Unrelated Shareholder Alliance and Related Party Transaction: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Using a manually collected dataset from 2006 to 2020 in China, we investigate the relationship between unrelated shareholder alliance (SA) and related party transactions (RPTs). We reveal that unrelated SA could reduce listed firms’ RPTs, which have plagued the capital markets for years. This negative association is more pronounced in abnormal RPTs, which typically indicates tunneling. Further, the negative relationship between SA and RPTs is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises. Overall, our findings indicate that alliance is not a tool for unrelated shareholders to collude, but is a means for unrelated shareholders to cooperate.

KEYWORDS:

• Shareholders
• alliance
• related party transactions
• China

JEL:

• M10
• M41
• D21
• D23

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71962010;72002086].