The Agency Cost of Concentrated Institutional Ownership: Evidence From Indonesia

Abstract

The purpose is to analyze the role of institutional ownership in firms with managerial ownership in reducing agency costs for the Indonesian listed firm. The polled data from the annual report of companies listed on the In-donesia Stock Exchange and data obtained are pooled from 949 units from 2008 to 2020. We have analyzed through regression of data from dependent is agency cost, independent managerial ownership, annual sales, total assets, independent commissionaires, and control variable is debt ratio. The total sales to total assets ratio has been used as a proxy for agency costs. The result is that higher agency cost proves more effectively (more than 1) in us-ing assets to generate annual sales. Quartile analysis has been used to determine the interval of managerial ownership, the result is that managerial ownership at the lower level (34%-59%) and higher (60%-74%) is significant to agency costs. Inverse, when none of the managerial ownership, much lower (<33%), and much higher (>74%) is insignificant to agency cost. Our results support the predictions of Jensen & Meckling (1976), which state that ownership structure as voting power and monitoring are mechanisms for aligning the interests of shareholders. The presence of much lower of managerial ownership results in managers not having enough power to produce agency costs. No different, when managerial ow-nership is at a much higher level, they also do not have the potential to produce agency costs because institutional investors can monitor more op-portunistic management behavior. Both levels of managerial ownership pro-ve more effectively use assets to generate annual sales.Originality/value is a study focusing on one of the largest emerging economies, i.e. Indonesia.