The Effect of Foreign Ownership and Product Market Competition on Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam*

In recent years, firm performance has been a topic that attracts many researchers. It is extremely important to identify the factors that change firm performance. In the current trend of competition and integration, foreign ownership, product market competition is found to reduce agency costs and impact firm performance. The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between foreign ownership, product market competition, and firm performance. Our research using a quantile regression model, through panel data of 290 companies listed on the Vietnam stock exchange (include Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi stock exchanges) from 2017 to 2019 that was collected by Thomson - Reuters DataStream has shown that foreign ownership and product market competition have a positive impact on Tobin’s Q but are not statistically significant with ROA. Critically, our quantile regression results suppose foreign ownership, product market competition have a significantly larger positive impact in high-performing firms relative to low-performing firms. The results help propose solutions to planners and managers to change foreign ownership and product market competition to increase business performance. Besides, through quantile regression analysis, managers need to pay attention to the impact on foreign ownership, product market competition; there will be a difference between high-performing firms relative to low-performing firms.