A multivariate comparison of foreign-owned versus domestically-owned private firms: The case of top 500 industrial enterprises in Turkey

Abstract

This paper examines the major aspects of conduct and performance that distinguish foreign-owned firms that operate in Turkey from domestically-owned firms. The firms that are analyzed are among the top 500 industrial enterprises in Turkey. We conduct repeated measures logistic regression on 77 foreign-owned firms and 215 domestically-owned firms for the period 2004-2008. The results show that domestically-owned firms have higher capital productivity than foreign-owned firms. Foreign-owned firms and domestic firms do not differ in terms of our other performance variables which are pretax profit margin, return on equity and labor productivity. Moreover, the two group of firms do not differ in terms of size, capital intensity, export intensity, patent intensity and trademark intensity. Domestically-owned firms also have higher capital productivity than majority foreignowned firms. On the other hand, majority foreign-owned firms are larger in size than domestically-owned firms. These two type of firms do not differ in terms of our other discriminating variable candidates. © EuroJournals Publishing, Inc. 2010.