Les conditions politiques au développement de la firme managériale

The large publicly held firm dominates business in the United States. But in other economically advanced nations, ownership is not diffuse but concentrated. Social democ-racies press managers to stabilize employment. Hence, public firms there will have higher managerial agency costs, and large-block shareholding will persist. Indeed, when we line up the world's richest nations on a left-right political continuum and then line them up on a close-to-diffuse ownership continuum, the two correlate powerfully. We thus uncover not only a political explanation for ownership concentration in Europe, but also a crucial political prerequisite to the rise of the public firm in the United States, namely the weakness of social democratic pressures on the American business firm.