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vatization in an international sample of 31 undergo a discrete and dramatic change in ownership upon privatization,which creates an opportune testing ground in which to understand corporate Considerable recent research starting with LLSV[1998]suggests that the structure and enforcement of laws protecting investors in a country are among the most salient determinants of the quality of its corporate ownership emerges as a rational substitute when protection of minority shareholders is poor,as documented by Boubakri,Cosset,and Guedhami[2020]in the case of privatized ,the success of privatization in improving firm performance largely hinges on the legal institutions that prevent expropriation by the new controlling shareholders. Moreover,major reforms to a country’s legal system often acpany the transition from state to private ownership,reinforcing that this is a natural setting for international corporate governance researc Murrell[2020],Denis and McConnell[2020]).Indeed,countries that implement largescale privatization programs are typically eager to modernize their corporate governance mechanisms as example, privatizing governments frequently set up(or strengthen)a regulatory body resembling the and Exchange Bushman and Smith[2020]argue that regime shifts within a country,including the privatization of stateowned enterprises,suit exploring the link between financial accounting quality and economic et al.[2020]rely on similar arguments to justify examining the institutional determinants of the choice between private and public capital markets in the context of privatization. Our study builds on Boubakri,Cosset,and Guedhami[2020],who analyze the relationships among ownership concentration,legal protection, and firm performance after authors report high levels of private ownership concentration for a sample of 209 firms from 39 with Shleifer and Vishny’s[1997]conjecture,they provide evidence that strong investor protection is associated with lower ownership In contemporaneous research,Atanasov[2020]finds that,in the absence of legal institutions that protect minority shareholders and constrain majority owners,privatization in Bulgaria leads to concentrated ownership and significant control premiums being paid by controlling shareholders who extract more than 85%of firm value as private ,the large private benefits of control that acpany high ownership concentration are an artifact of poor external corporate governance according to this and prior research,for example,LLSV[1998],Bebchuk[1999],LLS[1999],and Dyck and Zingales[2020]. We quantify minority shareholders’reluctance to invest in panies with greater private benefits of control with the extent of ownership concentration in privatized controlling for countrylevel and other firmlevel determinants,we fail to find that the presence of a Big 5 auditor affects ownership Although this result is sensitive to model specification,we provide weak evidence that enhancing disclosure standards reduces ownership parison,we eport strong,robust evidence that countries’auditing infrastructure moderates the agency conflict between outside investors and controll shareholders, consistent with Ball’s[2020],we detect that ownership concentration is lower in jurisdictions with securities laws that set a lower burden of proof