This study examines the link between ownership structures and R&D activities in Canada. Our main hypothesis is that highly concentrated ownership structures or the presence of controlling minority shareholders negatively affects R&D intensity of Canadian manufacturing firms. We observe a...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the legal status of a firm and the set of corporate goals that it pursues have an influence on the firm's efficiency. To perform this investigation, the productivity of the two main Canadian railways, namely Canadian National Railway (CNR) and...

The theory of law and finance proposed by La Porta et al. (1998) predicts that minority controlled ownership structures, i.e. the structures that allow voting rights to exceed cash-flow rights, are more frequent in legal contexts where investors are not well protected against the expropriation...

Prior empirical work examined the relationship between dominant shareholders, whose voting rights exceed cash flow rights, and firm value. In this study, we adopt a different perspective and argue that because of the risk imposed on minority shareholders and debtors, such excess control likely...