This paper aims to perform a meta-analysis of the relationship between post-privatization ownership and firm performance using a large database of the transition literature. Baseline estimation of a meta-regression model that employs a total of 2894 estimates drawn from 121 previous studies indicated the superior impact of foreign ownership on firm performance in comparison with state and domestic private entities. However, it did not go as far as to comprehensively verify the series of hypotheses concerning the interrelationship between different ownership types. The estimation of an extended meta-regression model that explicitly controls for the idiosyncrasies of transition economies and privatization policies strongly suggested that differences between countries in terms of location, privatization method, and policy implementation speed are the cause of the opaqueness seen in the empirical results of the previous literature. The definite evidence of the harmfulness of the voucher privatization for ex-post firm performance is one of the most noteworthy empirical findings obtained from the meta-analysis in this paper. JEL classification numbers: D22, G32, G34, L25, P21, P31
This paper aims to perform a large-scale meta-analysis to examine the relationship between ownership concentration and firm performance in emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. A meta-synthesis of 1517 estimates collected from 69 previous studies indicated the presence of a statistically significant and positive effect of ownership concentration on firm performance. The synthesized effect size, however, is only modest at best. A meta-regression analysis conducted to identify the factors underlying the small effect size revealed that differences in target industries, estimation periods, design of ownership variables, data sources, estimators, and choices of control variables could have had systematic and profound effects on the empirical results presented in previous studies. We have also noted that publication selection bias is strongly suspected in this research field, and that, due to the magnitude of this bias, existing studies cannot be expected to provide genuine evidence regarding the effect of ownership concentration on firm performance in European emerging economies. Further empirical studies are required to identify the true effect in this region.
This paper provides a meta-analysis of studies on the effect of ownership on the performance of Russian firms over 20 years of rapid institutional and economic changes. We review 29 studies extracted from the EconLit and Web of Science databases with a total of 877 relevant estimates. We find that the government negatively affects company management regardless of its administrative level. In contrast, private ownership is positively associated with firm performance. The effect size and statistical significance are notably varied among different types of private ownership. While the effect of insider (employee and management) ownership is comparable to that of foreign investors, the effect of domestic outsider investors is considerably smaller. Our assessment of publication selection bias reveals that the existing literature does not contain genuine evidence for a series of ownership types and, therefore, some of the findings have certain limitations.
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