A review of the literature on dual-class firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to critically review the relevant literature from the perspective of dual-class firms and to provide suggestions for future research on dual-class firms, and on methodological issues that should be addressed in such research. Design/methodology/approach The research design consists of three parts: an introduction to dual-class firms (motivations for; firm life cycle effects) in Part 1; concerns with firms with such share class structures (valuation; governance; accounting and corporate policy issues) in Part 2; and some solutions or ways to accommodate the trade-offs involved with such share class structures (retention arguments; index/exchange exclusions; contractual provisions; external monitoring) in Part 3. Throughout the paper, the authors provide some critiques of existing studies, particularly from a methodological perspective, the authors’ opinion on the state of the literature and suggestions for future areas of research. Findings While motivations for the use of dual-class voting structures include flexibility so that the idiosyncratic vision of their entrepreneurs/founders can be pursued in a less encumbered fashion, greater innovation and long-term managerial orientation, there are many possible costs (e.g. underinvestment and managerial entrenchment) to this ownership structure. Nevertheless, the authors believe that such firms should have provisions in place that facilitate a reversion to a single-class structure longer term when such firms have become more mature, less dependent on the idiosyncratic vision of the entrepreneurs/founders at IPO and have attracted more managerial talent. Originality/value The literature arrives at no consensus on the benefits/drawbacks of this type of share ownership structure which means that many topics of research require further academic examination. The authors provide suggested directions for such future enquiries.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".