 Interlocking directorates and business groups: Belgian evidenceAn Rommens, Ludo Cuyvers and Marc Deloof Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics Abstract: We investigate the determinants of interlocking directorates and their impact on company performance for a Belgian sample of 286 companies affiliated with a business group and 2,136 stand-alone companies. Most of these companies are not listed. We find that companies belonging to a group have much more interlocking directorates than stand-alone companies. Group companies tend to be strongly interlocked with other group members, including parent companies, and they have more intra-group interlocks when they are located at a higher hierarchical group level. Group companies have more vertical interlocks when they are involved in an internal capital market and when they are affiliated with a diversified business group. We also find that while interlocking directorates are negatively related to the profitability of stand-alone companies, they do not affect the profitability of group companies. This suggests that directors in Belgian business groups are not “too busy”, and that intra-group interlocks are not facilitators of expropriation by controlling shareholders. Keywords: Interlocking directorates; Business groups; Holding companies; Company performance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ant:wpaper:2007023 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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