Ownership structure and firm performance improvement: Does it matter in the Vietnamese Stock Market?

Abstract

This study examines the effects of ownership structure on firm performance of manufacturing companies listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange using the system-GMM estimator. The empirical results show a cubic relationship between managerial ownership and Tobin's Q, that is, positive, negative and positive, meanwhile block ownership has no impact on firm performance. This implies that internal managerial incentives play a more important role than shareholders' external monitoring in improving corporate governance quality. We also found an inverted U-shaped relationship between state ownership and Tobin's Q, indicating that partial privatisation possibly is an efficient way to improve firm performance.