Mauro Romano

Does family involvement foster IPO value? Empirical analysis on Italian stock market

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the relationship between family involvement and Initial Public Offering (IPO) value in the Italian context. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a unique hand-collected data set, the authors test the hypotheses on companies that went public between 2000 and 2011, making inference on 113 firms using OLS hierarchical regressions. The authors quantify the IPO value from an outside investors’ perspective with two measures to proxy for IPO value in the short-term and apply robustness checks for long-run performance. In a stewardship framework, the authors examine demographic variables including family firm status, family involvement in managerial positions and family generations. Findings – The results suggest that family firm status positively influences IPO value, that greater family involvement corresponds to higher IPO value and lastly, that the beneficial effect of family control is mainly attributable to the first generation. The results are robus...

Dialogue with standard setters. Business Combinations under Common Control: Concerns, Criticisms and Strides

Although excluded from the scope of IFRS 3, business combinations under common control (BCUCCs) are widespread transactions that take place all over the world in different forms, often as a reorganization or restructuring among related parties. These transactions occur when entities are ultimately - not transiently - controlled by the same party/ies before and after the combination (which is neither a capital market nor an arm’s length transaction and devoid of economic substance: indeed, no change of control is entailed). The scarce and fragmentary literature, not to mention the lack of clear consensus on the topic, contributes to the prevailing concerns on how to account for BCUCCs. In this complex context, the purpose of this work is to assess the possible and various accounting methods and identify the most suitable, accredited and consistent techniques.

Going Private and Going Dark Strategies: Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

Corporate delistings can be related to a wide variety of circumstances and operations (going private transactions, going dark strategies, mergers, buy-outs, involuntary delistings, etc.), representing a very complex and highly differentiated phenomenon, whose relevance has recently increased as one of the many effects of the ongoing global financial crisis.In this paper, on the basis of a systematic review of the existing international literature, we give reasons for the need for a wider and deeper theoretical framework for corporate delistings, which we consider to be an essential premise for the conduction of further studies on corporate governance changes and the dynamics of corporate value associated with going-private and going-dark strategies. We provide a possible classification of corporate delistings that deepens the fundamental distinction between voluntary and involuntary delistings. A particular focus is on voluntary delistings, which we differentiate in the light of three main characterising aspects: the subjects who pursue delisting, the strategic context and the operating conditions of the delisted company. We define some uniform areas of observation, which may represent a useful framework for future deeper studies concerning corporate delistings (pre-sale delistings, hidden potential delistings, control strengthening delistings and takeover delistings, either in balanced operating conditions or in presence of crisis/operating distress).