Ownership Structure, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance

Do corporate governance practices affect firm performance? Are shareholders willing to pay a premium for higher governance standards? How does the ownership structure of a firm affect its corporate governance practices and firm performance? This book investigates whether differences in the quality of firm-level corporate governance affects firm performance. Constructing a broad corporate governance index for listed Turkish companies, it is documented that there is a positive relationship between governance scores and Tobin’s Q as a measure for firm performance. Firms with better corporate governance scores in the model used in this book have higher firm values, which implies that firms can increase shareholder value by restructuring their corporate governance standards. The analysis also sheds light on the impact of ownership structure on stock performance. Listed companies withhigher corporate governance scores and higher foreign ownership ratios experienced a smaller reduction in their share prices during the equity market crash in Turkey parallel to the global equity markets between 2008 and 2009.