Abstract: The report of the 20th Party Congress proposes to continue to deepen the reform of state-owned capital and enterprises. At present, the reform of state-owned capital and enterprises has entered a new stage of taking“capital management”as the principal thing, and it is of great importance to study the effectiveness, mechanism and economic consequences of the reform of state-owned capital investment and operation companies (SOCIOCs). Based on the data of the reform samples of state-owned listed companies from 2008 to 2020, this paper conducts an empirical study. The findings show that the reform of SOCIOCs can significantly improve the investment efficiency of SOEs, which is mainly achieved by inhibiting over-investment. The result of the mechanism analysis shows that the reform of SOCIOCs has improved the investment efficiency of SOEs through the two intrinsic mechanisms of curbing the opportunistic behaviors of the management and reducing the policy burdens. Further analysis reveals that the stronger the reform efforts, the stronger the effect of SOEs investment efficiency improvement will be. The effect of SOCIOCs reform on the improvement of the investment efficiency of SOEs is more significant in the group of enterprises with lower levels of corporate governance. The result of the economic consequence test reveals that the financial value of SOEs can be significantly improved when the investment efficiency of SOEs is improved by the SOCIOCs reform. Therefore, we should actively promote the reform of SOCIOCs, promote the reform of government decentralization, give full play to the corporate supervision mechanism, and improve the level of corporate governance.

Key words: state-owned capital investment and operation company, investment efficiency, reform of state-owned enterprises, policy burden, management opportunism