Corporate Governance, Ownership Structures and IT Investments: An Institutional approach

The research aims to highlight the relationships of traditional and new ownership structures on information technology (IT) investments for firms listed on Iberoamerican stock markets after a global crisis. The study uses a neo-institutional economic framework to show the corporate governance’s changes through institutional logic of ownership structures as well as IT investments growth in Iberoamerica. A literature review considers the relevance of concentrated ownership, top foreign ownership and common ownership of new institutional investors. The research design is a non-experimental longitudinal study with an annual panel data from 2009 to 2015, using 2,156 firm-year observations listed in stock market of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru (MILA) and Spain (IBEX). The findings show that IT investment growth is negatively affected by concentrated ownerships and top foreign ownership, this last as unexpected situation, while it is positively affected by the new institutional investors. The contribution is to expand this research topic as continuing and permanent discussion of academics on corporate governance closer to IT approach, and vice versa.