Countries characterized by strong workers’ political rights tend to exhibit a strong and concentrated corporate ownership structure. One explanation is that employees' political rights influence corporate governance: systems characterised by strong employees' rights tend to be balanced by strong and concentrated owners. In this approach, the separation between ownership and control is only possible when unions and social democratic parties are sufficiently weak. In this paper we argue that causation runs also in the opposite direction (from strong concentrated ownership to strong employees' protection) and leads to multiple equilibria characterized by alternative interaction paths of Politics and Corporate Governance. To empirically assess our theoretical arguments, we run Bayesian simultaneous equation estimation and perform Bayesian model comparison of the various theories for employment protection determination. We obtain that the concentration model is more likely than other models in the determination of employment protection. We conclude by exploring economic policy implications.
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Paper provided by Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Public Economics in its series Working Papers with number
109.
Find related papers by JEL classification: G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Capital and Ownership Structure G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance J50 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - General K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Corporation and Securities Law P10 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - General
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