Volume 23 Issue 3 Article 2 11-2021 Concentrated Ownership and Firm’s Performance: A Bibliometric Concentrated Ownership and Firm’s Performance: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature Analysis of the Literature Ada Guš tin Habuš University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business, Ljubljana, Slovenia, ada.gustin@ef.uni-lj.si Janez Praš nikar University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business and Institute for South-East Europe, Ljubljana, Slovenia Follow this and additional works at: https://www.ebrjournal.net/home Part of the Business Commons Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Guš tin Habuš , A., & Praš nikar, J. (2021). Concentrated Ownership and Firm’s Performance: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature. Economic and Business Review, 23(3). https://doi.org/10.15458/ 2335-4216.1285 This Original Article is brought to you for free and open access by Economic and Business Review. It has been accepted for inclusion in Economic and Business Review by an authorized editor of Economic and Business Review. ORIGINAL ARTICLE Concentrated Ownership and Firm's Performance: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature Ada Gustin Habus a, *, Janez Prasnikar a,b,c a University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business, Ljubljana, Slovenia b Institute for South-East Europe, Ljubljana, Slovenia c Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, UK Abstract The article aims to describe the historical sequence, interrelatedness, and development of dominant and emerging researchareaswithin theconcentratedownership literature.Moreover,itaimstodeterminethemostinfluential articles, authors,journals,andcountriesinthefieldbyapplyingabibliometricanalysis.Thelatterrevealsthatthefutureresearch concerning concentrated ownership should be more country-based and use consistent and more extended data sets. It should also apply different theoretical frameworks, profound institutional analysis, and look for cross-fertilization of ideas, which could be spread worldwide. Keywords:Ownershipstructure,Concentratedownership,Blockholders,Largeowners,Controllingowners,Bibliometric analysis JEL classification: G30, G32, G34 Introduction T heissueofhowconcentratedownershipinthe handsofaspecificowneroragroupofowners could affect the firm's performance has been the subject of the debate among researchers for a long time. Three significant problems have been domi- nating economic research on concentrated owner- ship,sofar.First,asadvocatedbyproponents ofthe leading agency, the theoretical explanation of corporate governance (Fama, 1980; Fama & Jensen, 1985; Jensen & Meckling, 1976) is a principal-agent problem,claimingthateachsmallshareholderlacks the incentives or contractual mechanisms to align the interests of managers with those of share- holders. Consequently, managers may exert sub- stantial discretion over firm decisions and divert corporateresourcesforprivategain(Berle&Means, 1932; Grossman & Hart, 1980; Jensen & Meckling, 1976).Attheotherextreme, incases oflargeowners who either directly manage the firm or internalize the benefits from monitoring managers, managerial interests are aligned with those of the large share- holder (the active monitoring or the alignment hy- pothesis). Large shareholders can exert governance through direct intervention in a firm's operations, otherwise known as a “voice” (Friend & Lang, 1988; Shleifer & Vishny, 1986) or can govern through an alternative mechanism known as “exit” e selling their shares if the manager underperforms (Edmans, 2014; Edmans & Holderness, 2017). Second, large shareholders can create a different agency problem, the so-called principal-principal problem, referring to the counterbalancing forces between the monitoring and expropriation effect of the ownership concentration on performance (e.g. Shleifer & Vishny, 1986; Stulz, 1988; Burkart et al., 1997, 1998). The theoretical debate over the effect of ownership concentration on firm performance has led to conflicting results, where the alignment hy- pothesis predicts a positive relationship between ownership concentration andfirm performance and Received 20 March 2020; accepted 14 February 2021. Available online 8 November 2021. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ada.gustin@ef.uni-lj.si (A.G. Habus), janez.prasnikar@outlook.com (J. Prasnikar). https://doi.org/10.15458/85451.1285 2335-4216/© 2021 School of Economics and Business University of Ljubljana. This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). the exploitation hypothesis a negative one. These conflicting theoretical predictions are accompanied by diverse empirical evidence. Several studies sup- port the alignment monitoring hypothesis in shaping principal-principal conflicts and the role of ownership concentration in the alignment of in- terests of owners (Agrawal & Mandelker, 1990; Kaplan & Minton, 1994; Gorton & Schmid, 2000; Konijn et al., 2011). Other studies reinforced the expropriation hypothesis (Laeven & Levine, 2008; Leech & Leahy, 1991; Lehman & Weigand, 2000; Mudambi & Nicosia, 2002). Moreover, some claim that the relation between the ownership concentra- tion and performance is non-linear; either it takes a quadratic form (De Miguel et al., 2004; Busta et al., 2014) or it is U-shaped (Russino et al., 2019). Third, complementary to the one owner vs. dispersed ownership controversy, a parallel dis- cussion tackles multiple owners (blockholders) and their influence on the firm's performance. Based on the assertion that blockholders can start interacting with one another, several theoretical models got built to show the effects of multiple owners on a firm's performance. Blockholders can merge into coalitions. Coalitions may either be established due to cooperation or are based on the non-cooperative game (Bennedsen & Wolfenzon, 2000; Bloch & Hege,2003;Gomes&Novaes,2006;Pagano&Roell, 1998;Zwiebel,1995).Blocholdersononesidefightto form a ruling coalition to extract private benefits (Laeven & Levine, 2008). On the other hand, they may establish risk-sharing instruments (Bloch & Hege, 2003) and reduce the initiative of the largest blockholders to overmonitor or undermonitor the management of the firm (Gomes & Novaes, 2006; Pagano&Roell,1998).Inthatway,multiplecontrols may increase the firm's information capital, effi- ciency, and consequently its performance. Besides, the empirical literature tries to explain the block- holders controversy. For example, it is quite an agreement that the second-largest owner's position is essential when considering the impact of con- centrationofownershipinthefirm'sperformance.If the two biggest owners have a high ownership concentration and the types of the owners are not heterogeneous, the concentrated cash-flow rights discourage expropriation of corporate assets (La Porta et al., 2002; Lehmann & Weigand, 2000; Rus- sino et al.,2019).On the otherhand, the literature is of different opinions on family-owned firms, pre- senting a bulk of closely held firms with overall blockholding structure. Family