Private Benefits of Control, Ownership, and the Cross-Listing Decision

Craig Doidge, G. Andrew Karolyi (), Karl V. Lins, Darius P. Miller and René M. Stulz

No 11162, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper investigates how a foreign firm's decision to cross-list its shares in the U.S. is related to the concentration of the ownership of its cash flow rights and of its control rights. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to choose to list their firm's shares in the U.S. because the higher standards for transparency and disclosure, as well as the increased monitoring associated with such listings, limit their ability to extract private benefits. We offer evidence that confirms this hypothesis using data on more than 4,000 firms from 31 countries. Using logistic regression analysis, we show that the control rights held by controlling shareholders, as well as the difference between their control rights and their cash flow rights are significantly and negatively related to the existence of a U.S. listing. In addition, we employ duration analysis using a Cox proportional-hazard model to show that the probability of listing in a given year from 1995 to 2001, conditional on not yet having listed, is significantly lower for firms whose managers have high levels of control and for firms whose controlling shareholder owns more control rights than cash flow rights.

JEL-codes: G15 G34 K00 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-law
Date: 2005-03
Note: AP CF
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11162.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11162

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11162
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().