Working Paper No. 162. One Share-One Vote

Sammanfattning

Shares with more voting rights than cash flow rights provide their owners with a disproportional influence that is often found to destroy the value of outside equity. This is taken as evidence of discretionary use of power. However, concentration of power does not necessarily result from control enhancing mechanisms; it could also be that some shareholders retain a large block in a one share-one vote structure. In this paper, we develop a methodology to disentangle disproportionality, which allows us to test the effect of deviations from one share-one vote more precisely. Our empirical findings add to the existing literature.