This paper examines the relative price spreads between dual-class shares issued by the same firm on the Swedish market in order to investigate if a voting premium exists and what factors contribute to it. Previous research has found diverging explanations for the variation in price spreads between dual-class shares. Some find explanatory power in the concentration of ownership whilst others find trading costs and liquidity to determine the size and direction of the voting premium. This study tests factors of control and liquidity against the relative price spread in the Swedish market and in accordance with earlier research, the results indicate that a statistically significant voting premium exists in Sweden, although it is relatively small in comparison to many other markets. The paper contributes to the current pool of research by the choice of market, and by adding up-to-date information regarding the voting premium as well as evidence that increased domestic institutional ownership affects the voting premium negatively. At the same time, foreign institutional ownership has an opposite effect and leads to increased price differences between share classes. The general conclusion of this paper is that while some factors related to control and ownership concentration show significance long-term, other unobserved aspects could provide greater explanatory power of the voting premium in the short term.

Essay one investigates registered insider sales as stated in the final prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to test managerial market timing ability during the Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO) process. Using a comprehensive sample of 1,051 SEOs between 1997 and 2005, the findings suggest that the initial market reaction and the long-run post-issue performance of issuers are negatively related to C-level executive insider sales, but unrelated to sales by non-executive insiders. Overall, the findings are consistent with the notion that executive insiders are aware of the mispricing in their firm’s securities and successfully time their sales by participating in the secondary components of SEOs. The implication is that SEOs with C-level executive sales are overvalued relative to both SEOs without insider sales and SEOs with only non-executive insider sales. In the second essay, we compare shareholder wealth effects of dual-class and single-class Seasoned Equity Offerings (SEOs) between 1997 and 2005. While there is no difference in pre-issue stock performance or the initial market reaction to the SEO announcements, dual-class issuers significantly underperform single-class issuers in the post-issue years. The mean three-year underperformance of dual-class firms relative to single-class is a significant 28.93% (30.45%) in buy-and-hold raw (abnormal) stock returns, and robust to alternative model specifications. We document that this relative long-run stock underperformance is related to differences in the impacts of post-issue capital expenditures and acquisitions for dual and single-class issuers. Similarly, post-issue corporate cash holdings also contribute less to the shareholder wealth for dual-class firms.