Most listed firms are freestanding in the U.S, while listed firms in other countries often belong to business groups: lasting structures in which listed firms control other listed firms. Hand-collected historical data illuminate how the present ownership structure of the United States arose: (1)...

This paper reviews the literature on corporate groups in Japan and elsewhere, and offers a comparison of Japan's corporate groups with groups in other developed and developing countries. It then proceeds to examine the evolution of corporate groups in Japan since the mid-1970s. The main...

We compare sources of funds and investment activities of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK using a newly constructed data set. The data provide a rare opportunity to evaluate relations between funds' sources of finance and activities. We find that sources of VC...