Interbrand (Interbrand, 2010) and that a few hotel brand equity studies (e.g. Kim et al.,
2003; Prasad and Dev, 2000) have been conducted. Furthermore, the determination of
the size factor could be challenging because many lodging firms expand through
management contracts and franchising agreements in addition to investing in physical
assets as noted above.
2.3.2 Ownership structure. One central issue for equity financing is the topic of
ownership structure and its impact on corporate governance and firm performance in
light of the agency relationship. Although Demsetz (Harold Demsetz, personal
communication, March 3, 2004) stated that there is no reason to expect small firms with
highly concentrated ownership structures to perform better or worse than large firms
with more diffuse structures, empirical studies in mainstream finance mainly support a
positive relationship between ownership structure and firm performance. This
relationship has been examined using multiple regression analyses to reveal
significant and positive relationships between managerial shareholdings and firm
performance for both the restaurant (Gu and Kim, 2001) and hotel (Gu and Qian, 1999)
industries. Both studies used multiple accounting measures (i.e. return on equity (ROE)
and return on assets (ROA)) and stock returns as firm performance proxies and
concluded that managerial ownership could be a proxy for the convergence of interests
between managers and owners, and could help improve accounting profitability and
equity owners’ returns. Nevertheless, neither study considered other affiliates such as
creditors within the agency framework, nor did they address the possible endogenous
relationship between ownership structure and firm performance. As a result, the
regression coefficients obtained in these studies could be biased and their conclusions
are potentially challengeable. Therefore, conclusions from Gu and Kim’s and Gu and
Qian’s studies require further validation addressing the above-mentioned
shortcomings.
The increasing importance of institutions in the hospitality industry can be
observed from the growing volume of equity that they control (Tsai and Gu, 2007a),
and as a result, several studies have been conducted on institutional investors.
Studying the “Monday effect” on tourism stocks, Leung and Lee (2006) showed that
stocks followed by fewer institutional investors can cause negative Monday effects and
that the Monday return of a stock is positively correlated with its institutional
shareholdings. They argued that by attracting more institutional investors, the
volatility of tourism stock returns is reduced and the required rate of return for
shareholders is lowered. Institutional investors’ preferences for lodging stock
investment were examined by Oak and Dalbor (2008a). While institutions generally
prefer large firms, different types of institutions favor firms with different financial
characteristics. For example, banks prefer lodging firms with low book-to-market
value ratios, high liquidity, and high growth opportunities, whereas insurance
companies favor those with high capital expenditure-to-asset and high debt ratios.
Mutual funds, pension funds, and brokerage firms were also examined in their study.
However, Oak and Dalbor’s study suffered from the oversight of possible endogeneity
between the ownership and performance variables.
The relationship between institutional ownership and firm performance in the
restaurant (Tsai and Gu, 2007a) and casino (Tsai and Gu, 2007b) industries has also
been studied. Considering the possible ownership endogeneity issue and applying both
the ordinary least square (OLS) and two-stage least square (2SLS) approaches, both