Institutional-Grade Properties: Performance and Ownership

Quality commercial properties differ in operating performance not only on physical characteristics but in type of ownership, management, and control. For 1996?001 data on Atlanta apartments, a primary market for multiple types of investors, there is varying operating performance by ownership. Larger-scale owners and local property managers earn higher effective rents.

Institutional Ownership and the Returns on Investment

By examining a large number of Swedish listed firms, we analyse how institutional and foreign owners affect investment performance. To measure investment performance Mueller and Reardon’s (1993) marginal q is used, although derived directly from Tobin’s average q. Marginal q measures the ratio of the return on investment to the cost of capital. Our findings show that both domestic and foreign institutional owners positively influence firm performance. Furthermore a non-linear relation between institutional ownership concentration and performance is found. This is consistent with positive incentive effects and negative entrenchment effects. During the last decades the ownership structure of Swedish firms has undergone dramatic changes: institutional and foreign investors have been increasing their stakes, whereas Swedish households have decreased in importance. Controlling owners, often founding families, remain in control by resorting to an extensive use of dual-class shares. The practice of dual-class shares which separates cash-flow rights and control rights is also found to be an important determinant of firm performance that eradicates the positive influence of institutional ownership.Corporate governance; institutions; ownership; performance; Tobin’s q; marginal q;

How transition paths differ: enterprise performance in Russia and China

We use enterprise data to analyse and contrast the determinants of enterprise performance in China and Russia. We find that in China, enterprise growth and efficiency is associated with rapid increases in factor inputs, but not correlated with ownership or institutional factors. However, in Russia, enterprise growth is not associated with increases in factor quantity (except for labor) or quality. The main determinants of company performance are instead demand and institutional factors at a regional level. We explore possible interpretations of these results, including the impact of institutional and managerial quality

Central bank institutional structure and effective central banking: cross-country empirical evidence

Over the last decade, the legal and institutional frameworks governing central banks and financial market regulatory authorities throughout the world have undergone significant changes. This has created new interest in better understanding the roles played by organizational structures, accountability and transparency in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of central banks in achieving their objectives and ultimately yielding better economic outcomes. Although much has been written pointing out the potential role institutional form can play in central bank performance, little empirical work has been done to investigate the hypothesis that institutional form is related to performance. This paper attempts to help fill this void.central banking; institutional structure; accountability; transparency; performance

How Transition Paths Differ: Enterprise Performance in Russia and China

We use enterprise data to analyse and contrast the determinants of enterprise performance in China and Russia. We find that in China, enterprise growth and efficiency is associated with rapid increases in factor inputs, but not correlated with ownership or institutional factors. However, in Russia, enterprise growth is not associated with increases in factor quantity (except for labor) or quality. The main determinants of company performance are instead demand and institutional factors at a regional level. We explore possible interpretations of these results, including the impact of institutional and managerial quality.enterprise performance; privatization in Russia and China.

Characteristics of teaching institutions and students’ performance : new empirical evidence from OECD data

A whole branch of the economic literature suggests that institutional differences between and inside educational systems may have a larger influence on students performance than the amount of resources devoted to schooling. In this paper, we use the PISA 2000 international OECD data to evaluate the impacts of organizational and institutional factors on students performance. We estimate an education production function with country fixed-effect and school random-effect. We find that, alongside individual characteristics, school autonomy in decisions regarding the recruitment of new personnel as well as pedagogical training strongly affect students performance. On the contrary, measures of school resources and standardised evaluation of students have no consistent effect.human capital formation; individual performance; school resources; school autonomy; institutional arrangements

CEO Duality and Accounting-Based Performance in Egyptian Listed Companies: A Re-examination of Agency Theory Predictions

According to agency theory, the interests of shareholders are safeguarded only where different people occupying the two positions of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the chairman of the board of directors. This implies that CEO duality (i.e. the CEO serves also as the board chairman) is negatively associated with corporate performance. However, empirical evidence is mixed with respect to this prediction of agency theory. This paper aims at re-examining the predictions of agency theory with regard to the negative association between CEO duality and corporate performance using the financial statements for the year 2006 of most actively traded companies in the Egyptian stock market. It examines the role of other corporate governance mechanisms (board size, top managerial ownership and institutional ownership) as moderating variables in the relationship between CEO duality and corporate performance. Moderated Regression Analysis is used to analyse the empirical data. Our findings indicated that the hypothesized relationship between CEO duality, the moderating variables (top management ownership, board size and institutional ownership) and corporate performance has changed. We found that board size was the only moderating variable (a homologizer variable), top management ownership was a suppressor variable, and institutional ownership was simply another independent variable. For companies characterized by large boards and low top management ownership, corporate performance is negatively affected by CEO duality and positively impacted by institutional ownership

Labour Incentive Schemes in a Cournot Duopoly with Simple Institutional Constraints

This paper studies equilibrium incentive contracts in a Cournot duopoly, in which institutional arrangements constrain firms to pay (risk-neutral) workers a given salary. In this context, performance-related-pay (PRP) and relative performance evaluation (RPE) are compared in terms of resulting levels of workers' effort (firms' expected output), market price, profits, consumer surplus and social welfare. It is shown that, while under principal-agent standard assumptions (i.e. all wage components are "freely" negotiated by each firm-worker pair) PRP and RPE are equivalent, in the presence of institutional "frictions", RPE outperforms PRP in relation to output, profits, consumer surplus and social welfare. Moreover, RPE also permits to replicate results obtained without institutional constraints, even if the mechanism driving final outcomes is very different.Cournot duopoly, principal-agent model, relative performance evaluation, institutional constraints

The Growing Export Performance of Transition Economies: EU Market Access versus Supply Capacity Factors

The paper examines the reasons for the remarkable growth of transition economies’ export performance. We distinguish between foreign/EU market access and internal supply capacity factors. EU market access has been of great importance, while among supply capacity factors, stable institutional setup, structural reforms, and targeted FDI are in the forefront.Export performance, Transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe, (EU) market access, Supply capacity, Institutional setup, FDI.