Have the Private Benefits in Italian Firms Decreased?

Abstract

The topic of the paper is the estimate of the benefit of control, according to the Barclay and Holderness method. The reference system of this research is Italy, given that the empirical evidence of the past which had underlined private benefits particularly high among Italian companies and the reference period is 1999-2007. The idea of this research is to demonstrate that, since the Legislative Decree No. 58 of February 24, 1998 (Consolidated Law on Finance, henceforth Consolidated Law), which has significantly changed the protection of minority shareholders, in Italian, the intensity of private benefits has on average declined sharply. To this end, considering the results of the empirical researches on periods pre-1998 and at the turn of the Consolidated Law, the paper provides evidence that the improvement of minority shareholder protection already shown by these researches is further accentuated over the years, because of the effects that the new regulatory framework has produced. In fact, the basic assumption is that the important laws, as Consolidate Law, require several years to produce the desired results in full. This idea is supported by the findings of research that show an average percentage of private benefits dropped to five percent of the capital. Hence, the investigation is extended to the demonstration of comparability of this estimation with other estimations quoted in literature, verifying the statistical significance of the correlations between the measures estimated and the variables considered as determinants in much of the literature.

Keywords: private benefits of control, amenities, block premium, voting rights, insider shareholders, outside shareholders

JEL Classification: G10, G20, G30, G32