Who Owns Appalachia? Landownership and Its Impact

Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region\u27s land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region\u27s people. Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55,000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights. The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region—local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging. Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation. The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force-- a cooperative effort among communities, scholars, and individuals in the region and funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission--performed the survey.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/1007/thumbnail.jp

Ownership structures and the leverage of listed firms in China

In this paper the relationship between leverage, performance and a firm’s ownership structure is investigated. It is an exploratory study based on listed firms in China, that is all firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 1999 to 2005. The results of an empirical analysis of ownership structures and the leverage are reported in this paper. The most significant result is that foreign holdings are found to have a significant relationship with the leverage of listed firms in China. Whereas, somewhat unexpectedly, institutional ownership, through Legal Person holding companies, state ownership and private holdings are not found to have a significant relationship with the capital structure choices of firms in China. The results also suggest that some firm-specific factors that are relevant for explaining firm leverage generally referred to in studies in developed economies, such as profitability, growth opportunities, size and tax shields, are also relevant in China. The age of the firms and the industry to which they principally belong also has significant bearing. Yet direct government grants and the use of an internationally renowned auditing firm do not show a significant relationship

Using Ownership as an Incentive: Does the Too Many Chiefs Rule Apply in Entrepreneurial Firms?

Agency theory is used to develop hypotheses regarding the effects of ownership proliferation on firm performance. We examine the effects of CEO ownership, executive team ownership, and all employee ownership, in addition to the moderating effect of risk, on firm survival and stock price. Firms with low CEO ownership outperform those with high levels of CEO ownership across all levels of risk, but the effect is most pronounced for low risk firms. Executive team ownership is negatively related to firm performance, while ownership for all employees is positively associated with firm performance particularly for higher risk firms

Choice of Ownership Structure and Firm Performance: Evidence from Estonia

In this paper we use rich panel data for a representative sample of Estonian enterprises to analyse diverse issues related to the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes after privatisation. A key focus is to determine whether ownership changes are related to economic efficiency. While employee owned firms are found to be much more prone than other firms to switch ownership categories, often “employee owned” firms remain “insider-owned” as ownership passes from current employees to managers and former employees. Logit analyses of the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes provides mixed support for several hypotheses. As predicted: (i) wealth and resource constraints play a crucial role in the determination of ownership, with foreigners buying firms with the highest equity levels and insiders buying firms with the lowest equity valuations; (ii) risk aversion explains subsequent ownership changes, especially away from employee ownership; (iii) allocation of ownership depends on the pre-privatisation origin and location of the firm, and these factors also influence subsequent ownership changes. Finally we compare our findings with those achieved by using more conventional approaches to analyze efficiency that use very similar data. Reassuringly the evidence presented in this paper is consistent with the view that efficiency considerations drive ownership changes (while earlier analysis for Estonia and for many other transition economies has identified the impact of ownership on economic performance.) However, the findings in this paper also establish that there are important influences besides economic efficiency that affect enterprise ownership and ownership changes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39945/3/wp560.pd

Platform Ownership

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004We develop a general theoretical framework of trade on a platform on which buyers and sellers interact. The platform may be owned by a single large, or many small independent or vertically integrated intermediaries. We provide a positive and normative analysis of the impact of platform ownership structure on platform size. The strength of network effects is important in the ranking of ownership structures by induced platform size and welfare. While vertical integration may be welfare-enhancing if network effects are weak, monopoly platform ownership is socially preferred if they are strong. These are also the ownership structures likely to emerge

Impact of ownership structure and ownership concentration on credit risk of Chinese commercial banks

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose- The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of bank ownership structure and ownership concentration on credit risk. Design/methodology/approach- Using panel data on a sample of 88 Chinese commercial banks with 1194 observations over a period of 2003-2018, this study employs system generalised method of moments regression to examine the impact of bank ownership structure and ownership concentration on credit risk. Two measures of credit risk, namely, non-performing loan ratio and loan loss provision ratio are used to ensure the robustness of the results. Findings– The results show that ownership type (both government and private ownership) exert positive and significant impact on credit risk. However, our results indicate that concentration of ownership in the hands of government has negative and significant effect on credit risk while private ownership concentration positively impacts on credit risk. Overall our findings suggest that concentration of ownership in government hands reduces risk, whilst private ownership concentration exacerbates credit risks. Our results are invariant to alternative measures of credit risk and financial crisis. Practical implications – The findings provide useful insight to guide policy decisions in Chinese banks’ lending policies and bank ownership. Originality/value– Using hand collected data on ownership structure and governance from annual reports this study deepens our understanding on the effectiveness of Chinese banks’ corporate governance reforms on managing credit risks

Race and Home Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present

We present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007. Black ownership increased by 46 percentage points, whereas white ownership increased by 20 points. Remarkably, 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910. Part of this early convergence is accounted for by falling white ownership due to movement out of agriculture, but most is accounted for by post-emancipation gains among blacks. After 1910, white and black households increased ownership, but the racial gap barely changed. We discuss the influence of residential segregation, public policy, and permanent income on the ownership gap.

The Effects of Ownership Forms and Concentration on Firm Performance after Large-Scale Privatization

We analyze the effect of ownership on post-privatization performance in a virtually complete population of medium and large firms privatized in a model large-scale privatization economy (Czech Republic). We reject the hypothesis that domestic or foreign private ownership, in either moderate or high ownership concentrations, leads to increased sales. However, private domestic and foreign majority and significant minority owners, as well as dispersed owners, increase profitability relative to state-owned firms. Firms with dispersed ownership register higher positive effect on profit than firms with more concentrated ownership, thus giving support to theories stressing managerial autonomy and initiative. Foreign owners with high as well as moderate concentrations of ownership uniformly reduce financial leverage, as do majority domestic owners. Domestic banks and portfolio companies as single largest owners (SLO) are incapable of carrying out major restructuring. Foreign industrial company SLOs carry out strategic restructuring in production and financing without deviating from the state ownership benchmark in terms of the labor cost. The effect of SLO does not vary with the SLO's concentration of ownership. Overall, private ownership tends to be associated with superior performance in terms of some indicators but not others, and dispersed ownership results in better or equal performance than more concentrated forms of ownership.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39855/3/wp471.pd

Sharing Ownership via Employee Stock Ownership

Broad-based stock options, Employee ownership, Incentive compensation,

Employee Share Ownership Plans: A Review

This paper reviews the main strands of research on employee share ownership over the last forty years. It considers research findings in the literature on types of share ownership, the incidence of share ownership plans, the ‘determinants’ of the use of share plans by companies, influences upon employee participation in share plans, the effect of share ownership on employee attitudes and behaviour, the effect on company performance, and the relationship between share ownership plans and other forms of employee participation. The paper does not provide a comprehensive review of the literature on these topics: instead it highlights the main findings that have emerged in the literature to date, and suggests some avenues for future research. It is suggested that majority worker ownership is different in character and effects from ‘mainstream’ minority employee share plans in large companies but the literature has tended to conflate the two. It is argued that future research needs to distinguish the various forms of employee share ownership if the impact of share ownership is to be more precisely calibrated