Croatian banking sector research: relationship between ownership structure, concentration, owners’ type and bank performance

Abstract

Banks are important financial intermediaries of any national economy, and corporate governance has an important role in banking sector; especially due to processes of the globalization and the internationalization, and also because of the sensitivity of the activities between the interest groups. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between ownership structure, concentration, owners’ type and bank performance. The authors made a research of banks' ownership structure using publicly available data. Using statistical tools authors discovered relationships between bank ownership structure and bank performance indicators (average asset, total asset, average equity, profit (loss) before taxes, profit (loss) after taxes, ROAA, ROAE). Further they discuss the relationships between ownership structure and a number of consequences for the bank performance. The authors discovered significant correlation between bank ownership structure and performance indicators variables that are described in the paper.