Narrow Results

There is a high level of residual government ownership after privatization processes of state-owned firms in many transitional economies. Accordingly, the role of residual government ownership in firms in these economies draws strong attention from researchers resulting in a huge volume of papers in the literature. This naturally motivates us to examine whether state ownership affects the firm value in Vietnam, a successful transitional economy. More specifically, this paper aims to provide further insights into the impact of residual government ownership on the value of privatized firms listed on the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange covering the period from 2009 to 2014. Using panel data techniques of fixed effects estimator, our empirical results indicate that residual government ownership has a negative effect on value of Vietnamese firms. This finding provides important implications for different stakeholders in transitional countries.

A growing volume of studies indicate that the information asymmetry problem is a serious issue which significantly hinders stock market development. This problem is more pronounced in emerging markets with weak institutions. The domination of large shareholders in a firm might be a cause of information asymmetry because they are commonly believed to have access to private and value-relevant information. The current paper offers insight into the relationship between multiple large shareholder ownership and stock market information asymmetry in the context of Vietnam, an important emerging market. Employing fixed effects and GMM estimators for a panel data sample of firms listed on the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange covering the period 2007–2015, the results suggest that the concentration of large shareholder ownership is positively and significantly associated with information asymmetry. This finding has strong implications for policy making process in promoting stock market development.