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standards actually implemented by managers and the quality of financial reporting and disclosure actually achieved—are determined endogenously by the incentives that managers and auditors effective system of private litigation does more to improve actual practice than fiat that is exogenously imposed by governments. Recent research suggests that,although concentrated ownership mitigates managerial expropriation,it engenders another agency problem,the potential expropriation of minority shareholders and other stakeholders by controlling These dominant shareholders usually exert full control over managers and frequently hold control power in excess of their cash flow rights,providing them with strong incentives to extract private benefits at the expense of minority shareholders(La Porta,LopezdeSilanes,and Shleifer,hereafter,LLS[1999]).According to Shleifer and Vishny[1997,],“l(fā)arge investors represent their own interests,which need not coincide with the interests of other investors in the firm, or with the interests of employees and the process of using his control rights to maximize his own welfare,the large investor can therefore redistribute wealth—in both efficient and inefficient ways—from others.”Consistent with this view,international studies on the value of voting rights of large block trades(Dyck and Zingales[2020])and dualclass firms (Nenova[2020])report control premiums,indicating high private benefits of research finds that the extraction of private benefits,mainly shaped by the legal environment,can be costly to controlling shareholders and firms in terms of raising equity finance and firm value(La Porta et al.,hereafter,LLSV[2020]and Durnev and Kim[2020]).We investigate whether alternate governance mech,namely,disclosure standards and auditorrelated characteristics,improve contracting by moderating agency problems that lead to concentrated ownership in less protective legal environments. We conduct our analysis in the specific context of privatization 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 state