Abstract: Taking the A-share companies listed for the first time in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Markets during 2006-2012 which involve private equity investments as the research samples, this paper systematically investigates the timing behavior of the private equity investments. The findings indicate that unlike reducing share-holdings by other insiders within the company, the private equity investment can only earn excess earnings by selling shares, it cannot avoid possible losses in a timely way, thus the private equity investment only has the passive power to select the trading opportunities. As for the characteristics of the private equity investments, the larger the investment scale, the longer the investment period, the stronger the passive power to select that is owned by the private equity investments which have resident directors and syndicated investments. From the perspective of investment background, compared to non-state-owned private equity investments, the state-owned private equity investments have stronger passive timing ability. Further analyses shows that during the period of reducing share-holding, the private equity investments would create more favorable trading conditions for their passive timing behavior by reducing the quality of information disclosure. The conclusions of this study can not only enrich the relevant literatures about reducing share-holdings by the insiders, but also provide some theoretical references for the government to formulate regulatory policies.

Key words: private equity investment; timing behavior; selective bias