ownership might exert either a negative impact on a firm's perfor- mance due to the nepotism or succession problem (Morck et al., 2005; Perez-Gonzalez, 2006) or it can impose a positive impact because family-owners can make contributions that non-family managers cannot provide (Bennedsen et al., 2015; Laeven & Levine, 2008). When banks are the main block- holders or build up coalitions with other banks, banks might negatively influence a firm's perfor- mance because of short-termism (Martínez& Tribo, 2004).Moreover,institutionalenvironment(LaPorta et al., 2008) and path dependency (Aguilera et al., 2008, 2015; Hall & Soskice, 2001) can play an essential role in corporate governance mechanisms. The literature on blockholding relations is, thus, diverse either, opening the door to more profound country studies and different institutional arrangements. This paper aims to verify the dominant and emerging research areas within the concentrated ownership literature using bibliometric methods. We set three main hypotheses. First, the biblio- metric analysis will indicate the presented discus- sion on concentrated ownership and its breaking points. Second, due to the diversity and unresolved questions, each part of the debate (principal-agent, principal-principal, and multiple owners' relations) willfaceanequaltreatmentintheexistingliterature essentially. Third, a discussion on blockholders’ position (homogeneity/heterogeneity and their co- alitions) is getting based on studies made for a particular country(ies) as the increasing globaliza- tion has shown that complex ownership (a term inventedbyLauvenandLevine,2008)isbecominga new reality. The rest of the article is organized as follows. Section 1 introduces the data and methods we used to analyze the literature of concentrated ownership. Section 2 shows the development of studies on concentrated ownership, and the bibliometric anal- ysis results by periods. Section 3 focuses on the bibliometric analysis results by journals, countries of publication, and leading authors. Section 4 con- cludes the article. 1 Data and methodology To collect relevant information about the articles and cited references, we used the Scopus database of articles that we accessed in January 2020. The Scopus started operating in 2004 and is owned by Elsevier. The database contains a broader coverage than the Social Science Citation Index, accessible online through Thomson Reuters Web of Science. It is especially recommended to use while mapping smaller research areas (Zupic & Cater, 2015). Since the research topic on concentrated owner- shipisratherbroad,theScopusallowedustoeasier ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 153 identify the research fronts. Therefore, to limit the scope and retrieve articles that focus specifically on ownership concentration, we included in our searches the followingkeywordscombinedwith the Boolean operator OR: “ownership concentration”, “concentrated ownership”, “blockholder*", “block owner*", “block shareholder*", “large owner*", “large shareholder*", “controlling owner*"a n d “controlling shareholder*". Since not all journals publish article keywords, our search also included their titles and abstracts. Our inquiry into identified concepts yielded 3797 articles. We further limited our search to articles published in the business and economics research area and articles written in the Englishlanguage.Thisstepreducedourdatabaseto 3108 articles published between 1969 and 2019. We excluded the so-called 95 unwanted articles that were not in any sense discussing the concentrated ownership, and could, consequently, reduce the validity of the results. Therefore, our final database contains 3013 published between 1969 and 2019. To define the dominant and emerging areas of research within the concentrated ownership litera- ture as objectively as possible, we performed three different bibliometric methods. First, we applied a citation analysis to reveal the 20 most cited articles and looked for the ten authors, journals, and coun- tries, which published the highest number of arti- cles in concentrated ownership literature. Since researchers cite earlier articles that they consider essential to support their notion, citations can be seen as a measure of influence. If an article is heavily cited, it is considered essential for a partic- ular scientific field. However, by collecting the bibliographic data from the Scopus database, we could not systemati- cally check on whether all the essential articles are gathered in our analysis. In order to avoid this limitation, we performed the second bibliographic method, which is the co-citation analysis. The latter connectspublications basedonjointappearancesin the reference list. A fundamental idea behind the co-citation analysis is that the more often specific articles are cited together, the higher the chance their content is related. Therefore, the co-citation analysis reveals the articles that are potentially not included in the database. Yet, they are highly cited in the literature's observedfield and thus crucial for its development. Since the publishing process is time-consuming and citations need time to accu- mulate, the co-citation analysis shows the research field'sstatesometimebeforetheobservation(Zupic & Cater, 2015). The co-citation analysis enabled us to distinguish essential, highly cited articles in concentrated ownership literature, which were not included in our database. However, since citation analysis can be biased towardstheolderarticle,andsinceitcannotidentify interconnection among articles, we also applied the third bibliographic method e bibliographic coupling. Bibliographic coupling is a clustering techniquethatusesthenumberofreferencesshared by two documents as a measure of similarity be- tween them, meaning that the more two articles overlap, the stronger their connection (Zupic & Cater, 2015). Moreover, although the bibliographic coupling is not as widely used as co-citation anal- ysis, it addresses many of its limitations. Namely, it does not require citations to accumulate, since it directly maps recent publications based on how they cite rather than earlier published articles that were cited the most (Zhao & Strotmann, 2008). Therefore, the bibliographic coupling is recom- mended to use for clustering emerging and smaller subfields. Concentrated ownership satisfies both criteria. 2 Literature on concentrated ownership by its origins and in different studied periods Fig. 1 shows that the literature on concentrated ownership has been experiencing an exponential increase from 1994 onwards. The growth was even more rapid after the year 2001. In the last decade, from 2010 to 2019, the number of articles grew from 161 in 2010 to 297 in 2019, an 84.5% increase. The number of citations in the same period grew at an even faster rate and increased from 10,544 citations in2007to29,956in2019,a184%increase.Toattaina better overlook over the research field of concen- trated ownership, we divide this section into two parts. In the first part, we explain the development of the field of concentrated ownership and its main phases (periods) up to now, while in the second, we provide a systematic overview of the discussion by periods. 