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Are big firm control and ownership structures crucially shaped by entwined fiscal policies?

Project description

Understanding corporate ownership structures and tax frameworks

Unlike the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US), where company ownership is generally dispersed, many publicly listed European corporations are owned and controlled by majority shareholders, often families. Apart from bestowing privilege, this tends to impede growth, value and profitability, as well as negate market effects on corporate control. By comparing UK and US companies with those in Italy and Germany from the 1950s onwards, the CorpCONTROL-in-TAX project, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, will examine the evolution of corporation ownership type and its effects on taxation frameworks. It will investigate tax system divergence, particularly in inheritance, capital gain and income taxes. The results may be generally applicable and specifically affect EU Member States trying to improve low-productivity issues.

Objective

CorpCONTROL-in-TAX aims to understand the role of taxation in explaining the development of widely dispersed share ownership in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, in contrast to the persistence in many continental European states like Germany and Italy of corporate ownership structures characterized by controlling shareholders.
The nature and structure of corporate ownership is a fundamental issue in comparative corporate governance, as the idea that ownership concentration limits economic growth and financial development is a central cornerstone of modern corporate finance. Indeed, family-owned listed companies, especially those that are heir-controlled firms, may produce downsides, not only in terms of lowering firm value and profitability, but also by curtailing the functioning of the market for corporate control and engender the extraction of private benefits by the controlling families to the detriment of the minority shareholders.
Accordingly, CorpCONTROL-in-TAX investigates the role of taxation on corporate governance in a comparative setting, focusing on the British and American experience, on the one hand, and the German and Italian, on the other. To achieve its goals, the project plans to track, from the 1950s on, the evolution of corporate ownership structures in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and Italy in connection with the concomitant changes in their tax frameworks.
The purpose is to gauge whether different ownership structures - i.e. different frameworks of corporate ownership and control - in the U.K. U.S. Germany and Italy echo divergences in their tax systems, including as regards inheritance taxes, capital gain tax rates and income taxes.
Therefore, CorpCONTROL-in-TAX's wide scope considers issues that affect not just one but several countries in Europe. This study does also have special importance for those EU member states where low productivity-related issues are at the forefront of policy debates.

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG
Net EU contribution
€ 289 407,84
Address
MITTELWEG 177
20148 Hamburg
Germany

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Region
Hamburg Hamburg Hamburg
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Partners (3)