Corporate Governance Practices, Ownership Structure and Firm Performance: A Study of Indian Listed-Firms

Abstract

Corporate governance (CG) has gained substantial ground in developed economies; it has begun to make an impact in emerging markets like India only recently. Several studies, the majority from the developed economies, have examined the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms, ownership structure and firm performance. Those studies yielded different results, affected by the nature of the prevailing economies. Investigating India's listed firms could enhance the diversity of the growing body of work that examines this relationship. Using listed Indian firms (BSE SENSEX and CNX NIFTY) we study the relationship between ownership structure, corporate governance practices and firm value. In particular we have looked into the nature of relationship between family run companies and firm value. Family based governance system is widely prevalent in the India. While the monitoring hypothesis predicts a positive relation, the entrenchment hypothesis predicts a negative one between insider shareholding and firm value. We study the details of top Indian companies in terms of market confidence and use Return on Asset (ROTA) and Market Capitalisation to Enterprise Value as proxies for Firm Value. We use regression analysis to study the impact of ownership structure and corporate governance practises on firm value. We try to explain the impact of these variables on the valuation of family run companies and analyse how different they are from the non-family run companies.