Abstract: Under the dual drive of policy encouragement and supplementary capital demand, the introduction of private capital has become the main way for China’s urban commercial banks to reform their equity and increase capital and shares. Based on the data of city commercial banks from 2007 to 2016, this paper analyzes the impact of private capital investment on the operational performance of city commercial banks. The findings show that when the final controller of the city commercial bank is the government, the private capital investment (increasing the private shareholding ratio or the number of major private shareholders) can improve its operative performance. While the heterogeneity study of private shareholders shows that large private shareholders can play an important role in improving the performance of city commercial banks, the introduction of“sand-like”private minority shareholders cannot help the improvement of the performance of city commercial banks; compared with private shareholders from other places, the local private shareholders have a more positive effect on the operational performance of the city commercial banks; compared to the private shareholders with short-term holdings, the private shareholders with long-term shareholdings have a greater positive impact on the operative performance of the city commercial banks. Therefore, the bank equity reform should not just introduce private capitals, more importantly, it should introduce high-quality private capitals, so as to give a full play to the private capitals in the supervision and governance.

Key words: city commercial bank; introduction of private capital; private shareholders; operative performance