This subindex consists of
three variables: (1) Percentage of shares held by the
largest shareholder – La Porta et al. (1999) show
that shareholdings in companies that operate in
emerging markets tend to be concentrated within
the hands of relatively few individuals, and the
disparity between cash-flow rights and control
rights tends to be greater. Sung (2003) finds that
this disparity can lower a firm’s profitability.
Even though we do not track the ultimate ownership
of control rights here, we should expect that if the
largest shareholder has greater cash-flow rights in a
firm, there will be more monitoring effort and
less expropriation of minority shareholders. Even if
the largest shareholder has absolute control over
the firm, i.e. more than a 50% share, higher ownership
is expected to enhance CG mechanisms. This
is because the increased cash-flow rights of the
largest shareholder reduces the gain from probable
tunnelling, that is, the transfer of assets from low
cash-flow-rights subsidiaries to high cash-flow-rights
firms, as suggested by Bertrand et al. (2002).
(2) Square of the percentage of shares held by the
largest shareholder – Bai et al. (2004) find a nonlinear
relation between a firm’s value and the percentage of
its shares held by the largest shareholder. Including
this nonlinearity5 may reveal the effect of this
percentage’s control on a firm’s value. (3) Number
of substantial shareholders – Korczak and Korczak
(2009) show that concentrated holdings of several
investors effectively align managers’ and investors’
interests in a weak country-level CG environment.
Competition for control of the firm among large
shareholders may improve CG, thus positively affecting
firm value.