and listed company performance,and finally makes heterogeneity test and robustness test.The results show that ESOP can improve the performance of listed companies;Employee stock ownership plan indirectly improves the performance of listed companies by improving the company’s innovation ability and reducing agency costs.The more the employee stock ownership plan is granted to ordinary employees,the better the performance improvement effect of listed companies will be.And compared with the non-public offering of stocks,when the stock source is purchased from the secondary market,the effect of ESOP is better.