Corporate performance : does ownership matter? A comparison of foreign - and domestic - owned firms in Greece and Portugal

Abstract

The paper investigates whether multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in Portugal and Greece perform differently than domestic firms using two samples. The first contains 2651 and the second 523 firms operating in Greece in 1997 and Portugal in 1992 respectively. Departures from normality of firms' profitability motivated the adoption of the robust technique of quantile regression. The estimation results suggest that ownership ties do not make a significant difference with respect to performance of firms operating in Portugal. Results were similar for firms operating in Greece and only when firms in the upper quantiles of gross profits were compared, MNCs were found to significantly perform better than domestic firms. It is probably because MNCs have to compensate for their liability of foreigness that in spite of their technological advantages they cannot persistently outperform their domestic rivals.