Companies With Unequal Voting Rights Underperform Shareholder Friendly Ones

New research finds that companies with unequal voting rights generally underperformed and pay their executives a lot more despite this financial underperformance. The study defines controlled companies more broadly than the Securities and Exchange Commission and exchange listing rules do. For this review controlled companies are defined as those with multi-class capital structures and unequal shareholder voting rights—78 companies—and/or control by a person or group via ownership of at least 30% of a class of single-vote stock—27 firms.