UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS ERASMUS UNVERSITY ROTTERDAM HO CHI MINH CITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM – THE NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS THE INFLUENCE OF STATE OWNERSHIP, LEVERAGE AND INVESTMENT ON FIRM’S PERFORMANCE: A PANEL ANALYSIS FOR VIETNAMESE LISTED FIRMS IN THE PERIOD 2010-2015 BY NGUYEN PHUONG MAI MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY, November 2016 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES HO CHI MINH CITY THE HAGUE VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM - NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS The influence of state ownership, leverage and investment on firm performance: A panel analysis on Vietnamese listed firm in the period 2010 - 2015 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS By NGUYEN PHUONG MAI Academic Supervisor: PROF. NGUYEN TRONG HOAI HO CHI MINH CITY, November 2016 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would first like to thank my thesis supervisor Prof. Nguyen Trong Hoai of the Vietnam – The Netherlands Programme (VNP) at Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics. He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered me in the right the direction whenever he thought I needed it.
I would like to express my gratitude to the VNP officers who were involved in my thesis process by updating thesis schedule and providing good condition for my research process. Without their passionate participation, the thesis process could not have been successfully conducted. Finally, thanks are also due to my classmates for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them.
Nguyen Phuong Mai Ho Chi Minh City, November 2016 Page i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT This thesis uses data of non – financial listed firm in Hochiminh Stock Exchange in the period from 2010 – 2015 and econometric method, three – stage least square, to solve the simultaneous correlation of state ownership, firm performance, leverage and investment and try to found real relationship among them. The study found non –linear with U-shape impact of state ownership concentration on firm performance. Specially, the result of this study also found the negative effect of both leverage and investment on firm performance. In additional, this study demonstrate non-linear effect of state ownership on leverage, U-shape effects on long – term leverage with, invert U- shape effect on short-term.
The result also supports the hypothesis about two – way effect of leverage and investment. While investment affect positively to leverage, in invert side, increasing level of debt in firm may tend to decrease level of firm investment. Page ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com TABLE OF CONTENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. ii TABLE OF CONTENT.
iii LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES .5 The thesis structure. 3 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW .1 Framework of Corporate Governance .1 Corporate governance and its impact on the firm .2 Background of corporate governance of listed firms in Vietnam .2 The theoretical literature .1 Theory of Principal – Agency problem .3 Capital structure theories .1 Empirical evidence of state ownership effect on firm performance .2 Empirical evidence of state ownership effect on firm leverage .3 Empirical evidence of the linkage among leverage, investment and firm performance .4 Hypothesis construction and the conceptual framework .1 The effect of state ownership, leverage and investment on firm performance 19 2.2 The correlation between state ownership and leverage .3 The correlation of leverage and investment. 22 CHAPTER 3 : RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .1 System of simultaneous equations .2 Three Stage Least Square Method. 28 CHAPTER 4 THE EMPIRICAL RESULT .2 Correlation between variables.
35 Page iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.2 The result of three stage least square regression.1 These factors which affect to firm performance .2 State ownership affect to leverage .3 The correlation between leverage and investment. 45 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATION .3 The limitation and further research. 50 Page iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Table 2-1. Summary of theories.
Ownership structure, Firm performance, Leverage and Investment. State ownership concentration, leverage, investment and firm performance divided by years and industries. Comparing between SO = 0 and SO=1. Correlation coefficients between variables.
Three – Stage Least Square Regression using ROA as Firm performance. Three – Stage Least Square Regression using Tobin’ Q as Firm performance. Three – Stage Least Square Regression using Z-score as Firm performance. Summary of results.
47 Page v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Problem statement The economic reforms known as DOIMOI in 1986 helped Vietnam’s Economy have a high jump whereby it was converted from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. In this reform, the equitization process of state owned firms in Vietnam was proposed in 1991 and was launched in 1992. State sold a part of their shares in firms to public investors with the focus to improve their performance. As a result, these firms’ ownership structure is a mixture of many components as state, institutions, foreign, individual….
The role of state ownership in firm’s financial performance has been the interesting subject of ongoing debate between economic researchers. Though there are many studies which conduct to the impact of ownership on firm performance, lack of in-depth researches have been conducted to Vietnamese context (Le, 2015; Phung & Mishra, 2016). It originates from the reason that Vietnamese economy is not really similar to other economies because Vietnam is in group of developing countries with transforming economy. Most previous researches in Vietnamese context have investigate the effect of state ownership structure on firm performance, however number of researches which find the correlation of state ownership and financial decisions as leverage and investment is minority.
