The Impact of Corporate Ownership on Financial Performance: Role of Corporate Life Cycle

Since difererent aspects of corporate governance could result in considerable impacts on corporate performance, leaving remarkable changes behind, along the corporate life cycle, this article embarks on a research to analyze the impact of ownership stracture on financial performance, taking the life cycle of the corporations in mind. Accordingly, four factors, namely "ownership concentration", "institutional investors", "non-executive directors", and "free float shares" are taken as the dimensions of corporate ownership; in the meantime, Return on Asset (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) are employed as a criterion to appraise the performance of corporation. The role of "life cycle", as the adjusting factor of such a relationship, in addition to the "sum of sales and assets" are, in turn, tested as controlling variables of the research. The population and samples of the research consist of 252 companies, listed in Tehran Stock Exchange in 2013. In order to test the hypotheses, after having gone through multicollinearity, Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, the Hierarchical Multiple Regression method was put to use. The findings of the study illustrated the impact of "non-executive directors" and institutional investors" on the financial performance, taking into account the corporation's life cycle. Moreover, the results further indicate that the relationship between "ownership structure" and "corporation's performance" varies during differing stages of the life cycle continuum.