Choice Of Ownership Structure And Firm Performance

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.

Tiivistelmä.

Based on a survey of 29 public companies conducted in 1980-1988.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Performance and Behavior of Family Firms" that was published in IJFS

First Published in 2000. This book examines the shareholder activism of institutional investors and the effect of shareholder activism on portfolio performance. Institutional shareholder activism includes both traditional mechanisms of influence (e.g., filing shareholder proposals) and relationship investing (e.g., long-term interorganizational contacts between owners and a corporation’s top managers).

The study explores how power relationships between large-block shareholders and professional managers affect performance in public corporations. Certain types of shareholders with large ownership stakes are hypothesized to have formal authority, social influence and expertise that enables them to control public corporations, resulting in superior corporate performance. This idea is tested in a study of the U.S. textile industry from 1983-1992, an industry characterized by "transparent" economic conditions and strong social relationships between owners and managers, observed during a highly turbulent time period. Pooled, cross-sectional time series models indicate that controlling for ownership concentration, public corporations with outside-director owners, sustained owners and family owners each enjoy increased firm performance relative to industry competitors. These results suggest that large-block owners are not homogenous and that certain types of owners have a disproportionately large amount of influence in corporate governance.