| After a firm conducts an initial public offering (IPO), little is known about how much external ownership structure influences the corporate strategy that is implemented immediately post-IPO. The repetition of four strategies implemented by well-established public companies---seasoned equity offerings, acquisition, diversification, and professional management transition---makes them the strategic choices regarded as norms for companies whose ownership is publicly traded, IPO firms are likely to follow the norms by implementing one or more of these strategies shortly after going public in order to gain legitimacy and become institutionalized in the public arena, because legitimacy and institutionalization are very important for corporate performance and survival. However, according to agency theory, managers can be opportunistic and expropriate shareholders' wealth when ownership is diffused and external shareholders delegate direct control over business operations to managers. Therefore, the power of external shareholders to protect their wealth from managerial opportunism by designating certain strategies that are in their best interest is doubtful. In this dissertation, I propose and test the influence of equity concentration held by active external shareholders (1) venture capitalists, (2) activist institutional investors, (3) blockholders, and (4) outside directors---on corporate strategic choices. With differences in their equity holdings, investment objectives, and expertise, these external shareholders may prefer diverse corporate strategies and may use their equity holding concentration to induce those strategic choices. With panel data of 200 manufacturing IPO firms, findings from event history analysis indicate that external ownership structure can explain the likelihood of the four strategic choices modestly and only the equity concentration of certain types of external shareholders affects the likelihood of a specific strategic choice at a given time. |
