Alibaba, the NYSE-traded Chinese ecommerce giant, is currently valued at over $500 billion. But Alibaba’s governance is opaque, obscuring who controls the firm. We show that Jack Ma, who now owns only about 5%, can effectively...
This Article contributes to the long-standing and heated debate over dual-class companies by placing a spotlight on a significant set of dual-class companies whose structures raise especially severe governance concerns: those with...
A central challenge in the regulation of controlled firms is curbing rent extraction by controllers. As independent directors and fiduciary duties are often insufficient, some jurisdictions give minority shareholders veto rights...
We find that potential conflicts between majority and minority shareholders strongly influence how dividends respond to taxes. When the controlling shareholder has a smaller stake, the incentives to extract private benefits are...
The phenomenon of groups of companies is very common in modern corporate reality. The empirical data on groups of companies are heterogeneous because they are collected for very different regulatory and other objectives. Two main...
Over the past dozen years numerous overseas based businesses with dominant shareholders have become quoted on the London Stock Exchange, prominent examples of which have joined the ?blue chip? FTSE 100 stock market index. While this...
A central issue in corporate governance research is the extent to which “good” governance practices are universal (one size mostly fits all) or instead depend on country and firm characteristics. We report evidence that supports...
We provide an overview of the corporate governance practices of Brazilian public companies, based primarily on an extensive 2005 survey of 116 companies. We focus on the 88 responding Brazilian private firms which are not majority...
