Local official turnover, ownership, and firm cash holdings: Insights from an emerging market

Using a hand‐collected dataset of city‐level local official turnover in China, I find that average cash holdings of listed firms decrease significantly upon turnover of city heads, and this effect concentrates in privately owned enterprises. Such effects are more pronounced in firms located in cities with lower government quality. I also find that local official turnover leads to decreases in equity issuance for privately owned enterprises but not for state‐owned enterprises, which largely explains our primary findings. Overall, this paper reveals that the cash policy of privately owned enterprises is sensitive to local official turnover in an emerging market.