Executive Compensation and Agency Issues in Italy

From a theoretical perspective, we posit that that dividend policies may be relevant in resolving agency issues even in a governance environment dominated by family controlled firms. Earlier research has found that in more market based systems such as the US and Canada, dividends are in fact instrumental in solving agency issues. Prior empirical research has also found that dividends have a role in mitigating agency conflicts in a bank-dominated corporate environments like that in Germany (Elston and Goldberg, 2003). This paper extends the findings of earlier research by empirically investigating whether dividends retain their importance as the mechanism for resolving residual agency issues in a family controlled governance environment like Italy