Abstract: Divestiture has become an increasingly common phenomenon in China's listed companies in recent years. From the perspective of regional peer effect, this paper makes use of the data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2004 to 2018 to conduct an empirical test of the existence and occurrence mechanism of the contagion effect of Chinese listed companies' divestiture. The findings show that the divestiture decision making of the enterprises has significant regional peer effects, and the divestiture decisions made by focus enterprises are significantly and positively correlated with the divestiture probability of other enterprises in the same province. These results are still robust after controlling the endogenous problems. The results of further study indicate that such issues as the imitation of information acquisition, the imitation of competition and the agency costs are the important action mechanism that promotes the formation of the peer effect of corporate divestiture. To be specific, the enterprises without divestiture experience have significant regional peer effects when they conduct divestiture, the divestiture decision made by the non-leading enterprises are significantly influenced by the divestiture decisions of the regional peer enterprises, the enterprises under great competitive pressure will be significantly affected by the peer enterprises when conducting divestiture, and the enterprises with poor corporate governance quality will have significant regional peer effect when conducting divestiture. This paper provides a new perspective for the comprehensive understanding of China's corporate divestiture transactions.

Key words: divestiture, peer effects, imitation of information acquisition, imitation of competition, agency costs