Economic policy uncertainty, marketization level and firm-level inefficient investment: Evidence from Chinese listed firms in energy and power industries

Fei Hou, Wenjie Tang, Huabing Wang and Hao Xiong

Energy Economics, 2021, vol. 100, issue C

Abstract: This study examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on inefficient investment of energy and power firms. Analyzing a sample of publicly listed energy and power firms in China, we show that uncertainty concerning economic policy negatively affects firms' inefficient investment. This influence is more prominent for firms headquartered in the regions with a low level of marketization. These findings are robust to use alternative measures of corporate inefficient investment and economic policy uncertainty, two-way clustering method, and two-stage least squares approach. In addition, our results indicate that the strength of the relationship between economic policy uncertainty and inefficient investment is reinforced for firms with high government subsidies, less managerial ownership, and weak external auditors.

Keywords: Economic policy uncertainty; Marketization level; Inefficient investment; Government subsidies; Managerial ownership; External auditors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988321002590
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:100:y:2021:i:c:s0140988321002590

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2021.105353

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().