Ownership Structure and the Operating Performance of Hungarian Firms
Abstract
This paper uses firm-level data on 162 large Hungarian enterprises to analyse the relationship between ownership structure and corporate performance in 1998 and 1999. Cross-sectional regressions are run for each of these years using the return on assets (ROA) as the measure of performance. Both after-tax profits and operating profits are used to produce the ROA variable. The signs of the regression coefficients and their significance levels are consistent across the different measures of profit, and also across the two years. The results of the regressions suggest that the presence of foreign ownership may positively affect performance while the existence of continuing State ownership has the opposite effect. Neither of these relationships, however, is statistically significant. Two variables have a significant impact on performance that is consistent across different constructions of the regression models: firm size and capital intensity. The smaller firms in the sample outperform the larger firms, which suggests that the greater monitoring and agency costs likely to be incurred by larger firms negatively impact their performance. The more capital intensive a firm (measured by the log of total assets to employees) the greater is its performance. This positive relationship suggests that high capital intensity may impose a barrier to entry and strengthen the competitive position of companies within their industries. The export intensity of a company (exports to sales revenue) is also positively and significantly related to performance, which suggests that the discipline of competing in foreign markets has a positive impact. However, the inclusion of an industry dummy variable to the regression equations results in the export intensity variable losing its significance.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EUROPE,School of Slavonic and East European Studies,University College London (SSEES,UCL) in its series Working Papers with number 9 Key Words: Corporate governance; Corporate performance JEL classification codes: G30; G32.Length: 24 pages
Date of creation: Feb 2002
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:see:wpaper:9
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
Phone: +44-20-7679 8519
Fax: +44-20-7679 8777
Email:
Web page: http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/csesce.htm
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords:References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:see:wpaper:9For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Gerry, Christopher J.) The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Gerry, Christopher J. to update the entry or send us the correct address.
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.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

