An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Ownership Structure and Corporate Performance in China's Listed Tourism Companies

This paper investigates the relationship between ownership structure and corporate performance of China's listed tourism companies. We find a significant cubic relationship between corporate performance and ownership concentration (percentage of shares held by the largest shareholder or square sum of percentage of shares held by the largest five shareholders), that is, with the increase of ownership concentration, corporate performance slopes upward first, then downward, and then upward again. Furthermore, we also find a significant cubic relationship between degree of tunneling and ownership concentration; however, the degree of tunneling slopes downward first, then upward, and downward again as ownership concentration rises. So tunneling behavior is an important channel by which ownership structure can affect corporate performance.