 Block Premia in Transfers of Corporate ControlMike Burkart, Denis Gromb and Fausto Panunzi No 1868, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: This paper studies block trades and tender offers as alternative means for transferring corporate control in firms with a dominant minority blockholder and an otherwise dispersed ownership structure. Incumbent and new controlling parties strictly prefer to trade the controlling block. From a social point of view, however, this method is inferior to tender offers, because it preserves a low level of ownership concentration which induces more inefficient extraction of private control benefits. This discrepancy is caused by the free-riding behaviour of small shareholders. Moreover, the controlling block trades at a premium which reflects, in part, the surplus that the incumbent and the acquirer realize by avoiding a tender offer and the consequent transfer to small shareholders. Therefore, factors that alter the pay-offs of small shareholders in a tender offer (e.g. supermajority rules, disclosure rules and non-voting shares) also alter the block premium. Finally, the paper argues that greenmail, like block trading, enables the controlling parties to preserve low levels of ownership concentration and large private control benefits. Keywords: block premia; greenmail; takeover regulation; tender offers (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:cpr:ceprdp:1868 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.