Data on empirical estimation of the relationship between agency costs and ownership structure in Italian listed companies (2002-2013)

The data presented in this article are related to the research article entitled “Do shareholder coalitions affect agency costs? Evidence from Italian-listed companies”, Research in International Business and Finance, Forthcoming (Rossi et al., 2018) [1]. The study shows an empirical analysis using an extensive balanced panel dataset of 163 Italian listed companies for the period 2002–2013, which is a sample yielding 1956 firm-year observations. The sample consists primarily of manufacturing firms, but also includes some service enterprises. However all financial firms and regulated utilities are excluded. We collected data on ownership structure for the entire study period. Information was acquired from the Consob website and the individual company reports on corporate governance. Data on firm-level indicators (debt-to-capital ratio, firm size, and age of the firm) for all companies in the sample were collected from Datastream, Bloomberg, and Calepino dell’Azionista, as well as obtained manually from the financial statements of the individual companies being studied. Our dataset contains several measures of ownership structure for Italian listed companies.