The power of a single large shareholder in Iberianfirms: friend or for?

• Autor(a) principal: Bray, Matthew Robert
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/25779
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Agency costs as a result of the separation of ownership and control within a firm can be a hurdle to the performance and profitability. It has been suggested that these costs can be reduced by the presence of a single large shareholder monitoring management and their decisions. On the contrary it has also been argued that a large shareholder negatively affects firm performance by deriving personal benefits from the firm and making suboptimal decisions. This research aims to investigate the relationship between the profitability of a firm and the level to which the shares of that firm are concentrated into a single shareholder. A random effects GLS panel regression is used to determine the effect of a large shareholder being present in Spanish and Portuguese firms by studying firms listed on these bourses over the period 2005 – 2014. The results show that a large shareholder has a negative influence in the Portuguese market, and no statistically significant effect in the Spanish market.