Ultimate Owner and Firm Performance - Evidence from Romanian Mining and Quarrying Listed Firms.

The main objectives of this paper are to describe the necessary steps to identify the ultimate owner and to investigate the relation between the ultimate ownership and thefinancial performance of Romanian mining and quarrying listed firms. The study was conducted for the companies listed on Bucharest Stock Exchange, in both regulated andnon-regulated segments. The final sample included 17 companies of mining and quarrying.Return on Equity was used for measuring the financial performance of the firms. The ultimate ownership was measured by the percentage of voting rights held by a shareholder. Econometric tools like multiple linear regression analysis were used for analysis. Theresults of the study suggest that there is a significant negative link between financial performance and divergence between voting rights and cash-flow rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]