Abstract

The study examined the impact of ownership structure on the value of listed firms in Kuwait using endogeneity theory as an analytical framework. Ownership structure was measured in terms of ownership concentration (percentage of shares owned by all top shareholders), while measures of value were Tobin’s Q and Return on Assets. In the study, we used panel data for 121 firms listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) from 2010 to 2012, and we specified a model that used simultaneous equations with empirically-validated, strong, instrumental variables to control for endogeneity and causality issues. The results of the study indicated that ownership concentration had a negative, but insignificant, relationship with a firm’s value based on OLS regression. However, based on 2SLS regression, ownership concentration was found to have a significant negative relationship with a firm’s value However, the causality relationship between firm value and ownership concentration, if any, was from ownership concentration to firm value based on 2SLS regression. Therefore, there are two main contributions of this paper that make it a good addition to the extant literature, i.e., 1) it examined the relationship between firm value and ownership structure using the most recent data and 2) no work was done before the issues of endogeneity and causality for firms listed on the KSE were examined.

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