文档介绍：外文题目:Ownership Concentration and Corporate Performance in the Czech Republic
出处: The William Davidson Institute
作者: Stijn Claessens and Simeon Djankov
The association between ownership structure and corporate performance is a much studied topic in both transition and market economies. The research on this topic dates back more than sixty years to Berle and Means(1933),who contend that diffuse ownership yields significant power in the hands of managers whose interests do not coincide with the interest of shareholders. As a result,corporate resources are not used for the maximization of shareholders’ value. Several studies find a strong positive relation between ownership concentration and corporate performance in the United States and other market economies and attribute it to the impact of better monitoring. In transition economies,empirical studies find a positive relationship between concentrated ownership and both voucher prices and stock market prices in the Czech Republic and China. Other studies find a positive relation between actual firm performance and ownership concentration in Russia.
Much of the empirical work on the relation between ownership structure and corporate performance has had difficulty controlling for the possible feedback of firm characteristic to ownership, especially since it has focused mainly on market economies with low transactions costs in changing ownership. Using a data set that, by construction , alleviates the endogeneity problem can contribute to the dabate on the direction of causality. The design of the Czech privatization program precluded the adjustment of ownership to firm characteristics. In particular, the decision to change ownership was taken by the state, while the rules of the bidding process prevented participating agents from obtaining optimal ownership structure.
Thus, we can study the link between concentrated ownership and firm performance following voucher privatization. The Czech voucher scheme prevented