Identify Chinese State-Owned Enterprise using CSMAR

Research Notes
Author
Affiliation

Mingze Gao, PhD

Macquarie University

Published

May 22, 2020

Many research papers on Chinese firms include a control variable that indicates if the firm is a state-owned enterprise (SOE). This is important as SOEs and non-SOEs differ in many aspects and may have structural differences. This post documents the way to construct this indicator variable from the CSMAR databases.

Specifically, we need the CSMAR China Listed Firms Shareholders - Controlling Shareholders dataset. On WRDS, this dataset is named hld_contrshr, located at /wrds/csmar/sasdata/hld.

Inside this dataset there’re a few variables identifying the ultimate controlling shareholder.

According to the CSMAR documentation, s0702b can be one of the following. Apparently, s0702b=1100 means the firm is a SOE.

Code Type
1000 Enterprise business unit
1100 State-owned Enterprise
1210 Collective-owned enterprises
1200 Private Enterprises
1220 Enterprises with funds from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan
1230 Foreign-funded enterprises
2000 Administrative departments or institutions
2100 Central institution
2120 Local institution
2500 Social Organization
3000 Natural Persons
3110 Domestic natural persons
3120 Natural person from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan
3200 Foreign natural person
9999 Other

Princeton University Library has another guide on other ways to identify Chinese SOE.

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