Share Classes

05 August 2019

Bolstering Family Control: Evidence from Loyalty Shares

We study the introduction of a new control-enhancing mechanism in Italy, a country characterized by family-controlled firms and growing shareholders’ protection by institutional investors. Since 2014, Italian firms have been...

Emanuele Bajo | Massimiliano Barbi | Marco Bigelli | Ettore Croci

Dual Class Shares

28 January 2019

Sticking around Too Long? Dynamics of the Benefits of Dual-Class Voting

Using a new dataset of corporate voting-rights from 1971 to 2015, we find that young dual-class firms trade at a premium and operate at least as efficiently as young single-class firms. As dualclass firms mature, their valuation...

Hyunseob Kim | Roni Michaely

Dual Class Shares

16 April 2018

Loyalty Shares with Tenure Voting - Does the Default Rule Matter? Evidence from the Loi Florange Experiment

The contractual theory of the firm predicts that companies adopt charters that maximise firm value, regardless of the default rule. We test this proposition around an exogenous switch of the default from one share-one vote to tenure...

Marco Becht | Yuliya Kamisarenka | Anete Pajuste

Voting

01 March 2015

The Disappearing Taboo of Multiple Voting Shares: Regulatory Responses to the Migration of Chrysler-Fiat

In 2014, the Italian Government broke an old taboo of Italian corporate law, joining the ranks of many different legal systems that allow the issuance of multiple voting shares (MVSs), including the United States. The importance of the...

Marco Ventoruzzo