In this paper we investigate the relationship between family ownership structure and corporate value across a sample of 1314 firm-year observations of China’s family publicly listed companies (PLCs), from 2004 to 2008. We find a significant inverse-U-shaped relationship between the controlling family’s ultimate cash-flow rights and corporate value; as measured by Tobin’s Q. That is, as family-o...

Institutional context influences corporate financing behavior of firms and emerging economies provide an interesting scenario to investigate this phenomenon. Therefore, in this study, we focus on the capital structure decision of Chinese listed firms which continues to have government as a significant shareholder. We choose the sample period after the Split-Share Reform so that we can distingui...

Across the social sciences, agency theory has become one of the basic frameworks through which to analyze the organizational problem of aligning interests between owners (principals) and those who carry out the work of the corporation (agents). Less often analyzed within this framework is the problem of multiple principals with different incentives and agendas. In today’s global economy, this i...

Based on panel data from 1995-1997, the research focuses on the impact of ownership structure on the performance of Russian non-financial privatized companies that constitute the group of blue chips of the country’s stock market. Several performance indicators are used: Tobin’s Q, labour productivity and profitability. In particular, the paper analyzes the relationship between company performan...

The extent to which firm ownership is concentrated or dispersed varies considerably from country to country. Explanations based on differences in the protection of minority shareholders leave a significant part of the variance unexplained. This paper offers a novel explanation for the variation in ownership concentration across countries based on differences in the quality of labor relations. W...

Substantial declines in early childhood mortality have taken place in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya's infant mortality rate fell by 7.6 percent per year between 2003 and 2008, the fastest rate of decline among the 20 countries in the region for which recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data are available. The average rate of decline across all 20 countries was 3.6 percent p...

This paper examines a combined set of corporate governance features that influence disclosure quality in a context of ownership concentration. Agency theory presents a theoretical framework linking disclosure decision to corporate governance mechanisms. Using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), we find that firms with poor disclosure quality have higher ownership concentration, are family...

We show that differences in the quality of labor relations across countries can help to explain cross-country differences in ownership concentration. Controlling for minority shareholder protection, countries in which labor relations are hostile tend to have more concentrated ownership than countries in which labor relations are cooperative. Union strength, labor regulation, and the political o...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of wealth ownership and wealth inequality in Latin American countries, using diverse published sources and primary data analysis for 16 nations. We produce estimates of the distribution of home ownership, land, and financial assets, and find very high wealth concentration in all these types of assets, with the partial exception home ownership. The rele...