Publications
Publications
- March 2010
- Review of Financial Studies
Extreme Governance: An Analysis of Dual-Class Firms in the United States
By: Paul A. Gompers, Joy Ishii and Andrew Metrick
Abstract
We construct a comprehensive list of dual-class firms in the United States and use this list to analyze the relationship between insider ownership and firm value. Our data have two useful features. First, since dual-class stock separates cash-flow rights from voting rights, we can separately identify the impact of each. Second, we address endogeneity concerns by using exogenous predictors of dual-class status as instruments. In single-stage regressions, we find strong evidence that firm value is increasing in insiders' cash-flow rights and decreasing in insider voting rights. In instrumental variable regressions, the point estimates are similar but the significance levels are lower.
Keywords
Citation
Gompers, Paul A., Joy Ishii, and Andrew Metrick. "Extreme Governance: An Analysis of Dual-Class Firms in the United States." Review of Financial Studies 23, no. 3 (March 2010).