Incorporation Law, Ownership Structure, and Firm Value: Evidence from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we reexamine the law and finance theory in the Canadian context, characterized by a dichotomy in the legal traditions that govern incorporation law across provinces. We specifically examine the relation between incorporation law, corporate ownership structure, and firm value, taking into account the endogeneity of ownership structure. Using a sample of 181 Canadian firms between 2002 and 2005, we show that firms from Quebec mostly choose to incorporate under the federal law (CBCA), perceived as more protective of shareholder rights, rather than under the provincial law (QCA). Our 2SLS regressions show that Quebec firms incorporated under the QCA tend to have more concentrated ownership and that ownership concentration is negatively related to firm value (Tobin's Q). These results are in line with the previous literature, which, in different pieces, has identified the positive relationship between less stringent legal environment and ownership concentration, as well as the negative relationship between ownership concentration and firm value. In this study, we formalize these relationships while taking into consideration the fact that firm value could also influence ownership concentration, as shown by Cho (1998 ). These results take on a particular importance as many researchers and organizations dedicated to the protection of investors, in Europe and in many countries around the world, have criticized the existence of ownership concentration and excess voting rights (wedge). These results thus reinforce the need for better corporate governance regulations to minimize the risks of minority shareholders expropriation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".