The Shareholders Agreements: Typologies, Diffusion and Influence on Corporate Governance of Italian Listed Companies

The shareholders agreement is an agreement drawn up by the shareholders when the company is founded, or after its foundation, to rule one or more aspects of the relationships held by the shareholders. The shareholders agreement phenomenon is particularly relevant in the Italian context, where it is possible to observe a lot of companies with fragmentized ownership in which it is not often possible to find an economic subject that holds so many shares to manage the company. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the typologies and the diffusion of the shareholders agreements of the Italian listed companies, with the aim to analyze their influence on the corporate governance policies. The paper wants to answer to the following question: do some enterprise characteristics exist that makes more probable that a company adopt a shareholder agreement respects to another one? The empirical analysis is developed on the Italian listed companies at the date of 30, April 2010, belonging to all the sectors classified by Milan Stock Exchange.