Control Rights, Pyramids, and the Measurement of Ownership Concentration

Jeremy Edwards and Alfons Weichenrieder

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The recent corporate governance literature has emphasised the distinction between control and cash-flow rights but has disregarded measurement issues. Control rights may be measured by immediate shareholder votes, the voting rights as traced through ownership chains, or voting power indices that may or may not trace ownership through chains. We compare the ability of various measures to identify the effects of ownership concentration on share valuation using a German panel data set. The widely-used weakest link principle does not perform well in this comparison. Furthermore, measures that trace control through ownership chains do not outperform those that rely on immediate ownership, thus questioning the role of pyramids in the separation of control and cash-flow rights. The paper emphasises that there is a distinction between these two aspects of ownership even without pyramids or preferred stock, identification of which requires measures that, like the Shapley-Shubik index, do not simply equate control rights with voting rights.

Keywords: G32; G34; Control rights; Cash-flow rights; Pyramids; Ownership structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-05-28
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00701897
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2009, 72 (1), pp.489. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2009.05.016⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00701897/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Control rights, pyramids, and the measurement of ownership concentration (2009)
Working Paper: Control Rights, Pyramids, and the Measurement of Ownership Concentration (2009)
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:hal:journl:hal-00701897

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2009.05.016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().