A new view of shareholder voting in the nineteenth centuryevidence from Brazil, England and France

Resumo

Business corporations in the nineteenth century often imposed limits on the voting rights of large shareholders. Economic historians have generally interpreted these voting restrictions as a contractual mechanism designed to protect small shareholders in a legal environment that afforded insufficient investor protection. This dominant account, however, fails to explain the variation in the incidence of voting restrictions across different industries and firm ownership structures, as well as their eventual disappearance from corporate charters over time. In this Article, we advance an alternative interpretation for these early voting schemes as efforts at consumer protection employed primarily by firms that were local service monopolies and collectively owned by their principal customers, none of whom wished the firm to come under the exclusive control of their competitors or of profit-maximising investors. We explore and test this proposition by analysing data on shareholder voting rights in the nineteenth century in Brazil, England, and France.

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Artigo científico

Ano

2013

Instituição

Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd

Fonte

Repositório da FGV

Idioma

Inglês

Acesso

Acesso restrito

DOI

10.1080/00076791.2012.741972

Identificador

oai:repositorio.fgv.br:10438/23326

Temas

EconomiaGovernança

Palavras-chave

Business corporationsShareholder voting rightsVoting capsConsumer protectionCorporate governanceEconomiaAcionistas - Votação - BrasilDefesa do consumidor