2.1 The development of research on concentrated ownership and its main periods To attain a better understanding of the progress and evolution of the research areas in the literature of concentrated ownership, we divided our dataset intodifferentperiods.Weconstructedaone25-year interval spanning from 1969 to 1994. The literature on concentrated ownership started accumulating more rapidly from 1994; thus, a more thorough analysis needed to be performed for years after. 154 ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 Therefore, we constructed one ten-year interval spanning 1995e2004 and another one spanning 2005e2014. The reason for such division lies in the factthatdiscussionswritteninthearticlespublished in the first interval were relatively modest. This period the best reveals the intentions of the so- called Great Moderation, describing the period of decreased macroeconomic volatility experienced in the United States (Bernanke, 2004), followed by a substantialfinancialcycleinthewholeworld(Great Recession). The second interval contains the erup- tion of articles on concentrated ownership, pub- lished during the financial cycle. Last but not least, we constructed a five-year interval 2015e2019, capturing the articles written in the years after the economic recovery. A short comparison of the studied periods is provided in Table 1. It reveals that the period with the most published articles is the last period going from 2005 to 2014. However, the most cited articles and the articles with the highest average citations per articlewere written between1995and 2004. The reasonwhythenumberofcitationsisnotthelargest in the period with the highest number of published articles or perhaps in the last studied period can be partly attributed to the fact that citations need time to accumulate. Furthermore, the period with the highest h-index is the period between 2005 and 2014. The h-index is a metric measuring productiv- ity, as well as the impact of each period. More specifically, the h-index is based on the highest number of papers included that have had at least the same number of citations. One of the main concerns is whether we included all relevant publications discussing concentrated ownership in our database. There exists the possi- bility that essential articles were published in books or journals not yet indexed at the time. Also, there may exist articles that are not directly discussing or mentioning concentrated ownership, yet they playedanessentialroleintheemergenceofthefield in the past. To mitigate this concern, we performed a document co-citation analysis and made a quali- tative review of the results. The co-citation analysis revealed that only a few articlesandbooks,allpublishedbefore1990,arenot partofourdatabaseduetothementionedobstacles, yet, they need special attention. The origins of the ownership structure literature can be traced back to Berle and Means' (1932) “The Modern Corporation and Private Property”, known for describing the separation of ownership and control in America's largest companies. They claim that the owners lose control over their resources due to ownership being so widely dispersed across many of them. The ownerholdingsuchasmallshareofthefirmcannot Fig. 1. The number of articles (left axis) and the number of citations per year (right axis) of the literature on concentrated ownership. Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. Table 1. The number of articles, average number of articles per year, sum of citations, average number of citations per article, and h-index for the studied periods. Period 1969e1994 1995e2004 2005e2014 2015e2019 Total Articles 39 304 1511 1159 3013 Articles/year 1.6 30.4 151.1 231.8 60.3 Sum of citations 6920 54,290 46,327 5096 112,633 Average citations 177.4 178.6 30.7 4.4 37.4 h-index 24 98 103 27 Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 155 exercise efficient monitoring over modern corpora- tions' managerial performance. In such cases, management exercises more freedom in using a firm's resources than would exist if its owners managed the firm or if the firm's ownership struc- ture was concentrated. Therefore, Berle and Means formed the modern corporation concept as one run bymanagersuncountabletoowners.However,their interests were not necessarily in line with owners' interests. Thus, the separation of ownership and controlbecametheessencefortheemergenceofthe principal-agent conflict theory, which refers to the difficulties owners face to assure the return on their investment. Their image stimulated the formation of another widely cited work created by Jensen and Meckling (1976). In their study, they show, in light of the principal-agentconflict,howowners'andmanagers' interests become increasingly aligned as the man- agers' percentage of the firm's ownership increases. Byowningalargerownershipshare,managersbear higher direct wealth consequences from their decisions. Fama and Jensen (1983) challenged this view and warned about offsetting costs of significant man- agement ownership. They suggested that market discipline may still force manager towards value maximization when he or she owns a small owner- ship share. However, if a manager held a larger ownership share, he would ensure himself a more considerable voting power to, for instance, guar- anteehisemployment,payhimselfalargesalary,or withdraw corporate funds. Stulz (1988) in his study also supports their thesis by building a model showing that the firm's value is higher when man- agement is owning a smaller share of ownership and is lower when management is controlling a higher ownership share. Similarly, Morck, Shliefer andVishny(1988)andMcConnellandServes(1990) observe that managers' and shareholders' interests become more closely aligned as managerial ownership increases, resulting in improved firm performance. However, they proved that, as man- agers' ownership share continues to increase, their interests start to deviate from owners heading, which results in more significant principal-agent conflict and weakens firm performance. Also, they proposed that the identity of large shareholders might potentially be relevant. The first generation of literature that presented the basis for the evolution of concentrated owner- ship literature, therefore, dealt with the principal- agent conflict in the typical Berle and Means cor- poration, which is widely held by numerous small ownersbutcontrolledbymanagers.Theresearchers have widespread negative associations towards large owners. However, Berle and Mean's image began to show its weaknesses when the literature started proving that widely held firms are a rare phenomenon since concentrated ownership was detected even among the most powerful American corporations (Holderness & Sheehan, 1988; Shleifer & Vishny, 1986). Moreover, Holderness and Shee- han(1988)neglectthepropositionthatlargeowners' primary reason is to expropriate or withdraw corporate funds. They claimed that firms owned by large owners do survive in high numbers. 