Download This PaperThirty Years of Shareholder Rights and Firm Valuation
61 Pages Posted: 4 Jun 2009 Last revised: 13 Jan 2015
Date Written: July 2013
Abstract
This paper introduces a new hand-collected dataset tracking restrictions on shareholder rights at approximately 1,000 firms over 1978-1989. In conjunction with the 1990-2006 IRRC data, we track firms’ shareholder rights over thirty years. Most governance changes occurred during the 1980s. We find a robustly negative association between restrictions on shareholder rights (using the G-Index as a proxy) and Tobin’s Q. The negative association only appears after the judicial approval of antitakeover defenses in the 1985 landmark Delaware Supreme Court decision of Moran v. Household. This decision was an unanticipated, exogenous shock that increased the importance of shareholder rights.
Keywords: shareholder rights, antitakeover defenses, firm valuation, poison pill
JEL Classification: G34, G38
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Allen Ferrell
Harvard Law School ( email )
Griswold 303 1525 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
(617) 495-8961 (Phone)
(617) 495-1110 (Fax)
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