IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v30y2017i5p1583-1626..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Competition and Ownership Structure of Closely Held Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Jan Bena
  • Ting Xu

Abstract

We study how product market competition affects firms’ ownership structures using a large sample of closely held firms in eighteen European countries. We show that firms operating in more competitive environments have lower inside ownership and that the stakes of their outside shareholders are more dispersed. These results are explained by competition increasing the need to raise external equity and reducing private control benefits. Our findings suggest that, by changing corporate ownership structure, competition mitigates incentive misalignment among shareholders, leading to better firm performance and gains in economic efficiency.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan Bena & Ting Xu, 2017. "Competition and Ownership Structure of Closely Held Firms," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 30(5), pages 1583-1626.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:30:y:2017:i:5:p:1583-1626.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhx002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Clara Graziano & Laura Rondi, 2021. "Product Market Competition, Executive Compensation, and CEO Family Ties," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 58(3), pages 357-397, May.
    2. Sertsios, Giorgo, 2020. "Corporate finance, industrial organization, and organizational economics," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    3. Liu, Yu, 2020. "The comparative and interactive effects of political, academic and financial directors," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 546-565.
    4. André Casajus & Frank Huettner, 2019. "The Coleman–Shapley index: being decisive within the coalition of the interested," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 181(3), pages 275-289, December.
    5. Hu, Qing & Li, Wenjing & Lin, Chen & Wei, Lai, 2023. "Trade-induced competition and ownership dynamics," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    6. Liu, Yu & Xu, Jian, 2022. "Residual state ownership, foreign ownership and firms' financing patterns," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 51(PA).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:30:y:2017:i:5:p:1583-1626.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.