2.2 A more detailed overview of the literature, by periods After 1994, the number of published articles studying concentrated ownership started expand- ing, and accelerated following 2001. To look for the essential articles, authors, journals, and countries in concentrated ownership literature, we performed a citation analysis. The results of the 20 most cited articles are presented in Table 2. However, to better understand how the literature on concentrated ownership developed and which areas of research werethemostdominantoremerging,weconducted abibliographiccouplinganalysis.Thelatterenabled us to obtain clusters of articles based on the refer- ence they share. We performed analysis for three different periods. In thefirst period, we included all the articles written between 1995 and 2004. In the second period, we included those written between 2005and2014, andin thelastperiod,weconsidered articles written between 2015 and 2019. For the first twoperiods,wetookintoconsiderationarticlescited at least ten times. For the last period, since citations can be delayed due to the slow process of publica- tion, we considered the articles that were cited at least five times. 2.2.1 Clusters of articles published between 1995 and 2004 Fig. 2 shows that we can distinguish between three large clusters of articles written between 1995 and 2004. The green cluster mainly represents the articles that continuously focus on principal-agent conflict (Agrawal & Knoebler, 1996; Burkart et al., 1997;Denisetal.,1997;Shleifer&Vishny,1997),and the interrelationship between concentrated owner- ship and firms' board structure (Cyert et al., 2002; Denis et al., 1997a; Denis & Sarin, 1999; Mak & Li, 2001). The cluster also contains two articles listed among 20 most cited articles in the literature of concentrated ownership. Agrawal and Knoebler's study (1996), which ranks as the eighth-most cited 156 ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 Table 2. The 20 most cited articles in the literature of concentrated ownership. Authors Article Journal Year Citations R Cit./year R Shleifer, A. & Vishny, R.W. A survey of corpo- rate governance Journal of Finance 1997 5668 1 257.6 1 La Porta, R.; Lopez- de- Silanes, F. & Shleifer, A. Corporate owner- ship around the world Journal of Finance 1999 4578 2 228.9 2 La Porta, R., Lopez- De- Silanes, F., Shleifer, A. & Vishny, R. Investor protection and corporate governance Journal of Financial Economics 2000 2402 3 126.4 3 Claessens, S., Djankov, S. & Lang L.H.P. The separation of ownership and control in East Asian Corporations Journal of Financial Economics 2000 2366 4 124.5 4 La Porta, R., Lopez- de- Silanes, F., Shleifer, A. & Vishny, R. Investor protection and corporate valuation Journal of Finance 2002 1643 5 96.6 5 Claessens, S., Djankov, S., Fan, J.P.H. & Lang, L.H.P. Disentangling the incentive and entrenchment ef- fects of large shareholdings Journal of Finance 2002 1593 6 93.7 6 Faccio, M. & Lang, L.H.P. The ultimate ownership of Western European corporations Contemporary Ac- counting Research 2002 1534 7 90.2 8 Agrawal, A. & Knoeber, C.R. Firm performance and mechanism to control agency problems between managers and shareholders Journal of Financial Economics 1996 1173 8 51.0 11 Stulz, M. Managerial control of voting rights. Financing policies and the market for corporate control Strategic Manage- ment Journal 1988 1100 9 35.5 19 Dyck, A. & Zin- gales, L. Private Benefits of Control: An Inter- national Comparison Journal of Finance 2004 991 10 66.1 10 Laeven, L. & Lev- ine, R. Bank governance, regulation and risk taking Journal of Financial Economics 2009 922 11 92.2 7 Fan,J.P.H.&Wong, T.J. Corporate owner- ship structure and the informativeness of accounting earn- ings in East Asia Journal of Financial Economics 2002 852 12 50.1 13 Mehran, H. Executive compen- sation structure, ownership, and firm performance Quarterly Journal of Economics 1995 831 13 34.6 20 Eng, L.L. & Mak, Y.T. Corporate gover- nance and volun- tary disclosure Journal of Account- ing and Public Policy 2003 767 14 47.9 14 (continued on next page) ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 157 paper, discuses several mechanisms which can diminish principal-agent conflict, among which, they state, is also concentrated ownership. Namely, concentrated ownership in a large owner's hands can increase managerial monitoring, which poten- tially improves firm performance. However, the most cited article in the green cluster and the most cited article in concentrated Table 2. (continued) Authors Article Journal Year Citations R Cit./year R Young, M.N., Peng, M.W., Ahlstrom, D., Bruton, G.D. & Jiang, Y. Corporate gover- nance in emerging economies: A re- view of the prin- cipal- principal perspective:Review paper Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 2008 744 15 67.6 9 Faccio, M., Lang, L.H.P. & Young, L. Dividends and expropriation Journal of Financial Economics 2001 731 16 40.6 17 Hartzell, J.C. & Starks, L.T. Institutional In- vestors and Execu- tive Compensation Journal of Finance 2003 706 17 44.1 15 Morck, R., Wolf- enzon, D. & Yeung, B. Corporate gover- nance, economic entrenchment, and growth Journal of Account- ing and Economics 2005 704 18 50.3 12 Doidge, C., Karolyi, G.A. & Stulz, R.M. Why are foreign firms listed in the U.S. worth more? Journal of Financial Economics 2004 688 19 45.9 15 Anderson, R.C., Mansi, S.A. & Reeb, D.M. Founding family ownership and the agency cost of debt Journal of Financial Economics 2003 652 20 40.8 16 Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. Fig. 2. Cluster of articles in the literature of concentrated ownership in the period between 1995 and 2004. Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. 158 ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 ownership literature is an article titled “A Survey of Corporate Governance”, written by Shleifer & Vishny,1997.Thearticle pays particularattention to studying the importance of ownership concentra- tion in corporate governance around the world. The authors once again expose the seriousness of prin- cipal-agent conflict and suggest that large owners can be very useful in solving it since they enjoy highercontroloverthefirm.Nevertheless,theymay also worsen it by ineffectively redistributing wealth from other shareholders to themselves. They pro- pose that large owners may follow their interests, which does not necessarily coincide with the in- terestsofemployees,managers,andotherinvestors. Therefore, they suggest that the legal protection of owners’ rights is an essential element of the effec- tive corporate governance system. This article sets the root for the emergence of other articles that studyownershipconcentrationworldwide,gathered in the red cluster of Fig. 2. In the beginning, most of the studies examining the relationship between ownership structure and firmperformancewereperformedusingasampleof the United States firms, and not much was known about the ownership structures elsewhere. The vast majority of concentrated ownership literature, therefore, focused