INFLUENCE OF OWNERSHIP FACTOR ON COMPANIES' PERFORMANCE.

摘要

The aim of this research is to test the hypothesis that is provided by the property rights theory, suggesting that state-owned enterprises are inherently less efficient than their counterparts in the private sector. This argument is based on the fact that different property rights lead to different penalty/reward systems, and ultimately, to different economic behaviors. Property rights theory argues that non-transferability of rights to future benefits and the absence of an exclusive residual claim to the firm's income weaken the link between individuals' efforts and rewards in the state-owned enterprise setting. This presumably reduces public agents' motivation to take more care in making decisions that ultimately affect the state-owned enterprises' performance. In contrast, it is argued that owners of private firms have great economic incentive to monitor the performance of their firms and will utilize market information to scrutinize firms' managers to ensure high efficiency. The study builds upon existing research by (1) providing an empirical test on the petroleum industry (most of the previous research was conducted in the service industries); (2) providing across-country tests to the property rights theory claims; and (3) utilizing the most recent advancement in statistical and econometric models to measure the economic efficiency of the firms in the sample.