Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2023, 69(4):151-161 | DOI: 10.17221/78/2023-AGRICECON

Corporate governance, ownership concentration and performance of European agricultural companies: New empirical evidenceOriginal Paper

Graţiela Georgiana Noja ORCID...¹, Mirela Cristea ORCID...², Nicoleta Sîrghi ORCID...³, Oana-Ramona Socoliuc Guriță ORCID...⁴, Ioana Vădăsan ORCID...³, Daniel Cîrciumaru ORCID...²

¹ Department of Marketing and International Economic Relations, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, West University of Timişoara, Timişoara, Romania

² Department of Finance, Banking and Economic Analysis, Center for Economic, Banking and Financial Research (CEBAFI), Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Craiova, Craiova, Romania

³ Department of Economics and Economic Modelling, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, West University of Timişoara, Timişoara, Romania

⁴ Department of Economics and International Relations, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Iași, Romania

Considering the relevance of the agricultural sectors for the European countries' development, but also the volatile features of agriculture, with unforeseen risks induced by climate, ensuring durable economic progress is foremost for the companies. This paper aims to assess the associations of the key parties in corporate governance (directors, managers, advisers, and shareholders), employees and the independence level with the main outcomes and capacity/size of the European companies operating in agriculture, fishing, and aquaculture activities. Using a newly compiled and complex dataset of 3 184 active companies from Europe, provided by the ORBIS database, advanced modelling approaches were employed, based on the robust regression (RREG) and Gaussian Graphical Model (GGM). The main findings emphasised that: directors, managers, and advisors had a strong positive influence on the firms' size, boosting their turnover, and the shareholders' funds; advisors induced positive connections with the companies' liquidity; the number of employees exerted positive impacts on the firms' size and outcomes of these companies; the independence level exerted a negative impact on the firms' size and outcomes. Finally, specific measures must be addressed to primarily reconsider the number of directors and managers and the shareholders' participation in the ownership of these companies due to their unfavourable exerted effects.

Keywords: agriculture; board structure; econometric modelling; Europe; financial performance; strategy

Received: March 5, 2023; Revised: April 1, 2023; Accepted: April 11, 2023; Published: April 28, 2023  Show citation