The paper argues that the weakest link principle, which has been widely used as a measure of ultimate owners' control rights, has a number of serious problems. A theoretically more satisfactory method of measuring control rights, based on voting power indices, is proposed, and the different...

Concentrated ownership of large listed companies is widespread throughout the world, and Germany is typical in this respect. This paper proposes a method of distinguishing empirically between the beneficial and harmful effects of ownership concentration, and applies it to German data. The...