关键词: 上市公司, 股东关系, 复杂网络, 财务风险

Abstract: China’s economic development has been significantly regionalized, with the formation of regional economic characteristics of eastern development, western expansion, mid-China rise, and northeast revitalization. The regionalization of economic development has also expedited the regional integration process of financial development. As the outstanding representatives of regional economy, listed companies play an important role in regional economic development on the one hand, and are deeply affected by the factors such as regional economic environment, capital, administration and culture on the other hand. More generally, with the increasingly extensive cooperation and exchanges of listed companies in the region, a complex network has been formed, accelerating the coordinated development of regional economy. However, when listed companies in the complex network are hit by risks, it is likely that these risks will spread through the path of the complex network, resulting in greater regional risks.
Listed companies in a region form a complex network due to the common major shareholder relationships. There are two possible effects of the shareholder network on the financial risk of listed companies. On the one hand, financial assistance will work through the shareholders’ linkage. On the other hand, it may lead to financial tunneling via the shareholders’ linkage. Both of the two ways are closely related to the economic and political environment in a region. Therefore, it is of great significance to analyze the listed companies’ shareholder network in a specific region to explore their financial risks. Based on the information of major shareholders of listed companies from 2010 to 2019, this paper constructs A-share listed companies’ shareholder networks in the whole country and in the four regions, namely, the east, the middle, the west and the northeast respectively.We calculate the network characteristics, and deeply analyze the risk transmission and characteristics among listed companies.
In the first part, this paper clarifies the impact of the network between enterprises on their financial risk based on previous researches on complex financial network. Enterprises seek to conduct related party transactions in order to accelerate capital accumulation and capital flow. If two listed companies have common shareholders, they will have the incentive to participate in related party transactions, which will generate a huge effect on the financial risk of listed companies through assistance or tunneling. This paper aims to conduct a theoretical and empirical research on complex network from the perspective of enterprise risk, analyze the phenomenon of related party transactions between enterprises from a new perspective, and interpret the mechanism of large-scale risk contagion, thus providing intellectual support for local economic governance.
In the second part, this paper establishes the listed companies’ shareholder network by the connection of common major shareholders, calculates the degree centrality, in-between centrality, proximity centrality and eigenvector centrality of the network nodes, and discusses the correlation coefficient among these centralities, so as to identify the important nodes of the listed companies’ shareholder network. Then, the statistical variables such as the average shortest distance and clustering coefficient of the network are analyzed to find the possible contagion path of financial risk of listed companies. Finally, the topological structure and robustness of the network are investigated with the result that the network is stable.
In the third part, the paper empirically analyzes the impact of the degrees of listed companies’ shareholder network nodes on their financial risks. The results show that the degrees of listed companies’ shareholder network nodes in the eastern and central developed regions have a significant positive effect on the Z value, indicating that the more common major shareholders a listed company shares with other listed companies, the smaller its financial risk is. If a financial crisis occurs in a company, other companies which connect the company by common major shareholders have the intention to rescue it, which can inhibit the occurrence of regional systemic financial risk. However, the degrees of listed companies’ shareholder network nodes have an opposite effect on the Z value in less developed regions.

Key words: listed companies; shareholder relationship; complex network; financial risk