Seminario Shareholder empowerment and ownership structure in a free-contracting environment

The seminar is reserved for the Department of Management’s community. Other interested colleagues can contact Giulia Baschieri (giulia.baschieri@unibo.it).

We study how firms choose to allocate decision powers to shareholders or management in a historical context where control allocation was not mandated by corporate law but ownership structures were constrained by differences in regional wealth distributions. Firms with numerous small-and plausibly less informed-owners tend to disempower shareholders and increase managerial authority. Moreover, shareholder empowerment is accompanied by provisions promoting information acquisition by owners, suggesting that control and information are complements. Our findings highlight how the debate on shareholder empowerment should account for the critical role of ownership structure.

Salvatore is Associate Professor of Finance at BI Norwegian Business School. He earned his PhD degree from the University of Southern California in 2010 and joined the BI faculty the same year. His main area of research is corporate finance with particular attention to employee/executive compensation and corporate governance problems. He is also interested in behavioral and experimental economics.

The seminar will be held in English.