- Original authors / creators
- Niannian Wu; Furong Guo; Bingxia Wang
- Original publication
- PLOS One · Public Library of Science · 2025-05-28
- License & retained notices
- CC BY 4.0
© 2025 Wu et al
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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Article-specific license URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Edition changes
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- Evidence limits
- Adjacent research, not a directly sampled family-office study. Applicability to a family office requires separate assessment. While these empirical results provide support for our baseline findings, we remain mindful of potential limitations in fully capturing all relevant factors in our analysis. However, our study has several methodological limitations. First is the endogeneity issue: SOEs may strategically select private firms with high innovation potential as acquisition targets; firms’ existing innovation capabilities might influence their propensity to engage in mixed-ownership M&As; and time-varying unobservable factors could simultaneously affect both acquisition decisions and innovation outputs. While we attempt to address these issues through PSM-DID methodology and careful sample construction, certain challenges remain. Second, despite our comprehensive analytical approach, several unobservable factors could affect our results, including management capabilities, organizational culture, and dynamic local political environments. Additionally, the complex nature of China’s regional institutional environment poses challenges for controlling relevant factors. Building on this, we suggest three directions for future research: methodologically, qualitative case studies could explore specific mechanisms through which mixed-ownership enhances innovation capabilities (Wang et al., 2021); theoretically, research could examine how institutional theory and resource dependence theory jointly explain mixed-ownership reform effects; contextually, studies could investigate how regional market development and industry characteristics influence the innovation outcomes of mixed-ownership M&As.
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