Abstract:
Demsetz and Lehn (1985), Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny (1988), and McConnell and Servaes (1990) report different empirical findings regarding ownership structure and corporate profitability. In this paper, we re-estimate the relation between management ownership and firm's value after controlling for the history of management ownership as well as inter-firm differences using panel data. Further, we consider the possibility that the current ownership structure is jointly determined with the firm value, an endogeneity argument a la Demsetz (1983). We find that history of the management ownership, not its current level, matters in determining the firm value, which is consistent with information asymmetry arguments.