| 讲座简介： | This paper studies the connection between share pledging and entrepreneurial activities in the context of China. Share pledging is prevalent across markets, and the pledging funds are at the discretion of the shareholders who pledge their shares. Survey evidence shows that a majority of the largest shareholders (67.3%) used pledging funds outside the listed firms in China. By linking firm registration data with share pledging data, we show a positive relation between shareholders’ pledging transactions and entrepreneurial activities. Utilizing the launch of the exchange market in 2013 as a quasi-natural experiment that favors share pledging by natural person shareholders against that by legal entity shareholders, our difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis shows natural person shareholders increased their entrepreneurial activities significantly in response to the policy shock, relative to legal entity shareholders. In addition to various robustness checks, we also show that shareholders with better access to share pledging invest more in PE/VC firms, which help spawn further entrepreneurial activities, and they follow a momentum-like strategy that invests in past winners. |
