Ownership concentration and corporate performance in the Czech Republic

The relationship between ownership structure and corporate performance has been the subject of intense research in both transition and market economie s. The Czech Republic's mass-privatization program provides an unique oppor tunity to investigate this relationship. It changed the ownership of firms in a short period of time, and firm characteristics had only a limited infl uence on the resulting ownership structure. For a cross section of 706 Czec h firms over the period 1992 through 1997, we find that the mon concentrate d the ownership, the higher the firm profitability and labor productivity. These findings are weakly robust to the inclusion of control variables for the type of ownership, or to a correction for the endogeneity of ownership concentration. (C) 1999 Academic Press.