The Effect of Institutional Ownership on Firm Performance : The Case of U.S. Listed Shipping Companies

This paper examines the relationship between institutional ownership and firm performance for US listed shipping companies using quarterly 13F reports of institutional holdings over the period 2002 to 2016. Traditionally, public shipping companies exhibit a large concentration of ownership as specific individuals and families hold large percentages of the total shares outstanding. However, institutional investors also hold a substantial percentage of ownership of U.S. listed shipping firms, whose effects on firm performance have not been examined previously in the literature. Results reveal a negative relationship between the percentage of institutional ownership and firm performance, which is primarily attributed to non-strategic rather than strategic institutional investors. This result survives a set of panel data estimators which take into account the presence of dynamic endogeneity in the relationship examined