its attention on studying two extreme ownership structures: whether the firm's ownership was completely dispersed among numerousowners(Berle&Means,1932)orwhether it is in the hands of one large owner (Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Shleifer & Vishny, 1986). However, from the 90s onwards, researchers started to study also the ownership structure worldwide. Their studies show that ownership structures are indeed much more complex than it was predicted at first. The articles confirmed that relatively few firms are widely held and that concentrated ownership is highly present in developed and developing coun- tries (Claessens et al., 2000; Dyck & Zingales, 2004; Faccio & Lang, 2002; Fan & Wong, 2002; La Porta et al., 1999). Besides the largest controlling owner, other large owners, combined with smaller owners, arepresentinthefirm'sownershipstructure(Faccio & Lang, 2002; La Porta et al., 1999). La Porta et al. (1999) revealed that multiple large shareholders are present in 25% of the firm's ownership structure in their multi-country sample, while 32.2% of Asian firms (Claessens et al., 2000) and 39% of European firmsareownedbyatleasttwolargeowners(Faccio & Lang, 2002). Moreover, these firms are typically controlledbyfamilies(Claessensetal.,2000;Dyck& Zingales, 2004; Faccio & Lang, 2002; Fan & Wong, 2002; La Porta et al., 1999). The red cluster is of particular importance since it contains nine articles ranked among the 20 most cited articles in concentrated ownership literature. Therefore, based on the number of citations, this cluster unites articles that became a dominant theoretical reference in concentrated ownership research. Firstly, the articles emphasize that concentrated ownership is a much broader phe- nomenon than it was first thought. Secondly, they find that concentrated ownership is often, espe- cially in developing countries, accompanied by the absence of sound corporate governance systems and low legal protection of minority shareholders. These studies made a critical shift and started studying the conflicts between different sets of principals present instead of focusing on the prin- cipal-agent conflict. The theory became known as the principal-principal conflict, which mainly fo- cuses on a conflict between large and minority owners in a firm (Claessens et al., 2002; Dyck & Zingales, 2004; Joh, 2003; La Porta et al., 2000, 2002; Lemmon&Lins,2003).Principal-principalconflicts became defined by concentrated ownership, inad- equate legal protection of minority shareholders, and weak corporate governance systems (La Porta et al., 1999), such as lower firm performance (Claessens et al., 2002; La Porta et al., 2002; Lins, 2003), lower levels of dividends payout (La Porta et al., 2000), and, in various circumstances, expro- priation of minority owners (Claessens et al., 2000; Faccio et al., 2001; Mitton, 2002). The blue cluster in Fig. 2 mainly contains the articlesstudyingthe effect concentrated ownership hasonfirmperformance(Daltonetal.,2003).Some articles find a positive correlation between concentratedownershipandfirmvalue(Gedajlovic & Shapiro, 1998; Pedersen & Thomasen, 2003; Thomasen & Pedersen, 2000). Others report on finding a negative one (De Miguel et al., 2004). Besides, we can also spot articles claiming concentrated ownership does not affect firm value (Chang, 2003; Wright et al., 1996). The articles joined in the blue cluster also support the hy- pothesis that large owners’ identity matters in terms that different institutional owners follow various corporate strategies, leading the firm to attaindifferentlevelsofperformance(Thomasen& Pedersen,2000;Thomasen&Rose,2004).Anderson et al. (2003), whose article completes the list of 20 most cited articles in the field of concentrate ownership, for instance, find a piece of evidence suggestingthatfamilyownershipisassociatedwith better firm performance in comparison to the per- formance of widely held firms. ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 159 2.2.2 Clusters of articles published between 2005 and 2014 Discovering the principal-principal conflict and the question of the effect that concentrated owner- ship has on firm performance take the leading role among the dominant research areas concerning the literature of concentrated ownership during the period 2005 and 2014, while the discussion on principal-agent conflict is pushed into the back- ground. Instead, two new research areas receive more attention: family ownership and the relation- ship between multiple large owners. The green cluster contains articles that continu- ouslyfocusonstudyingtheeffectsthatconcentrated ownership has on firm performance. Studies once againintroduceconflictingresults(Delegado-Garcia et al., 2010; Perrini et al., 2008; Reddy et al., 2008; Shan & Mciver, 2011; Thomasen, 2005; Thomasen et al., 2006). Moreover, they show that the relation- ship between concentrated ownership and firm performance is often conditioned with the largest owner's identity (Boone et al., 2011; Heugens et al., 2009; Yeh & Woidtke, 2005). However, it seems that family ownership, out of all ownership types, received the most tremendous attention. Studies performed in the previous observed period already established the notion that family-control is by far the most common owner- ship structure worldwide (Claessens et al., 2000; Faccio & Lang, 2002; La Porta et al., 1999). The arti- cles joined in the blue cluster of Fig. 3, therefore, focus specifically on studying family ownership and its connection to firm performance (Jagi et al., 2009; Liuetal.,2012;Principeetal.,2011;SanMartin-Reya & Duran-Encalada, 2012). Some studies show that family firms are more profitable than widely-held firms, and they also outperform firms with other institutional types of large owners (Andres, 2008). Other studies suggest that family firms are less transparent and exhibit a negative relation to firm performance compared to widely held firms (Anderson et al., 2009). Nevertheless, we can also notice studies that could not find any influence that family ownership would have on firm performance (Sacristan-Navarro et al., 2011). A closer look at the small yellow cluster of Fig. 3 reveals the emergence of a new research area in the literature of concentrated ownership, which is a so- called complex ownership structure area. Plenty of articles were up until this time writtenon observing complexownershipstructures,inwhichresearchers mostly focused on studying the relationship Fig. 3. Cluster of articles in the literature of concentrated ownership in the period between 2005 and 2014. Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. 