Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) is a fairly mature system in developed countries such as the USA and Japan, which plays an important role in attracting talented people and upgrading operating efficiency. With the development of China Market Economy, enterprises are committed to achieve a long-term sustainable development by improving the corporate system arrangement. Thus, ESOP rises in China. Since June 2014, with the implementations of several regulation policies such as <The Guidance On The Implementation of Employee Stock Ownership Plans by Listed Companies> issued by the CRSC, ESOP has entered into a standard and rapid developing period.

There are controversies regarding the effectiveness of ESOP’s impact on enterprise performance. This paper uses samples of Chinese listed companies which have implemented ESOP between 2014-2018, and applies empirical analysis methods such as descriptive statistics, correlation analyses and regression analyses, to investigate ESOP’s impact on enterprise financial and market performance. Then this paper further explores which factors may influence the implementation effect of the plan, for example, the enterprise attributes such as its property rights and the industry it belongs to, as well as the scheme design characteristics such as employee subscription ratio and duration period.

The results show that the implementation of ESOP can significantly improve the financial performance of enterprises. but there is no significant impact on the market performance. In terms of enterprise characteristics, after the implementation of ESOP in high-tech enterprises, the improvement effect of market performance is more significant than that of traditional enterprises. However, there is no significant difference between state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises. In the aspect of scheme design, the higher the proportion of ordinary employees subscribe , the greater the ESOP’s promotion effect on the market performance will be. But the duration period of ESOP has no significant impact on the improvement effect. This paper explores the implementation effect and influencing factors of ESOP from multiple perspectives, broadens the research scope of samples, enriches the research results in the field of ESOP in China, and provides certain practical reference value for the scheme design of ESOP.