Disentangling the Effect of Private and Public Cash Flows on Firm Value Cristina Mabel Scherrer and Marcelo Fernandes Working Paper No. 800 August 2016 ISSN 1473-0278 School of Economics and Finance Disentangling the effect of private and public cash flows on firm value Cristina Mabel Scherrer ∗1 and Marcelo Fernandes 2 1Aarhus University and CREATES 2Sao Paulo School of Economics, FGV and Queen Mary University of London June 8, 2016 Abstract This paper presents a simple model for dual-class stock shares, in which com- mon shareholders receive both public and private cash flows (i.e. dividends and any private benefit of holding voting rights) and preferred shareholders only receive public cash flows (i.e. dividends). The dual-class premium is driven not only by the firm’s ability to generate cash flows, but also by voting rights. We isolate these two effects in order to identify the role of voting rights on equity-holders’ wealth. In particular, we employ a cointegrated VAR model to retrieve the impact of the voting rights value on cash flow rights. We find a negative relation between the value of the voting right and the preferred shareholders’ wealth for Brazilian cross- listed firms. In addition, we examine the connection between the voting right value and market and firm specific risks. JEL classification numbers: G32, G34, G38, G15 Keywords: Private benefits, voting right, dual-class shares ∗ Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Fuglesansgs All´e4, 8210 Aarhus V, Denmark. E-mail:
[email protected]. 1 1 Introduction In many countries firms have the possibility to issue different types of shares with distinct voting and dividends rights.