160 ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 between large and small owners. The yellow cluster presents a shift in this focus since it combines arti- cles that mainly study the relationship between multiplelargeowners(Attigetal.,2013;Boubaker& Sami, 2011; Gianfrate, 2007; Laeven & Levine, 2008; Mishra, 2011; Ruiz-Mallorquí & Santana-Martín, 2009). However, it needs to be pointed out that this idea isnotentirelynew.AsshowninFig.2,thistopicwas already analyzed in three articles published be- tween 1995 and 2004. Bennedsen and Wolfenzon (2000) claimed that large owners compete to create controllingcoalitionssinceformingacoalitioncould enable them private benefits from control. By grouping their cash flows, they attain higher power to take more efficient actions then would any of its owners, and their interests would be better aligned with the interests of minority owners. Pagano and Roell (1998) specify the conditions under which multiple large owners cross-monitor each other. This mechanism could help to reduce expropriation and increase thefirm's valuation. Yet, there is also a negative side to the large owners' presence, since they may cooperate in pursuing a greater expro- priation of minority owners (Zwiebel, 1995). From 2005 to 2014, the number of published arti- cles discussing this topic grew, and the results of studies show that the value of firms owned by multiple large owners might be higher as it was initially thought. The higher firms’ value was attached to the fact that multiple large owners take on an important monitoring role over the control- lingowner(Attigetal.,2013;Laeven&Levine,2008; Mishra, 2011). Since the values differ, researchers started advertising to devote more attention to examine this question. 2.2.3 Clusters of articles published between 2015 and 2019 The studies that analyze the effect of multiple large owners on firm performance grow substan- tially from 2015 to 2019. The growth was so signifi- cant that this topic became one of the three dominant research areas of concentrated ownership literature. Articles on the role of multiple large shareholders are combined in the red cluster of Fig.4.Theyshareasimilarmessage,statingthatthe presence of multiple large owners imposes positive impacts on firms' corporate governance mecha- nisms in a way that they limit the ability of con- trolling owner to extract private benefits and consequently increases firms’ value (Ben-Nasr, Boubaker,& Rouatbi, 2015; Boateng& Huang, 2017; Fig. 4. Cluster of articles in the literature of concentrated ownership in the period between 2015 and 2019. Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 161 Boubaker, Nguyen& Rouatbi, 2016; Boubaker et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2015). Furthermore, all articles combined in the blue cluster of Fig. 4 are once again dealing with family- controlled firms. Until now, it already got widely accepted that family-controlled firms represent the prevailing global economic and social force. Their high involvement in ownership structures world- wideexplainstheconsiderableattentionresearchers dedicated to understanding the implications fam- ilies have on firm performance. However, despite manyarticlesdealingwiththequestion,anddespite greatempiricalefforts,researchersstilldidnotcome to the conclusive findings on the relationship of family ownership to firm performance (Minichilli, Brogi, & Calabro, 2016). The same goes for the articles joined in the green cluster. Their attention is continuously directed to studying the effect that concentrated ownership has on firm performance, and studies once again intro- duce opposing theoretical predictions and incon- clusive empirical results within and between countries (Abdallah & Ismail, 2017; Aguilera & Crespi-Cladera, 2016; Aguilera et al., 2015; Aluncha & Kaminski, 2017; Lepore et al., 2017; Nguyen et al., 2015; Wang & Shailer, 2015). 2.2.4 A comparison of the three observed periods by the bibliometric analysis results A comparison of the three periods unveils the following. Our bibliometric analysis exposed key topics in concentrated ownership literature, each bound to a particular period mentioned in the introduction. In the first period (1995e2004), the researchers'focusedonstudyingtheprincipal-agent problem.Inparticular,theymainlyanalyzedhowto prevent the misbehavior of managers against the value formation. In the second period (2005e2014), the researchers focused on studying a principal- principal problem. More precisely, they were analyzing concentrated ownership and specific owners' effects on the firm's performance. In the third period (2015e2019), researchers switched to giving more attention to a new topic. They focused on observing multiple large owners, their in- teractions,andpossibleeffectsonafirm'svalue.The analysis clearly indicated the discussion on concentrated ownership and presented its breaking points, and is, therefore, in line with our first hy- pothesis set initially. However, it would be too early to conclude that such a mechanistic approach is completely observ- able in our data. In reality, each period did give more attention to a specific key topic, yet it also covered discussions on several other ones. Moreover, researchers did not study a particularly criticalissueonlyinoneperiod,buttheylookedatit throughmore periods. For instance, the research on the principal-agent problem started even before the first period (1994e2004), achieved the highest in- tensity during the first one (the green cluster in Fig. 2), and got later pushed into the background. Research on the principal-principal problem, which achieved the most apparent peak in the second period(theredclusterinFig.2),appearedalreadyin thefirstone(theredclusterinFig.2).Itcontinuedin the third one (the green cluster in Fig. 4), during which it was based more on a country-level approach. Family ownership research became apparent in the second period (the blue cluster in Fig. 3) and continuously played an essential role in the third one (the blue cluster in Fig. 4). Moreover, researchers studied the internationalization perspective in the first period and observed the worldwide ownership concentration from a prin- cipal-agent standpoint (the green cluster in Fig. 2). However, they switched their focus to country-spe- cific studies on the impact of ownership concentra- tion on a firm's performance (the green cluster in Fig. 4) in the third period. Consequently, some important topics, such as theoreticalcontributionsonmultipleownershipand itseffectsonafirm'sperformance(i.e.Zwiebel,1995; Pagano & Roell, 1998; Bennedsen & Wolfenzon, 2000; Bloch & Hege, 2003; Gomes & Novaes, 2006), studies dealing with the exit mechanism by selling off shares (Edmans, 2014), and profound country studies on multiple ownership and its effects on a firm's performance, received relatively little atten- tion throughout all three periods. Instead, many existing studies deal with showing a deviating behavior of countries from the trend in a particular period. Following our bibliometric analysis, there- fore, we cannot confirm the second hypothesis that each part of the discussion (principal-agent, prin- cipal-principal and multiple owners' relations) is treated equally. We can also not confirm the third hypothesis that profound country studies represent abasisofthecurrentresearch.Namely,datainmost of the country studies are used to test propositions of prevailing theoretical concepts of the agency theory. 