Am I Right or Am I Right?

Though the value of a right should be not lower than zero, negative voting premiums often appear in recent empirical evidence. The present paper highlights some possible measurement errors and contemporary proposes a new measure, the vote segment, which incorporates all dividend privileges. Results from Italian non-voting shares listed in the 1999-2008 period show that the more accurate measure reports an average voting right equal to +45.58%, while the standard relative price difference or the Nenova (2003) measure greatly underestimate its value and report average values equal to +20.35% and +1.38%, respectively. Our methodology reports almost no negative values, while traditional measures report almost 25% of negative values. Though a more correct measure of the voting right is essential to estimate its average value and make meaningful cross-country comparisons, the determinants of the voting rights are well captured also by the relative price difference measure, once the dividend yield differences are controlled for. JEL Classification Code: G34.