We investigate whether ownership concentration influences bank profitability in a developing country context. We focus on bank ownership concentration measured as the amount of direct equity held by a majority shareholder categorised into: high ownership concentration, moderate ownership...

The Italian industrial sector is characterized by a number of peculiarities compared to other advanced countries. One of these is the small average size of its firms. This particular model of organization of production, based on the small dimension and often on informal relationships within and...

The leveraging of control is the possibility for the controlling shareholder to lower his direct participation in capital through a convergence of financial and economic interest with other shareholders in the firm. In this paper, the setting of a coalition contract is done by awarding stocks to...

Going public often creates an agency conflict between the owner-manager and minority shareholders. This problem is especially severe in countries with poor legal investor protection, such as France. We examine the controlling position of owner-managers in French IPO firms. We find that investors...

Multiple blockholder structures are a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. The theoretical literature, however, provides conflicting predictions on whether a single large blockholder or a set of dispersed smaller blockholders is better for firm value. Using U.S. data, we find a negative correlation...

This paper examines how family and non-family ownership affects the performance of Swiss listed firms from 2003 to 2010. We distinguish between these two types of controlling shareholders since they have different objectives. We hypothesise that only family shareholders have a real incentive to...

This paper examines stock repurchases from an agency perspective by identifying agency costs across three dimensions — interest conflicts and information asymmetry, managerial discretion, and the use of alternative mechanisms to mitigate agency conflicts. We use ownership structure as a proxy...

This paper empirically examines the relation between corporate risk-taking and the organizational level with which internal auditing is affiliated in Chinese listed firms. Using a sample of 1,806 firm-year data available from 2007 to 2009, we find that Chinese corporate risk-taking is only...