Globalization, Firm Performance and Group Affiliation in Emerging Markets: Evidence from Turkey

Although the process of globalization deeply affects businesses in all aspects, unfortunately, the firm level effects of globalization are highly unexplored in the literature. This research aims to explore how the overall globalization level of a country as well as her economic, her political and her social globalization levels affect the performance of both the group affiliated and the unaffiliated firms, operating in this business environment by using pooled panel analysis. To search for the potential differences that may prevail between the firm performance effects of globalization on the group affiliated firms and on the unaffiliated firms, it focuses on Turkish listed companies for the period 2002-2009. The findings of the study indicate that while globalization improves the stock returns of both the group affiliated and the unaffiliated firms, it deteriorates the operational income of both groups of firms. The findings also imply that although the effects of economic and political globalization do not seem to differentiate much between the group affiliated and the unaffiliated firms, social globalization may be argued to affect the operating incomes and the firm growth rates of group affiliated and unaffiliated firms differently. Last but not least, the findings suggest that the most influential dimension of globalization in terms of its effects on firm performance for Turkish companies seems to be the economic globalization.