Ownership Structure and the Corporate Efficiency of Listed Companies in Tehran Stock Exchange Market

To achieve high speed transition to market economy, policy makers in former Soviet Union and East European countries divested state-owned- enterprises to the public. This method, called voucher or mass privatization, was the main method of privatization in these countries. Different studies revealed that reducing ownership concentration through voucher privatization was not promising and deteriorated the enterprise efficiency. In Justice Equity Scheme, Iranian authorities have announced to devolve the ownership of state-owned- enterprises to the public. This paper is an attempt to find the effects of this dispersed ownership. After a brief survey on the experience of privatization in socialist countries, especially Czech republic, we have calculated the ownership concentration in Tehran Stock Exchange Market to compare the gains under different ownership structures. The results show that minor shareholding and small ownership lead to worsened economic performance of the enterprises.