Ownership concentration, corporate risk-taking and performance: evidence from Vietnamese listed firms

Abstract

This study examines the associations of corporate governance with firm risk-taking and performance in a typical frontier equity market characterized by high ownership concentration and weak investor protection rights. Using an extensive dataset of 504 Vietnamese publicly listed firms over the period 2008-2015, we find a positively, albeit weakly, linear relationship between ownership concentration and accounting-based measure of performance, and a (seemingly ushaped) non-linear relationship between ownership concentration and market-based measure of performance. However, there is no evidence of the linkage between ownership distribution and the riskiness of performance, implying that the ownership concentration-performance relation may not be shaped by risk-taking behavior.