This paper analyses the turnover of board of directors members on a sample of companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in the period 1988-1996. Our aim is to investigate if board members change more frequently when company performance is poor, as the literature suggests, if this relationship...

I analyse the effect of ownership structure and bank control on performance. I employ a unique data set of 715 German takeovers to test whether group structure, large shareholders, and bank control affect their value to shareholders. First, I find that takeovers increase bidder value, but...

The first striking feature is that ownership of the average UK company is diffuse: a coalition of at least eight shareholders is required to reach an absolute majority of voting rights. Even though the average firm has a dispersed ownership, the reader should bear in mind that there are about...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

This paper analyses ownership and control structures of Dutch listed companies. Legislation effective since 1992 mandates all shareholders with holdings of 5 percent or more in Dutch companies to disclose their holdings. Our analysis shows that the average ownership stakes of the largest and the...

The paper analyzes the optimal structure of board of directors in a firm with ownership concentrated in the hands of a large shareholder who sits on the board. We focus our attention on the choice between one-tier board who performs all tasks and two-tier board where the management board is in...

We develop an endogenous growth model with capital, labor and energy as production factors and three productivity variables that measure accumulated innovations for energy production, energy savings, and neutral growth. All markets are complete and perfect, except for research, for which we...

We study the interactions between technological innovation, investment in human capital and child labor. In our setting new technologies require new skills and new skills can be developed only through schooling. In a two-stage game, first firms decide on innovation, then households decide on...

In the last fifteen years, income differences among European Member States have been strongly narrowing while the process has been matched with a widening of the inter-regional variance within single countries. Traditionally, regional economic disparities in Europe have been ascribed to...

A suitable strategy for achieving sustainable development is to foster environmental innovations. Environmental innovations, however, suffer from so-called "double externalities", because apart from innovation spillovers they also improve the quality of public environmental goods, which can be...