Abstract: Corporate fraud is extremely damaging,which should be distinguished from financial fraud or corporate violations. Among the listed companies in China,most are state-owned and featured by higher concentration of ownership,which leads to the need of studying the relationship between ownership structure and corporate fraud. The research divided the process of corporate fraud into conducting fraud and being exposed,and adopted the Bivariate Probit estimation method of partial observability to analyze the data of the listed company in China from 2006 to 2016. The results firstly indicate that being stated-owned is a positive variable,in other words,state-owned companies have a lower probability of committing fraud,and fraudulent activities that may occur are more likely to be exposed. Secondly,investor types determine the relationship between equity concentration and corporate fraud. As typical long-term investors,controlling shareholders of state-owned companies reduce the propensity of fraud commitment significantly. Controlling shareholders of non-state-owned companies are both long-term investors and short-term ones,thus have no significant implications on fraud commitment,but reduce the probability of fraud exposure. As typical short-term investors,non-controlling shareholders increase the probability of fraud commitment significantly. In the end,the higher the concentration of equity represented by the shareholding ratio of the top ten shareholders,the less likely it is that fraudulent activities will be exposed,which will obviously cause problems for supervision. The conclusion displays the necessity and urgency of practicing the value investment in China's capital market,which needs the efforts of government to punish the corporate fraud more rigorously and carry on institutional reforms.

Key words: partial observability, corporate fraud, controlling shareholders, non-controlling shareholders