Controlling Shareholder‘s Self-dealings and Government Monitoring Game Open Access

Following Zingales (1994) and Gilson (2006), this paper assumes that controlling shareholders have incentives to secretly transfer parts of corporate earnings to themselves, and the government to reduce these corporate self-dealing activities. We study if there exist certain levels of government monitoring intensities which are optimal for all parties involved; controlling shareholders, public investors and the government. Our model shows that there exists Nash equilibrium in corporate self-dealing and governmental monitoring levels. At this equilibrium, the optimal corporate investment level is greater than the counterpart in the absence of self-dealings and government monitoring. Our model further shows that the main determinants for the equilibrium level are monitoring efficiency, severity of self-dealings penalty, and marginal return on investment. Interestingly, however, we can not conclude that either controlling shareholders’ equity ownership ratios or corporate tax rates determines the optimal investment level.