Corporate groups and minority shareholder wealth: A role for private benefits?

This paper aims at developing a theoretical framework to address the issue of internal resource allocation within corporate groups, representing an extension of the internal capital market approach developed for Anglo-Saxon type multidivisional enterprises. In particular, the paper investigates how private benefits from control affect investment decision processes in a capital constrained business group. We consider a group of n listed companies controlled by one main shareholder (i.e., a hierarchical group), and suppose that the group as a whole is endowed with an exogenous and limited amount of capital for investment. We analyze the effects of private benefits on the investment allocative efficiency and on the wealth of the group's various claimants. Under reasonable assumptions, we show that the controlling shareholder always finds preferable to secure private benefits. Moreover, and surprisingly enough, we find that the appropriation of control benefits may give rise to an increase in the market value of the group as well as in the portfolio wealth of the set of minority shareholders. In particular, the positive effect of control benefits on minority interests increases with the capital rationing of the group. Therefore, the effects of private benefits can be different in different markets, depending on the degree of development and the credit capacity of the single market. The findings of this paper challenge the largely accepted view that private benefits from control are always harmful to minority shareholders. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.