Summary:
Share pledge financing has become common in China's capital market; however, it often brings great risk, especially in high-leverage companies. Once a firm's stock price falls sharply after share pledging and touches the unwinding line, its controlling shareholder will be under great pressure and may lose control rights. Therefore, the controlling shareholder often has a strong motivation to drive the company to conduct market value management to prevent the stock price from crashing to the liquidation line; this is commonly achieved by changing accounting policy or adjusting the firm's information disclosure behavior. However, research on the impact of shareholder equity pledging on the quality of accounting information mainly focuses on income statements (especially the information quality of earnings) and seldom deals with balance sheets. To reduce the risk of debt default and the forced liquidation of the pledged shares, the controlling shareholder, out of self-interest, may lead the company to cover up bad news using leverage manipulation after equity pledging. Leverage manipulation refers to reducing the leverage level presented on the balance sheet, via the use of financial activity arrangements (e.g., off-balance sheet liabilities) and other accounting methods (Xu and Lu, 2020). Leverage manipulation is an appropriate proxy for the quality of balance sheet information because the higher the leverage level is, the lower the balance sheet information quality is. Additionally, the delisting system plan announced by Shenzhen Stock Exchange and Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2012 added delisting conditions, such as a firm's net assets being negative (with a negative value at the end of one year, the end of two consecutive years, and the end of three consecutive years corresponding to a delisting risk warning, listing suspension, and termination of listing, respectively), making it difficult for listed companies to avoid delisting by merely manipulating profits. Therefore, controlling shareholders who have pledged equity in high-leverage firms often have strong incentives to drive firms to manipulate leverage to reduce the risk of control transfer due to the leverage indicator being suspended or terminated from listing. Based on the balance sheet information of A-share non-financial listed companies with high leverage in China from 1999 to 2019, this paper empirically tests the influence of controlling shareholders' share pledging on the possibility and extent of corporate leverage manipulation. We find that high-leverage companies with share pledging by controlling shareholders are more likely to engage in leverage manipulation, and the higher the pledge ratio, the greater the degree of leverage manipulation. Our conclusions remain unchanged after a series of robustness tests considering any potential endogeneity problems. We also find that these influences are more pronounced in high-leverage companies with lower growth, greater pressure on short-term debt servicing, more media attention, and higher stock price crash risk. The research contributions of this paper are as follows. First, it expands the literature on the influencing factors of leverage manipulation. The few studies on the influencing factors of leverage manipulation are mainly from the perspective of company characteristics (e.g., leverage ratio and financing restrictions); however, this paper focuses on the equity pledging of controlling shareholders. Second, it enriches the literature on the economic consequences of share pledging. Unlike previous studies, this paper focuses on balance sheet information and investigates the impact of equity pledging from the perspective of leverage manipulation. The results show that the manipulation of balance sheet information is an important economic consequence of leverage manipulation. Furthermore, the study provides empirical evidence that can serve as a reference for policymakers to prevent corporate leverage manipulation and standardize the share pledging of controlling shareholders. The findings also suggest the need to further regulate the equity pledging of controlling shareholders, especially in high-leverage companies with a high pledge ratio, and to guard against the adverse effects of leverage manipulation on systemic financial risks. The results indicate that to prevent limited credit funds from entering high-liability pledgers with leverage manipulation and improve the efficiency of credit resource allocation, it is necessary to strengthen the monitoring of the quality of balance sheet information.
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