Ownership Structure And Corporate Performance

After the global financial crisis, the topic of corporate governance has been gaining momentum in accounting and finance literature since it may influence firm and bank management in many countries. Corporate Governance and Its Implications on Accounting and Finance provides emerging research exploring the implications of a good corporate governance system after global financial crises. Corporate governance mechanisms may include board and audit committee characteristics, ownership structure, and internal and external auditing. This book is devoted to all topics dealing with corporate governance including corporate governance characteristics, board diversity, CSR, big data governance, bitcoin governance, IT governance, and governance disclosure, and is ideally designed for executives, BODs, financial analysts, government officials, researchers, policymakers, academicians, and students.

The relationship between ownership structure and firm performance has been studied extensively in corporate finance and corporate governance literature. Nevertheless, the mediation (path) analysis to examine the issue can be adopted as a new approach to explain why and how ownership structure is related to firm performance and vice versa. This approach calls for full recognition of the roles of agency costs and corporate risk-taking as essential mediating variables in the bi-directional and mediated relationship between ownership structure and firm performance. Based on the agency theory, corporate risk management theory and accounting for the dynamic endogeneity in the ownership–performance relationship, this book develops two-mediator mediation models, including recursive and non-recursive mediation models, to investigate the ownership structure–firm performance relationship. It is demonstrated that agency costs and corporate risk-taking are the ‘missing links’ in the ownership structure–firm performance relationship. Hence, this book brings into attention the mediation and dynamic approach to this issue and enhances the knowledge of the mechanisms for improving firm’s financial performance. This book will be of interest to corporate finance, management and economics researchers and policy makers. Post-graduate research students in corporate governance and corporate finance will also find this book beneficial to the application of econometrics into multi-dimensional and complex issues of the firm, including ownership structure, agency problems, corporate risk management and financial performance.

The book illustrates that the impact of ownership on firm value depends not only on the concentration of ownership but also on the identity of blockholders. Large shareholders can use their power to influence corporate performance. However, owners are no homogenous group and have different motivations and abilities.

This book fills the gap between theories and practices of corporate governance in emerging markets by providing the reader with an in-depth understanding of governance mechanisms, practices and cases in these markets. It is an invaluable resource not only for academic researchers and graduate students in law, economics, management and finance but also for people practicing governance such as lawmakers, policymakers and international organizations promoting best governance practices in emerging countries. Investors can benefit from this book to better understand of these markets and to make judicious investment decisions.

This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-96. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to create agency problems gain more from group affiliation, while young and high-growth firms more likely lose. Agency problems are important explanatory factors of firm value in economies outside Japan, but less so in Japan. Consistent with the literature, financially-constrained firms benefit from group affiliation. Our results are robust to different time periods and estimation techniques.

This report reflects long-term, in-depth discussion and debate by participants in the Latin American Roundtable on Corporate Governance.

This study investigates whether ownership structure has significant effects on the performance of publicly-listed companies in China, and in what way if it does. Publicly- listed stock companies allow us to quantify the ownership mix and concentration and thus provide a unique opportunity for studying the above issue. The recent literature on the role of large institutional shareholders in corporate governance provides the theoretical foundation of this study. A typical listed stock company in China has a mixed ownership structure with the state, legal persons (institutions), and domestic individuals as the three predominant groups of shareholders. Each holds about 30 percent of total outstanding shares. Employees and foreign investors together hold less than 10 percent. The ownership concentration is high with the five largest shareholders accounting for 58 percent of the outstanding shares in 1995, compared to 57.8 percent in Czech Republic, 42 percent in Germany and 33 percent in Japan. Results from our empirical analysis show that ownership structure (both the mix and concentration)indeed has significant effects on the performance of stock companies. First, there is a positive and significant correlation between ownership concentration and profitability. Second, the effect of ownership concentration is stronger for companies dominated by legal person shareholders than for those dominated by the state. Third, firms? profitability is positively correlated with the fraction of legal person shares, but it is either negatively correlated or uncorrelated with the fraction of state shares and tradable A-shares held mostly by individuals. Last, labor productivity tends to decline as the proportion of state shares increases. These results suggest the importance of large institutional shareholders in corporate governance and performance, the inefficiency of state ownership, and potential problems in an overly dispersed ownership structure.