Value creation and contestability: findings from italian market

Abstract The idea of this research starts from the debate about the efficiency of the Italian capital market. In an increasingly globalized context, where Italian companies have to compete not only among themselves but also with foreign forces, the inefficiency of the capital market could be a fundamental discriminant. This paper aims to analyze the contestability in the Italian market. As it is known, it has some peculiarities. If compared with the other market, the Italian one is strongly characterized by the presence of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), most of them family-run. In the Italian listed companies the entrepreneur and the manager are the same person, often chosen in the same family that exercises control. So the Italian market has a low contestability. Furthermore, the analysis conducted allows determining the existence of a relationship between value creation and contestability.