This chapter documents the evolution of ownership and control of firms around the world over a hundred year period from the beginning of the 20th century to today. It records the substantial changes that have taken place in the nature of stock markets and contrasts these with the persistent...

Twentieth century Japan provides a remarkable laboratory for examining how an externally imposed institutional and regulatory intervention affects the ownership of corporations. In the first half of the century, Japan had weak legal protection but strong institutional arrangements. The...

A generally accepted view is that sophisticated bankruptcy procedures are required to mitigate coordination failures and fire sale discounts arising from financial distress. In this paper, we study an industry not subject to mandatory bankruptcy procedures; instead, the shipping industry has...