Corporate Governance and Performance in Local Public Utilities

This paper analyses the effects of corporatization, mixed ownership and board composition on the behaviour and performance of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1,630 directors during 1994-2004 has been collected. Our main findings indicate that, while the corporatization process and the presence of private investors are positively correlated with profitability, the presence of politically connected directors, who dominate boards of directors in the Italian public utilities in the period under investigation, exerts a negative impact on performance.