Strategic Ownership, Networking Effect and Firm Value : A Study of Indian Corporate Governance

The number of studies available in India to address issues specific to institutional structure of production are undesirably very limited. A quite of them is at the industry Level and structured in the traditional neo-classical framework where institutional issues are suppressed. Many of them have restricted their discussion to a very limited set of issues and often put that as appendices. Even in many cross-country studies and reviews (like Shleifer and Vishny, 1997 and La porta, Lopez De-Silanes and Shleifer, 1999) India has not been featured. However, in the later phase of Nineties, some of the Indian scholars (Mostly non-resident academicians) have tried to fill this gap by exclusively focusing on institutional aspect of production. Studies like Chhibber and Majumdar (1998, 1999), Majumdar and Chhibber (1998), Patibandla (2006), Sarkar and Sarkar (1999, 2000), Khanna and Palepu (1999, 2000, 2004) are the few illustrious work on Indian corporate governance system.In this work we have taken forward the above tradition by exclusively focusing on micro issues. We have viewed the performance of firm as the outcome of several competitive processes which are either endogenous in nature or are purely exogenous to the firm. The issue of ownership is the dominant aspect of our analysis. These are the several questions which we have raised:1. What is the impact of group structure and group formation on firm?2. What is the optimal level of diversification?3. Do family dominant firms perform better than managerial firms?4. How the nexus between politician and family helps/destroys the firm value?5. How the markets perceive the signal of corporate-corporate relationship?6. Does business networking makes the firm less sensitive to external shocks?7. Does family reputation bear any significance for firm performance?8. How the firm income stream is shaped when there is contestability of control vis-a-vis no-contestability?