eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

This thesis examines agency conflicts in companies with the focus on majority-minority shareholder conflicts and conflicts between the management and shareholders. These agency conflicts are addressed by studying the impact of dual-class shares, supervisory boards, staggered boards and board independency on company valuation of the Finnish and Swedish stock-listed companies at the end of the year 2013.

The valuation impact of each mechanism is tested with a separate regression models where Tobin's Q is regressed on dummies for the respective mechanism and a set of control variables. Furthermore, an additional event study on the Finnish supervisory board abolitions is performed.

The descriptive statistics show that dual-class shares are still common in Finland and especially in Sweden. On the contrary, the other three mechanisms are rare and mainly concentrated on certain industries in Finland. Moreover, the four mechanisms appear to serve as complements rather than substitutes to each other.

The regression models yield negative coefficients for dual-class share and staggered board dummies. The staggered board dummy is statistically significant, while the dummy for dual-class shares is at the most suggestive. The event study on supervisory board abolitions fails to document any statistically significant cumulative abnormal returns around the event date. Unexpectedly, the cumulative abnormal returns are lower for state-owned companies that dismantle their supervisory board than for their privately owned counterparts.

The possible endogeneity problems, small sample sizes and low number other mechanisms than dual-class shares impose certain methodological challenges. Therefore, the robustness of the results and the direction of causality cannot be fully ensured.