Ownership structure and corporate governance in Turkish stock companies

The importance of corporate governance has increased in the companies after the big corporate scandals. Financial crisis emerged globally or domestically also draw attention to the corporate governance issue as a key element for longer and better financial performance.The aim of the study is to analyze the impacts of ownership structure on performances of Turkish non-financial firms listed on Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) by considering the financial crisis emerged in 2001 and 2008. The sample of the study consists of all non-financial firms quoted at ISE and the firm-level data for the sample period covers the years from 1999 to 2008 is obtained from the official website of ISE.In the first chapter corporate governance and its principles are defined. This chapter also discussed the possible benefits of corporate governance issues. Second chapter reviews the literature about the effects of corporate governance and ownership structure on firm performance. The empirical analysis of the study is also provided in this chapter.The results show that the relationship between ownership structure and firm performance is statistically significant and the direction is negative for free float rate and it is statistically insignificant for first major shareholder. Second major shareholder is only significant to explain Tobin?s Q in OLS model. The relationship between second major shareholder and Tobin?s Q is negative in this model. All indicators of ownership structure show insignificant relationship with return on equity.