3 Journals, countries of publication and authors To be more specific on the above assertion, we continue by investigating our data set. We first elaborate on a bibliometric analysis of journals that publish articles on the concentration of ownership 162 ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 and its impact on a firm's performance most frequently. This is followed by the analysis of countries where these articles were published, and, finally, by the analysis of the main authors pub- lishing the most in the field of concentrated ownership. 3.1 Journals We constructed a map of all the journals that published at least five articles in concentrated ownership literature and were cited at least 25 times. Fig. 5 shows that we can distinguish between three clusters of journals. If we look at the clusters more closely, we see that journals combined in the red one are mainly concerned with finance, while journals combined in the blue cluster are mainly concerned with the management and in the green one with an accounting topic. The leading journals in the field of finance are Corporate Governance: An International Review, Journal of Corporate Finance,and Journal of Financial Economics,theleadingjournalsin the field of management are Journal of Management and Governance, Strategic management Journal and Asia Pacific Journal of Management, while the leading journals in the field of accounting are Journal of Business Ethics, Managerial Finance and Journal of Applied Business Research. Table 3 shows the top 10 journals in concentrated ownershipliteraturebasedonthenumberofarticles published in the field. Eight are placed in the red cluster(Fig.5),andonlyoneintheblueandanother in the green cluster. The journal titled Corporate Governance: An International Review published 118 articles, followed by the Journal of Corporate Finance with 106 articles and the Journal of Financial Eco- nomics with 74 published articles. However, the one with the most cited articles is the Journal of Finance. Articles on concentrated ownership published in this journal were cited 21,696 times. Based on the numberofcitations,thesecondjournalistheJournal of Financial Economics, of which articles were cited only a few times less, which is 21,235 times. The Journal of Corporate Finance is ranked in third place, with articles being cited 4964 times. These three journals follow the same ranking also when comparing them based on the average citation per article. We also examined the journals based on their average impact factor achieved over the last five years. The impact factor serves as the measure Fig. 5. Cluster of journals in the literature of concentrated ownership. Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 163 of the frequency with which an average article was cited. The Journal of Financial Economics is ranked in thefirstplacewithanaverageimpactfactoroverthe last five years of 7.89. It is followed by the Journal of Business Ethics with an average impact factor over the last five years of 4.98 and the journal titled CorporateGovernance:AnInternational Reviewwithan averageimpactfactoroverthelastfiveyearsof4.15. 3.2 Countries of publication The analysis of the results on a country level which are presented in Table 4 reveals that the United States is the clear leader in the literature of concentrated ownership based on the number of published articles and based on the number of ci- tations. Throughout the whole observed period, 751 articles were published in the United States, fol- lowed by 453 articles published in China and 298 articles published in the United Kingdom. The United States ranked as the first country also while observing the number of citations. The articles published in the United States reported 52,729 ci- tations.Incontrast,HongKong,whichrankedinthe second place based on the number of citations, reported 14,525 citations and is followed by the United Kingdom with 8602 reported citations. However,HongKongtakesfirstplacewhileranking the countries based on the average number of cita- tions per article, with 116.2 average citations per article. Therefore, it by far overtakes the United States, which ranked the second place, with 70.2 average citations per article, and the United Kingdom, which ranked the third place with 36.6 average citations per article. Ifwecomparethenumberofpublishedarticlesof the first three most productive in three different periods, we can see that the dynamics vary. Fig. 6 showstheUnitedStatespublished159articlesinthe periodfrom1995to2004,or,onaverage15.9articles per year, followed by the United Kingdom with 36 articles, or, on average, 3.6 articles per year, while China published only four articles, or, on average, 0.4 articles per year. In the following period from 2005 to 2014, the United States again holds the leading role by publishing 393 articles or, on average, 39.3 articles per year. However, China takes second place by publishing 60 times more articles than in the previous period, which is 240 articles or, on average, 24 articles per year and is followed by the United Kingdom with 146 articles or,onaverage,14.6articlesperyear.Thelastperiod, Table 4. Top ten countries with the most published articles in the literature of concentrated ownership. Country Articles R Citations R Cit./article R United States 751 1 52,729 1 70.2 2 China 453 2 7001 4 15.5 8 United Kingdom 298 3 8602 3 28.9 4 Australia 199 4 2467 9 12.4 9 Spain 167 5 3210 6 19.2 7 Canada 166 6 6020 5 36.3 3 Malaysia 136 7 1213 10 8.9 10 South Korea 131 8 3067 8 23.4 6 Italy 130 9 3135 7 24.1 5 Hong Kong 125 10 14,525 2 116.2 1 Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. Fig. 6. The number of published articles in the United States, United Kingdom and China in three different periods. Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. Table 3. Top ten journals with the most published articles in the literature of concentrated ownership. Journal Articles R Citations R Cit./article R IF (5 years) R Corporate Governance: An International Review 118 1 3921 4 33.2 6 4.15 1 Journal of Corporate Finance 106 2 4964 3 46.8 3 3.18 6 Journal of Financial Economics 74 3 21,235 2 287.0 2 7.89 2 Journal of Banking and Finance 66 4 3014 5 45.7 4 3.53 5 Journal of Management and Governance 54 5 789 8 14.6 9 1.63 9 Pacific Basin Finance Journal 50 6 1163 7 23.3 7 1.98 7 Journal of Finance 43 7 21,696 1 504.6 1 6.2 3 Emerging Markets Finance and Trade 37 8 280 10 7.6 10 0.89 10 Journal of Business Finance and Accounting 34 9 626 9 18.4 8 1.97 8 Journal of Business Ethics 33 10 1499 6 45.4 5 4.98 4 Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. 