Summary:
This study explores the role of stock exchange comment letters, as a preventive regulatory mechanism, in promoting the capacity utilization rate of Chinese listed firms, and its potential channel and economic consequences. The formation of corporate overcapacity in China is a complex process. It's difficult to completely rely on the market mechanism.Therefore,exploring a synergistic mechanism by which the government and the market could reduce capacity overhang is very important. However, the literature does not provide a unified framework for coordinating market and government actions to promote firms' reduction of capacity overhang. This study combines the specific background of China's overcapacity with an investigation of the preventive regulatory mechanism of stock exchange comment letters, and explores the synergy between the market and the government in reducing capacity overhang. We analyze overcapacity-related annual report comment letters from 2014 to 2017. We find that firms are more likely to reduce capacity overhang after they receive an exchange comment letter related to overcapacity issues than when they do not receive such a letter. Moreover, we find that this effect is stronger in firms with more negative media coverage or with good governance. These results are consistent with the theoretical prediction that stock exchange comment letters play an important role in alleviating information asymmetry between the capital market (administrative agencies) and commented firms, therefore forcing firms to reduce capacity overhang. Furthermore, we find that overcapacity-related comment letters improve resource allocation and decrease the agency issues of commented firms, which is a potential channel by which comment letters reduce capacity overhang. As a result, commented firms are likely to exhibit higher operating efficiency and performance than uncommented firms. The contributions of this study are as follows. First, this study innovatively explores an effective way to reduce corporate capacity overhang from the perspective of stock exchange comment letters. Although there is extensive and in-depth research in previous studies on the causes and economic consequences of capacity overhang, there is relatively little research on how to prevent capacity overhang. Thus, this study's exploration of market-government synergy in capacity overhang reduction provides important academic evidence. Second, this study enriches the literature on preventive regulations in the Chinese capital market from the perspective of the observed effects of annual report comment letters. Although the preventive regulatory role of comment letters is increasingly the main mechanism of stock exchange regulation, few studies focus on these letters' effects, such as how annual report comment letters improve information disclosure, internal control quality, and capital market pricing efficiency. Unlike previous research, this study empirically examines the preventive regulatory effect of annual report comment letters from the perspective of de-capacity, and provides unique evidence on the Chinese capital market to supplement the international academic literature on regulatory comment letters. This study has several policy implications. It provides a timely response to China's current de-capacity policies and the carbon peak plan.China's socialist market economic system has the potential to become an asset in international economic cooperation and competition, and this important issue requires further research. Overall, this study explores a sustainable mechanism of overcapacity reduction that is based on collaborative governance involving the market and government. This exploration is performed from the perspective of the annual report comment letters, and thereby provides new understanding on the government-market relationship in a socialist market economy.
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