Listing and Value: A Cross-Country Analysis in the Energy Sector

The study aims to fill a gap in the literature on the impact of listing on value. Most of the relevant literature analyzes the impact of listing by focusing on the financial performance of companies. The innovative aspect of this study lies in considering value as a combination of return on equity and risk profile, the latter reflected in the cost of capital. So, in this analysis value is ascertained with the ROE-ke measure. We compare listed companies vis-à-vis their unlisted peers in the energy sector. Data are extracted from Amadeus and covers the period from 2015 to 2017. The empirical investigation considers the following areas: profitability (ROE); cost of equity (ke) and value (ROE-ke). We observe statistically significant differences between listed and unlisted companies. In particular, listed companies show lower cost of equity but they also have lower profitability than unlisted companies. Furthermore, results highlight that listing has a negative impact on shareholder value: listed companies have negative ROE-ke or they register less ROE-ke if compared with unlisted peers. This research has several limitations, for example, having considered a relatively short period of time. Future developments of this work may overcome some limitations by taking into account more recent years and using additional variables such as governance, financial structure, operations in the renewable energy sector, size.