Institutional change and ownership patterns in Italy

Dominant legal (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1997, 1998, 2000) and political (Roe, 2003) views of corporate governance systems suggest that such institutional changes as regulatory reforms and privatization processes can break down the institutions of stable shareholding. So the partial stability of ownership patterns in Italy during the last two decades, despite a large increase in investors’ rights and the privatization of a number of state-owned firms, seems to be an “unambiguous disconfirmation of existing theories” (Culpepper, 2007: 799).