Large Shareholders and Stock Price Synchronicity: Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how large shareholders affect the information environment, as measured by stock price synchronicity, of listed firms in the Vietnam stock exchanges. Upon applying fixed effects and instrumental variables fixed effects with firm-level clustered standard errors for a sample of 160 listed firms in the Vietnam stock exchanges over the period 2008–2017, the results show that stock price synchronicity is negatively associated with the two largest shareholders’ ownership and positively related to state ownership. The findings support that non-state large ownership plays an important role in improving the information environment in emerging markets where investor protection laws are relatively weak.