The Impact of Foreign Shareholdings on Corporate Strategic Choice: A Quasi-natural Experiment from “Shanghai-Hong Kong” and “Shenzhen-Hong Kong” Stock Connect

Strategic choice is an important corporate governance decision. What strategy the company needs to choose and what impact the strategy will bring to the company are the two most basic questions that need to be answered in the field of strategic management. Existing research mainly discusses the latter issue, but seldom involves the influencing factors of corporate strategic choice. Therefore, this paper is based on the important internal governance feature of equity structure, and selects the unique perspective of foreign shareholdings to investigate its impact on corporate strategic choice and its internal mechanism systematically. Considering that the capital market opening policy represented mainly by “Shanghai-Hong Kong” and “Shenzhen-Hong Kong” Stock Connect has a certain exogenous nature and can effectively alleviate the endogenous problems faced in the study of the economic consequences of foreign shareholdings, this paper further selects “Shanghai-Hong Kong” and “Shenzhen-Hong Kong” Stock Connect as a substitute variable for foreign shareholdings, and constructs a multi-time DID model to study the strategic choice tendency of the target company under the background of capital market opening. We find that foreign shareholders caused by “Shanghai-Hong Kong” and “Shenzhen-Hong Kong” Stock Connect play an active external governance role in the strategic decision-making of the target company, which is manifested in effectively reducing the overall strategic progress of the target company. The above results are still valid after a series of robustness tests including substitution of key variables. The mechanism test shows that foreign shareholders mainly play the role of external governance by enhancing shareholder supervision, improving the information environment, and strengthening internal control, thereby restraining the target company’s strategic progress. Further research finds that foreign shareholders’ restraint on the target company’s strategic progress caused by the opening of the capital market has a more obvious time effect. That is, its governance effect gradually increases over time. This paper examines the specific motivations of strategic choice from the perspective of the company’s internal governance characteristics for the first time, enriches the relevant literature and research perspectives in the field of strategic management, and helps to analyze the ins and outs of corporate strategic choice from a more basic level. At the same time, this paper also expands the relevant research on the economic consequences of foreign shareholdings through the perspective of strategic choice, and provides incremental theoretical and empirical evidence for the comprehensive, objective and accurate evaluation of the economic consequences of capital market opening at the micro-level corporate governance under the background of the new era. It also provides a useful reference for the continuous improvement and optimization of the capital market opening system in the new stage of economic development. Finally, this paper not only provides a vivid case for the overall operation thinking of “opening to promote reform and reform to promote development” of China’s capital market during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, but also brings profound thinking for effectively promoting the modernization of listed companies’ governance capabilities and governance systems.