Ownership Structure for Sustainable Growth

The article refers to the problem of the association between ownership structure and firm performance. The literature overview allows us to state that there is a connection between ownership concentration and firm performance (positive association), however the cited research studies gave ambiguous findings. The subject of this article is important for the company’s owners, managers, investors, financial analysts and policy makers. The main hypothesis is that firms with higher ownership concentration achieved an increase in the level of profit. We conducted the analysis for all the listed companies present on the Polish stock market in the period 2005-2013. Our research findings are contradictory to the subject literature but consistent with some empirical findings described in research studies. The originality of this article lies in the applied method: we carried out our research taking into account pre, crisis and post crisis period; we distinguish two groups of companies: group A that improved the level of profit, and group B that has not improved the level of profit; and then we tested ownership concentration for these two groups. The article is organized as follows: we start with an overview of the literature on ownership structure and firm performance, then we present some empirical findings from different countries; we discuss also the measures of ownership concentration and firm performance; we conduct the analysis and present conclusions.