On the impact of outside blockholders’ voting power

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to complement existing research of the relationship between concentrated ownership and firm performance by theoretically exploring the impact of outside blockholders on the firm, primarily from the perspective of voting power. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes theoretical propositions based on analyses and logical extension of results of the existing theoretical and empirical studies. Findings This paper proposes three theoretical predictions: First, voting power provides outside blockholders a necessary condition to pursue shared and private benefits of control, and it is positively correlated with blockholders’ capability of influencing firm value. Second, everything else being equal, an outside blockholder is more (less) likely to pursue private benefits than shared benefits when the equity market is efficient and when the blockholder’s voting power is less (more) than 50 per cent. Third, controlling outside blockholders can capitalize on their voting power to appoint managerial delegates and board representatives to the invested firms for the purpose of pursuing private benefits of control. Originality/value This paper tries to make two contributions to the corporate governance literature. First, this research relies on a new perspective to explore the relationship between ownership structure and firm value. Second, this paper presents the first theoretical argument which states that controlling outside blockholders rely on their managerial delegates and board representatives to pursue their private benefits of control.