Implications Of Ownership Regulation And Market Structure For Performance

This thesis is an empirical investigation of the impact of ownership and regulation on the performance of privatised state-owned enterprises (SOEs) operating in non-competitive markets. This research was prompted by New Zealand's experience with privatisation of SOEs and their sale to foreign owners.

This timely book addresses the important issue of the negative effects of anticompetitive regulation on industry and the massive economic harm it causes. The distinguished contributors, including economic and legal scholars, advocate the need for a review of all anticompetitive laws and address several industry and country case studies with the ultimate aim of providing recommendations to eliminate the impact of anticompetitive regulation. The first part of the book considers regulations affecting private business and professions, part two covers public utility and public services regulation, whilst part three discusses the role of institutions and competition authorities in relation to anticompetitive practices. The authors draft guidelines, based on economic evidence and legal arguments, which they believe would provide a starting point for the European Union to address the problem. They go on to propose possible implementation strategies for these guidelines from both an institutional and legal perspective. The book also includes a historical perspective on the evolution of anticompetitive regulation complemented by an overview of the actions currently being implemented to address and reverse the problem in other jurisdictions.

Restrictions on the ownership structure of a public company may harm the company's performance by preventing owners from choosing the best structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure, before and after the expiration of anti-takeover regulations, of a sample of thrift institutions that converted from mutual to stock ownership. We find that after the anti-takeover provisions expire, firm performance improves significantly, and the portions of the firm owned by managers, noninstitutional outside block holders, and the firm's employee stock ownership plan increase. Changes in performance are positively associated with changes in ownership by managers and by noninstitutional outside block holders but negatively associated with changes in ownership by employee stock ownership plans.

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between stock market performance and ownership structure during plummeting and soaring financial markets in a Continental-European setting. Our results show the importance of ownership concentration, the presence of secondary blockholders and the type of the controlling owner to explain stock price performance. In addition, the analysis shows that the results for extreme down markets are fundamentally different from the results for the up market. While ownership concentration is valued positively during down market periods, it is valued negatively during up market periods. The results of the study also have implications for policy makers, by showing that firms with concentrated ownership are less subjective to extreme market periods. To the extent that ownership concentration might contribute to the financial and economic stability of listed firms, this study provides empirical insights against regulations that could hamper the persistence of large controlling shareholders.

The paper uses an original international database on regulation, market structure and performance in the telecommunications industry to investigate the effects of entry liberalisation and privatisation on productivity, prices and quality of service in long-distance (domestic and international) and mobile cellular telephony services in 23 OECD countries over the 1991-1997 period. The data on regulation and market structure is analysed by means of factor analysis techniques in order to group countries according to their policy and market environments. Controlling for technology developments and differences in economic structure, panel data estimates show that prospective competition (as proxied by the number of years remaining to liberalisation) and effective competition (as proxied by the share of new entrants or by the number of competitors) both bring about productivity and quality improvements and reduce the prices of all the telecommunications services considered in the analysis. No clear evidence could be found concerning the effects on performance of the ownership structure of the industry (as proxied by both the public share in the PTO and years remaining to privatisation).