Resumen de The Impact of Ownership Structure on Bank Profitability and the Diversity of Products: new Evidence from Iraqi Banks

Zainab Hamid Kati Al Harishawi, Faten Zoghlami

• Purpose: The objective of this study was to identify the impact of the ownership structure on the profitability and the diversity of banking products in commercial banks listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange.

    Theoretical framework: Investigating the factors affecting bank performance is an important debate these days. The literature refers to the importance of the ownership structure in deriving various types of performance in companies. However, there is still much to investigate and learn about the sensitivity of the performance of banks to various types of ownership structures.

    Design/methodology/approach: Using a linear regression model, we analyzed the relationships between ownership structures and the company’s profitability, as well as product diversity for the period span from 2011 to 2020. We focused our investigation on commercial banks listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange.

    Findings: The empirical findings show that the ownership structure has a mixed effect on Iraqi bank profitability measured by return on assets, return on equity, and Q-Tobin ratio. Nevertheless, the result confirm the significant influence of the ownership structure on the diversity of banking products.

    Research, Practical & Social implications: The results indicate that Iraqi banks’ regulators and supervisors should give more attention to the sensitivity of banks’ performance and diversity of the products to the effect of ownership structure.

    Originality/value: This study is among the first to investigate the relationships between ownership structure measured by the concentration of ownership, institutional ownership, and administrative ownership on the Iraqi commercial banks’ performance, whether financial or non-financial such as the bank's profitability and diversification of its products.