Does Antitakeover Provision Harm Shareholders? Indexing for Antitakeover Provisions in China

Abstract Does antitakeover harm shareholders? Encumbered by a multitude of theoretical perspectives, the legality of antitakeover remains a shared intellectual inquiry that the A-share market has yet to fully address. This paper constructs a governance index for the A-share market based on a manually collected and hand-coded research dataset (C-index). This dataset, comprising 4251 historical firm-level profiles of Antitakeover Provisions (ATPs), is meticulously sampled from companies listed in China from 2001 to 2017. The study investigates the logical correlation between antitakeover strength, financial performance, and the governance attributes of the company by leveraging the index’s economic utility. Additionally, this paper explores the firm-level factors that prompt corporate directors to integrate ATPs. From an empirical standpoint, it provides evidence that the governance index of firm-level strength of ATPs is positively correlated with share liquidity, institutional shareholding, private ownership, and the company’s commitment to achieving specific financial performance.