This work investigates the role of equity ownership for the purpose of committing the management to the pursuit of shareholder value in the presence of separation between ownership and control. By rooting the conflicts of interests between managers and shareholders upon the control of internal...

This study addresses the debate over the relation between institutional ownership and dividend payout through the lens of the agency theory. We hypothesize that only institutional investors with certain traits are likely to monitor and conditioning on firms' financial performance, they will use...

Public firms are becoming increasingly interconnected through institutional investors' stock ownership, specifically through cross-ownership, in which an institutional investor has a significant stake in multiple firms in the same industry. When a firm seeks external financing for its investment...

We examine how ownership concentration and the separation of ownership and control affect secondary-market liquidity in France. We find that firms with a large insider blockholder exhibit significantly lower liquidity. However, different methods of enhancing control affect liquidity in different...

The article analyses inter-dependencies between dividend, capital structure, and cost of capital, factoring the ownership structure of listed firms in India, using 3SLS system approach. The study finds that family firms are dominant with concentrated ownership. Dividend, leverage, and average...

Agency theory - as applied to debates in corporate governance - rests on a myth of separated ownership and control. The true separation, however, is between ownership and ownership: ownership of shares by shareholders and ownership of assets by the corporation. Shareholders are not principals;...

The well-documented information content of dividends is contingent on the firm's corporate governance. Using cross-listing events, we find that firms reach a new equilibrium dividend policy after a shift in the level of shareholder protection and the direction of the dividend adjustment depends...

The new Brazilian Company Law, enacted in 1976, increased the protection of minority shareholder rights, providing an experiment to test alternative agency theories of dividends. Are dividends an outcome of the effective legal protection of shareholders? Or are dividends a substitute for legal...

We investigate dividend smoothing behaviors of approximately 6,000 firms from 28 countries. The data find a wide variation in the extent of dividend smoothing across countries, while US firms smooth dividends the most. Firms with a concentrated ownership structure adjust their dividends quickly,...

Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between financial decisions and ownership structure using the control contests on a sample of Italian listed companies.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis adopts a balanced panel data-set of 984 firm-year observations...