There is limited empirical evidence on the effect of state ownership on level of debt and level of investment in Vietnamese firms although the role state ownership is important in transforming economy as Vietnam. Therefore, to investigate the impact of state ownership and firm financial decisions on firm performance is main purpose of this thesis. Some previous studies have examined the correlation of ownership and firm’s financial characteristics. However, the limitation of empirical evidence can fully interpret their simultaneous relation, especially the endogenous problem among state ownership, leverage, investment, firm performance and other corporate governance factors.
It is difficult to evaluate separately the impact of state ownership which has simultaneous correlation with other factors. For evidence, if the impact Page 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com of state ownership on firm performance is positive, it may be caused by the fact that in the case of favorable business environment, firm with higher level concentration of state ownership approach to bank credit easier tend to expand scale of production process and create more benefits. Since, researches may see erroneous result of studies because of endogeneity problem. This limitation is my motivation for this research.
As a result, in order to solve the problem statement mentioned above, this thesis will concentrate to analyze the impact of state ownership, leverage and investment on firm performance and test the hypothesis about two-way correlation between leverage and investment.2 Research objective The objective of this thesis is to analyze the impact of state ownership, together with investment, leverage level and corporate governance on the firm performance. There are two main objective, as following: - Testing the causal relation between state ownership concentration and firm performance. - Analyzing the potential impact of state ownership concentration together with leverage and investment on firm performance. - Analyzing the potential two – way impact of leverage and investment.3 Research question In order to resolve the above objectives, I have reflected two research questions: (i) Does state ownership concentration, leverage and investment affect to firm performance? (ii) How does state ownership concentration influence effect on leverage? (iii) How does the two – way effect of leverage and investment? 1.4 Research scope This thesis uses data collected from audited financial statement and annual reports of 269/307 listed firms in Hochiminh Stock Exchange (HOSE) in the period 2010-2015 The dropped firms cover firms violated the securities regulations, Page 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com merged, lacked data and financial firms.
Financial firms include banks, securities firms and insurance firms are not covered in this thesis. Finally, the database cover 1614 observations of 269 firms in 6 years.5 The thesis structure After the first chapter, the thesis will continue with the other four chapters which can briefly be presented as follows: - Chapter 2 is the presentation of the theoretical and empirical evidences related to the relationship of state ownership concentration, firm performance and other firm characteristic. Conceptual framework is also illustrated in this chapter. - Chapter 3 presents the research methodology in which the formulation model, data measurement and formulation hypothesis.
Furthermore, econometric technique will be introduced. - Chapter 4 contains the simple statistics and regression analyses and discusses the results with the arguments from the reviewed literature - Chapter 5 is the formulation of the generation finding and discussion. The implications are proposed for the policy purposes. Discussions of limitation and the potential improvement for future studies are included.
Page 3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter will present four sessions. The first session demonstrates framework of corporate governance, background of Vietnamese corporate governance. The related theories, empirical studies which focuses on the relationship among firm performance, state ownership and financial decision as leverage and investment are showed in the second and third session. The research hypothesis and conceptual framework are also included in this chapter in the fourth session.1 Framework of Corporate Governance 2.1 Corporate governance and its impact on the firm Freeman and Nguyen (2006) ague that there is a difference of the perception across these countries in practice.
However, in general, corporate governance is the uniqueness internal mechanism that be responsible for a safe direction and management of organizations. As a result, it can be suggested a general definition of corporate governance as a set of mechanism of controlling or regulating the firms. The concept of “corporate governance” mentions to the structures and processes for the direction and control of the firms. It includes the nexus among board of directors, controlling shareholders, these other stakeholders and the actions of management, so on.
Information from firms with good corporate governance seems more transparent and activities of them to investors are also more accountable. Hence, it could be suggested that good corporate governance support to firms have more efficient operation, improve access to the capital resources, alleviate risk and protect against mismanagement. In that case, good corporate governance can protect the interest and treatment of shareholders as well as possible. Based on agency right of holding shares, the shareholders join in the corporate governance system and build the management mechanism and then affect significantly to the corporate behavior.
Each of activities of shareholders has one and only role in the governance system. They can encourage the shareholder’s exercise their right, play a square game among shareholders or create a long-term Page 4 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com strategy planning for the firms. Thus, firm performance will be improved (International Finance Corporation 2013).2 Background of corporate governance of listed firms in Vietnam 2.1 Framework of state ownership in Vietnamese listed firms After two first firms listed in Hochiminh Stock Exchange in the first trading day in year 2000, the increasing of number of listed firms was not really noticeably in the period 2000-2005. However, Vietnamese stock market has an impressive change from 2006.
From 280 listed firms in both HOSE and HNX1 2006, the number of listed firms increased sharply to 563 in 2015 (Hanoi Stock Exchange 2006 - 2015; Hochiminh Stock Exchange, 2006 - 2015).