Dividend Privileges and the Value of Voting Rights: Evidence from Italy
37 Pages Posted: 6 Jul 2011 Last revised: 6 Mar 2014
There are 2 versions of this paper
Am I Right or Am I Right? Dividend Privileges and the Value of Voting Rights
Date Written: September 12, 2013
Abstract
The present paper proposes a new measure of the voting right, the Relative Vote Segment, which incorporates dividend privileges into the inferior class of shares. We test and compare it against the standard Relative Price Difference and the Nenova (2003) measure using 1998-2008 data from Italy, a country where dividend privileges are relevant. Results show that when dividend privileges are considered, the average voting right equals 35.63%, while its estimated value corresponds to a significantly lower 20.35% and 1.29% with the Relative Price Difference and the Nenova (2003) measure, respectively. Negative values of voting rights drop significantly with our methodology. Results become even more clear-cut when we clean the sample of possible measurement errors. As far as the determinants of the voting premium are concerned, the choice of the measure does not appear to have a significant impact, as long as the dividend differences are controlled for.
Keywords: non-voting shares, voting premium, dual-class share firms, Italy
JEL Classification: G34
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation