85. Andrew Weiss and Georgiy Nikitin

Performance of Czech Companies by Ownership Structure
May 1998

Abstract

Our main finding is that ownership concentration in the Czech Republic is associated with improvements in the performance of operating companies, but only if ownership is concentrated in hands other than investment funds. We assessed the effects of ownership structure on economic performance by measuring the relationship between changes in performance and the composition of ownership shares at the beginning of the period. Other studies measured the association between levels of performance and the composition of ownership. We used robust estimation techniques, in addition to OLS estimation, since we were able to strongly reject normality. Since the data comes from surveys and since accounting standards during this period were far from uniform, it is not surprising that the data would be subject to large measurement errors. These measurement errors may have generated the results observed in other studies.

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