Large shareholders' shareholding and earnings' longitudinal persistence

This paper is the first to adopt longitudinal data analysis methods, such as the Kaplan-Meier survival analysis model, hierarchical linear model and Cox proportional hazards regression model, to investigate the relationship between large shareholders' shareholding and earnings persistence. We find that large shareholders' shareholding has a negative effect on corporate longitudinal persistence. The large shareholders' shareholding will increase the risk of earnings decline and strengthen the declining trend of earnings. The effects of large shareholders' shareholding on earnings' longitudinal persistence for SOEs are different from those for non-SOEs, the effects in the pre-crisis period are also different from those in the post-crisis period. These findings contribute to the literature by adopting longitudinal data analysis methods and present new empirical evidence on the economic consequences of large shareholders' shareholding.