IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/indcch/v22y2013i2p427-458.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effects of legal reforms on the ownership structure of listed companies

Author

Listed:
  • Francesca Cuomo
  • Alessandro Zattoni
  • Giovanni Valentini

Abstract

A general view in the corporate governance literature is that corporate ownership structures are rather stable in time and change slowly. However, even if changes in ownership structures are difficult due to path dependence, anecdotal evidence indicates that some sort of transition towards the US style corporate ownership could be occurring in civil-law countries. The aim of this article is to test the so-called "law and finance" view, which predicts that this convergence will only happen if the appropriate regulatory framework is in place. We test this prediction using longitudinal data from Italian listed companies, assessing the effects of recent legal reforms. Our results show that an increase in the protection of investors' rights is associated with a lower use of control enhancing mechanisms and a lower separation of control and cash flow rights, while it is less evident if it is associated with a more dispersed ownership. These findings carry important implications for theory and practice. Copyright 2013 The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Francesca Cuomo & Alessandro Zattoni & Giovanni Valentini, 2013. "The Effects of legal reforms on the ownership structure of listed companies," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 22(2), pages 427-458, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:22:y:2013:i:2:p:427-458
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/icc/dts015
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gerhard Schnyder & Centre for Business Research, 2018. "Investigating New Types of 'Decoupling': Minority Shareholder Protection in the Law & Corporate Practice," Working Papers wp502, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.
    2. Schmid, Stefan & Altfeld, Frederic & Dauth, Tobias, 2018. "Americanization as a driver of CEO pay in Europe: The moderating role of CEO power," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 53(4), pages 433-451.
    3. Giuseppe D’Onza & Alessandra Rigolini, 2017. "Does director capital influence board turnover after an incident of fraud? Evidence from Italian listed companies," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 21(4), pages 993-1022, December.
    4. Alessandro Zattoni & Emmanouil Dedoulis & Stergios Leventis & Hans Van Ees, 2020. "Corporate governance and institutions—A review and research agenda," Corporate Governance: An International Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(6), pages 465-487, November.
    5. Zattoni, Alessandro & Witt, Michael A. & Judge, William Q. & Talaulicar, Till & Chen, Jean Jinghan & Lewellyn, Krista & Hu, Helen Wei & Gabrielsson, Jonas & Rivas, Jose Luis & Puffer, Sheila & Shukla,, 2017. "Does board independence influence financial performance in IPO firms? The moderating role of the national business system," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 52(5), pages 628-639.
    6. Sven-Olof Yrjö Collin & Yuliya Ponomareva & Sara Ottosson & Nina Sundberg, 2017. "Governance strategy and costs: board compensation in Sweden," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 21(3), pages 685-713, September.
    7. Aguilera, Ruth V. & Crespi-Cladera, Rafel, 2016. "Global corporate governance: On the relevance of firms’ ownership structure," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 50-57.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:22:y:2013:i:2:p:427-458. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/icc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.