Abstract: Enterprises are one of the subjects of real economy and financial market, and the complex relationship between enterprises plays an important role in overall stable development of the economy. This paper constructs a multi-layer network of listed companies, including shareholder association and executive association, based on the complex network theory, and takes all A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2019 as samples to empirically study the structural evolution characteristics of listed companies under multiple association and their impacts on the risk-taking level. The results show that: 1) in terms of restraining risk contagion and improving the risk-taking level, the executive network of listed companies plays a great role through information transmission, while the shareholder network plays a small role through related transactions; 2) from the perspective of inter-layer, the structural stability of the executive network is relatively high, while the structural stability of the shareholder network is relatively low, the similarity between the two networks in the same year is low, and the structural difference of the networks effectively inhibits inter-layer spread and contagion of risks.

Key words: multi-layer network, listed companies, network structure, risk taking level