Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding, and super-voting rights let such families control corporations without making a commensurate capital investment. In many countries, a few such families end up controlling considerable proportions of their countries’ economies. Three points emerge. First, at the firm level, these ownership structures, because they vest dominant control rights with families who often have little real capital invested, permit a range of agency problems and hence resource misallocation. If a few families control large swaths of an economy, such corporate governance problems can attain macroeconomic importance—affecting rates of innovation, economywide resource allocation, and economic growth. If political influence depends on what one controls, rather than what one owns, the controlling owners of pyramids have greatly amplified political influence relative to their actual wealth. This influence can distort public policy regarding property rights protection, capital markets, and other institutions. We denote this phenomenon economic entrenchment, and posit a relationship between the distribution of corporate control and institutional development that generates and preserves economic entrenchment as one possible equilibrium. The literature suggests key determinants of economic entrenchment, but has many gaps where further work exploring the political economy importance of the distribution of corporate control is needed.

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Corporate Governance, Economic Entrenchment, and Growth

The returns earned by U.S. equities since 1926 exceed estimates derived from theory, from other periods and markets, and from surveys of institutional investors. Rather than examine historic experience, we estimate the equity premium from the discount rate that equates market valuations with prevailing expectations of future flows. The accounting flows we project are isomorphic to projected dividends but use more available information and narrow the range of reasonable growth rates. For each year between 1985 and 1998, we find that the equity premium is around three percent (or less) in the United States and five other markets.

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Equity Premia as Low as Three Percent? Evidence from Analysts' Earnings Forecasts for Domestic and International Stock Markets

http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/professuren/intwipol/energy.pdf

Does higher economic and financial development lead to environmental degradation: Evidence from BRIC countries

Recent research studying the link between law and finance has concentrated on country-level investor protection measures and focused on differences in legal systems across countries and legal families. Klapper and Love extend this literature and provide a study of firm-level corporate governance practices across emerging markets and a greater understanding of the environments under which corporate governance matters more. Their empirical tests show that better corporate governance is highly correlated with better operating performance and market valuation. More important, the authors provide evidence showing that firm-level corporate governance provisions matter more in countries with weak legal environments. These results suggest that firms can partially compensate for ineffective laws and enforcement by establishing good corporate governance and providing credible investor protection. The authors' tests also show that firm-level governance and performance is lower in countries with weak legal environments, suggesting that improving the legal system should remain a priority for policymakers. This paper - a product of Finance, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study corporate governance around the world.

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M.E. Ellis

Papers

Globalization, Corporate Finance, and the Cost of Capital