Minority Stockholders' Protection in a New Corporate Control Law: Market Implications in an Emerging Economy

Franco Parisi, Ike Mathur and Lance Nail

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 2009, vol. 45, issue 6, 4-19

Abstract: This paper analyzes the effect of a new corporate governance law in the emerging capital market of Chile to determine if capital markets perceived the intended protection of minority stockholders against wealth expropriation as effective. The unique nature of the new law allowed for voluntary adoption during the initial three-year period, after which it became mandatory. We find no evidence of superior abnormal returns for those firms voluntarily adopting the new law versus those forced to accept the new law as it became mandatory. Trading volume also increased for those not adopting and declined for those that did voluntarily adopt. These results indicate that the capital markets did not perceive voluntary adoption of the new law as effective protection for minority shareholders. We also find a greater presence of institutional investors in the ownership structure of those firms not voluntarily adopting the new law, indicating their monitoring role by investing in firms with better corporate governance practices. Our results suggest that, in the Chilean case, the presence of strong institutional investors is as effective a corporate governance mechanism as is the new law.

Keywords: Chile; corporate governance; emerging market; international finance; minority stockholder; wealth expropriation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?target=contribution&id=HH28R18153141P38 (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:mes:emfitr:v:45:y:2009:i:6:p:4-19

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MREE20

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().