Does a one-tier board affect firms’ performances? Evidences from Italian unlisted enterprises

Carlo Bellavite Pellegrini () and Emiliano Sironi ()
Additional contact information
Emiliano Sironi: Catholic University

Small Business Economics, 2017, vol. 48, issue 1, No 12, 213-224

Abstract: Abstract Even though the financial literature has examined the relation between the composition of the board of directors and firms’ performances, few studies have investigated the effect of adopting a specific corporate governance system. Past studies have not found clear evidence of the superiority of a specific corporate governance system in terms of economic and financial performances; instead, they have generally been limited to legal systems where the adoption of a specific system is mandatory. In this paper, we take into consideration the case of the Italian Corporate Law Reform, which gives firms the opportunity to choose, in a non-mandatory way, between different governance systems and in particular between a one-tier model and the pre-existing system prior to the Reform. Using propensity score matching and focusing on a sample of unlisted Italian joint-stock companies, we found evidence of a significant worsening of performances from 2003 to 2013 for corporations adopting a one-tier board after the Reform.

Keywords: Corporate governance; One-tier board; Firm performance; Propensity score; G34; K22; M42; L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-016-9768-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:48:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11187-016-9768-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-016-9768-z

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().