The Impact of a Stock Listing on the Determinants of Firm Performance

Research on the question of what makes firms perform well has shown that product market competition, financial pressure and ownership or ownership identity are important performance drivers. Recently the issue of whether or not their impact is influenced by environmental or contextual characteristics has received increasing attention. In this paper we test, on a sample of Belgian firms, whether performance drivers behave differently in a non-quoted environment as compared to a quoted one. Our main result is that the impact of competition, financial pressure and family control does indeed depend upon whether the firm is quoted or not. Overall, for nonquoted companies the performance drivers do not enhance performance and in mostcases are even detrimental. For quoted companies however the results are just the opposite. We find that this difference in driver functioning explains the better performance of quoted firms vis-agrave;-vis their private peers