Corporate name change: the effect of the firm’s shareholder distribution

Ashish Kumar

Applied Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 32, issue 6, 870-894

Abstract: This study explores the effect of corporate ownership structure on firm performance resulting from a firm’s strategic decision of corporate name change. First, the study uses the separation of ownership and control to capture the corporate ownership structure using a new shareholder distribution metric. Second, the study empirically estimates the main and interaction effects of shareholder distribution on a firm’s performance resulting from its corporate name change using data from the Australian Securities Exchange from 2017 to 2022, during which 457 unique firms changed their corporate names. The study finds shareholding distribution has contrasting effects on firm performance due to the corporate name change. The positive impact of shareholder distribution on a firm’s abnormal returns is attenuated due to the corporate name change. Thus, while a manager-controlled firm, characterized by its larger shareholder distribution, reaps more benefits, such benefits are reduced when it makes strategic decisions, such as corporate name change. The study attributes such reduction in firm benefit to owner-manager conflict emanating from a firm’s dispersed corporate ownership structure.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2023.2290582 (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:taf:apeclt:v:32:y:2025:i:6:p:870-894

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2023.2290582

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().