Subsequently, following the research conducted by Morck et al. (1988) for
established firms, we then investigate an extension of the nonlinear model by allowing
the ownership variable to be squared and cubed (cubic form). The inclusion of the
cubic form allows for three levels of managerial ownership, consistent with Morck et
al.’s theoretical model and Short and Keasey’s (1999) empirical design. Our findings
indicate that increases in managerial ownership are associated with better firm
performance within both the 0 – 31% and 71 –100% ownership ranges. Alternatively,
greater managerial ownership is negatively associated with firm performance in the
31 –71% ownership range. As such, we document that post-IPO ownership does play
an important role in the going-public firm’s change in performance, but that the
relationship is only captured when we allow for three levels of inside ownership.
Thus, our results are consistent with prior empirical findings on the general relationship
between firm performance levels and managerial ownership, allowing us to
suggest that this model is applicable to going-public firms and its change in
performance.
Lastly, we investigate other determinants of the going-public firm’s change in
performance. After controlling for capital expenditures, we find that firm size does not
seem to play an important role, but that growing firms perform better after the IPO than
other firms. We also find that firms with high levels of bank financing suffer a larger
performance decline when they become public firms. However, in subsequent analyses,
we find that these additional determinants have different implications on the level of
performance. Most importantly, however, these additional determinants do not subsume
the managerial ownership findings.
Overall, because we are the first (to the best of our knowledge) to investigate the
operating performance of IPO firms in an emerging market and because we document
a curvilinear relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance for
these going-public firms, it is our contention that we are making two significant
contributions to the IPO literature. The rest of this paper proceeds as follows. Section 2
discusses managerial ownership and firm performance issues. Section 3 describes our
data and presents summary statistics. The results of our empirical investigations are
presented in Section 4 and our conclusions are discussed in Section 5.