164 ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 which is the period from 2015 to 2019, brings the switch in the top of the ranking based on the number of published articles since China now overtakes the first place with 218 published articles, and is followed by the United Stated with 206 and the United Kingdom with 121 published articles. Thelastperiodalsoseemstobethemostproductive in terms of the average published articles per year for all three observed countries. Therefore, China published, on average, 43.6 articles per year, which is also twice as much as in the previous period, while the United States published, on average, 41.6 articles per year, and the United Kingdom pub- lished, on average, 24.2 articles per year. 3.3 Main authors Lastly, we focused on the articles' authors by first studying the most productive authors regarding the number of articles related to the literature of concentrated ownership they wrote. Table 5, which lists the ten authors with the highest number of published articles in concentrated ownership liter- ature, reveals that the author with the most pub- lishedarticlesisLucRenneboog,with17articles.He isfollowedbySabriBoubakerandYinhuaYeh,both with 12 articles. In his research, Renneboog mostly focused on studying the relation between concen- trated ownership and firms’ mergers and acquisi- tions. At the same time, Boubaker dedicated his research to multiple large owners and their impact on firm value, with Yeh, in contrast, dedicating it to the study of the relationship between controlling owners and board composition and its dynamics. To check whether there is a difference in authors' exposure and dominance based on the number of published papers and based on the number of ci- tations,wepreparedadensitymapofauthorsinthe literature of concentrated ownership. We limit the authors to those who published at least five articles and were cited at least 50 times. The density map, presentedinFig.7,revealsanoticeabledifferencein the authors’ exposure if the weight is put on the numberofpublishedarticles(leftside)orwhetherit is put on the number of citations. If it is hard to differentiate among the authors based on the number of published articles, it is much easier to distinguish them based on the number of citations. Consequently, Table 6 lists the ten authors with the highest number of citations. The leading author in terms of the number of citations is Andrei Shleifer, with 14,244 citations and 2374 average ci- tations per article. Robert W. Vishny follows him with 9683 citations, and then Rafael La Porta and Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, both being cited 8597 times. However, all ten of them were already mentioned in the previous chapter while discussing the most cited and relevant articles in concentrated owner- ship literature. More specifically, the first nine au- thors, going from Andrei Shleifer to Mara Faccio, can be found in the red cluster in Fig. 2 and among theauthorsofthe20mostcitedarticlespresentedin Table 2. In contrast, David J. Denis is placed in the green cluster in Fig. 2 and is at the same time not ranked among the authors of the 20 most cited ar- ticles. The authors’ position again proves the dominance and importance of principal-principal Table 5. Top ten authors with the most published articles in the liter- ature of concentrated ownership. Author Articles R Citations R Cit./article R Renneboog, L. 17 1 800 4 47,1 5 Boubaker, S. 12 2 185 9 15,4 9 Yeh, Y.H. 12 2 434 6 36,2 7 Guedhami, O. 11 4 609 5 55,4 4 Kang, J.K. 11 4 1774 1 161,3 1 Ntim, C.G. 11 4 304 8 27,6 8 Thomsen, S. 11 4 894 3 81,3 3 Habib, A. 10 8 115 10 11,5 10 Laeven, L. 10 8 1578 2 157,8 2 Pindado, J. 10 8 431 7 43,1 6 Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. Fig. 7. Density map of authors in the literature of concentrated ownershipwith weights put on the number of published articles (left) and the number of citations (right). Source: Scopus database (2020) and own work. ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS REVIEW 2021;23:152e169 165 conflict theory in the literature of concentrated ownership, which was, of course, the prevailing topic of the articles combined in the red cluster in Fig. 2. Based on our analysis in the last three sub- chapters, we can argue that the essential articles in thefield of concentrated ownership appeared in the leading financial journals, published mainly in the USA, China, and the United Kingdom. The USA is prevailing in all three periods, with China increas- ingly becoming more critical in the last two observed periods. Leading authors in terms of cita- tion(whichusuallydeterminestheresearch)arethe most exposed authors, known from the theoretical discussion on principal-agent problems and the discussion on principal-principal problems. The above analysis therefore additionally supports the missing link to our second and third hypotheses, as already elaborated in the previous chapter. The focus is still on researching of the first two prob- lems, i.e. principal-agent and principal-principal conflicts, set by the leading principal-agent theory, while the theory of blockholding relations is only mentioned sporadically (and not elaborated or cited frequently). This is seen even more in empirical studies.Countrydataareinmanycasesusedonlyto test propositions of the prevailing theoretical concepts. 4 Conclusion Itisnotalongtimeagowhenthefamousquote “it is now the end of the corporate governance” (Hansmann & Kraakman, 2001) was born. That was at the time when the Anglo-Saxon shareholder model became widely spread around the world. After reaching the Washington Consensus, corpo- rate governance's main focus was to support dispersed ownership structure in publicly traded corporations and liquid capital markets. Back then, researchers and others considered the appearance of blockholdings as some temporal phenomenon and/or a substitute for legal protection in a poor institutional environment. Concentrated ownership was back then, indeed, viewed as a part of the so- lution against managers' misbehavior. A few years later, the term concentrated ownership became a buzzword in the corporate governance literature, focusing in thefirst line on dilution of afirm's value by self-interested blockholders. However, it seems that its crucial intentions are driving firms back again to reach as dispersed ownership structures as possible and to reach liquid capital markets. How is this vicious circle ever going to be resolved? As shown in our research, the researchers mainly follow the leading (normative) approaches in the existing concentrated ownership literature. Howev- er, to find answers to several critical issues that the society is dealing with, such as what type of ownership structure model works and how to incorporate deeper institutional characteristics into research, it is of utmost importance to change the direction and start applying a positive approach. Moreover, researchers should treat all theoretical strands more equally. Their focus should not only be on supporting the mainstream theories, but should instead investigate which theoretical frame- work(includingbuildingnewones)bestfitsthedata in a particular environment. In other words, future research should be more country-based, using consistent, more extended data sets, and explaining data by applying different theoretical frameworks and profound institutional analysis. In light of heterogeneous corporate struc- tures that characterize the present landscape, the integrative part of the research would be to look for cross-fertilization of ideas, which could be spread worldwide. 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