Helper or Shelter: Why Do the Controlling Shareholders Provide Financial Support to Listed Companies?

Purpose/Significance The internal capital market tends to alleviate the local and global impact of financial crisis to a group through so-called “support behavior”. However, this paper finds that such “support behavior” could also bring negative effects. Design/Methodology Specifically, this paper focus on the influence of financial assistance to the stock price crash risk from the aspect of a company’s capability of storing negative information, based on analysis on a dataset with 18,303 company-year samples. Conclusions/Findings The financial assistance provided by the controlling shareholders essentially plays role of “shelter”, which may make listed companies face greater risks while helping them alleviate their difficulties temporarily. Furthermore, when listed companies are facing fiercer external competition and poorer internal governance, their financial assistance brings an even stronger positive impact on stock price crash risk. Finally, such financial assistance to a listed company with a higher stock price crash risk might also increase its delisting risk.