- Original authors / creators
- Kanghong Li; Xiuying Wang; Yongqi Luo; Zixiao Li
- Original publication
- PLOS One · Public Library of Science · 2026-02-02
- License & retained notices
- CC BY 4.0
© 2026 Li et al
Article-specific license evidence ↗Exact license notice
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
- Attributed narrative text edition with normalized whitespace. Original full XML retained. Figures, table layouts, display equations and supplements are available through the linked original full text; no new primary findings or source-author endorsement are claimed.
- Evidence limits
- Adjacent research, not a directly sampled family-office study. Applicability to a family office requires separate assessment. Research on non-state-owned shareholders’ participation in corporate governance provides a foundation for examining their power on the board, given the principle of aligning control rights with equity. In the early stage of SOE mixed-ownership reform, scholarly attention centered primarily on the equity structure and its collaborative governance effects. According to Xia [36], to SOEs under the mixed ownership reform with diversified equity, the differences in mixed scale and degree lead to varied impacts upon corporate capital costs. Yu et al. [37] studied the impacts of non-state-owned shareholders on corporate social responsibility and economic performance in terms of shareholder diversity, shareholders’ penetration degree and degree of mixed equity (DME). However, as the SOE mixed ownership reform deepens, practical experience shows that focusing solely on equity structure may have limitations. Mere “mixing of equity” does not necessarily translate into “mechanism reform.” Zeng et al. [38] found that non-state-owned shareholders’ merely holding shares does not produce the expected positive effect on accounting information quality while appointing senior executives can significantly improve the accounting information quality of SOEs. Hence, many studies began to discuss the impacts of non-state-owned shareholders’ participation in governance from the perspectives of equity structure and senior executive governance [21,22]. Senior executive governance refers to the power in the board obtained by non-state-owned shareholders, given the equal allocation between equity and control rights. In terms of the effect of SOE governance, that non-state-owned shareholders appoint directors can produce the desired effects in management and decision-making such as removing overcapacity, improving asset allocation efficiency [39], addressing the de-zombification problem [40], ensuring state-owned asset preservation and appreciation [41] in addition to moderating the principal-agent issue and improving accounting information governance [38,42]. The number of seats of directors in the board is a straightforward index showing that non-state-owned shareholders obtain a say in the board. According to the extant research, the director who assumes the post of director in a SOE and simultaneously takes a post in a non-SOE and receives a salary from the non-SOE instead of the SOE is regarded as a director appointed by the non-SOE. However, such a measuring method has its own limitations. For one thing, the annual report of a listed SOE may offer incomplete disclosure of whether its directors assume a post in a non-SOE and whether the relevant directors receive salaries from the non-SOE. For another thing, under the influence of distinct governance culture in SOEs, such as the strict observance of status and order, the clear line between the insider and the outsider [57], it remains a question whether the size of the power of non-state-owned shareholders in the board can be directly measured by the ratio of the seats of non-state-owned shareholders in the board. In addition, for the lack of data, this study has not yet been able to further explore the impacts of the commissions of audit, strategy, nomination, remuneration, and other commissions under the board of directors on the substantial power of non-state-owned shareholders in the board. This is also one of the directions worth studying in the future. Forth, although this paper employs lagged models and PSM to mitigate endogeneity concerns, it cannot fully rule out biases arising from unobservable factors or omitted variables. Future research could focus on identifying more effective instrumental variables or leveraging exogenous policy shocks to construct quasi-natural experiments, such as pilot policies for mixed-ownership reform, thereby further verifying the causality of the findings presented here.
- Retraction / correction check
- No notice found in retrieved article XML, publisher HTML or Crossref relation/update-to/updated-by. Bounded check; unlinked or unregistered notices and independent retraction databases are outside coverage. Verified 2026-11-05. Automated/source checks are not human peer review.
- Preserved record
- Rights and full text checked 2026-11-05. Included in this volume on 2026-11-05. Original source dates remain unchanged.
Download the preserved source
SHA-256 (retrieved artifact): 934035e8d6ba7682fcfc167c4f2a2602fac7229bd9788452711a68c72b63cc0f
SHA-256 (preserved text edition): ef21448e3812a048698f4b11cbfe73b6433e539e3e52d37dfdeb09ea5ab50242