The Impact of Common Ownership on the Internal Pay Gap: Evidence from China

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-701-9_63How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Common Ownership; Internal Pay Gap; Corporate Governance

Abstract

Common ownership across firms has become an important external governance force. This paper studies the impact of common ownership on the internal pay gap between executives and ordinary employees using a sample of A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2012 to 2024. I find that a denser common ownership network significantly reduces the internal pay gap. Mechanism analyses reveal that common ownership narrows the pay gap by improving managerial efficiency, reducing tunneling behavior, and promoting human capital upgrading. The effect is stronger in firms with higher internal control quality, no analyst coverage, and stronger ownership checks and balances. These findings highlight the role of common ownership in corporate governance and income distribution.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xintong Cheng
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/30
TI  - The Impact of Common Ownership on the Internal Pay Gap: Evidence from China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 11th International Conference on Social Sciences and Economic Development (ICSSED 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 620
EP  - 636
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-701-9_63
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-701-9_63
ID  - Cheng2026
ER  -