Ownership structure, horizontal agency costs and the performance of high-tech entrepreneurial firms

Massimo Colombo, Annalisa Croce () and Samuele Murtinu

Small Business Economics, 2014, vol. 42, issue 2, 265-282

Abstract: We use the lens of the resource-based view and horizontal agency cost theory to analyse the effect of the presence of different types of individual owners, i.e., owner-managers and non-manager individual shareholders, on the performance of high-tech entrepreneurial firms. Ownership enlargement may contribute to fill the resource gap faced by entrepreneurial firms and improve firm performance. However, whereas owner-managers engender low horizontal agency costs, non-manager individual shareholders generate high horizontal agency problems because of their limited managerial involvement. Our results on a sample of Italian high-tech entrepreneurial firms show that the number of owner-managers has a positive effect on firm performance, whereas the effect of the number of non-manager individual shareholders is negligible. This latter effect becomes more positive, even though still not statistically significant, when firms are highly leveraged confirming the disciplining role of bank debt. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Horizontal agency costs; High-tech entrepreneurial firms; Productivity; Ownership structure; Bank debt; G32; L26; M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-013-9483-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:42:y:2014:i:2:p:265-282

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-013-9483-y

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().