State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often justified for correcting market failures, providing essential public services, and fulfilling social objectives. Yet, SOEs face unique governance challenges as agency conflicts usually increase with state ownership. This paper examines Brazil's efforts to...

This paper documents recent structural changes in China's corporate landscape, based on company level data, providing a complementary perspective to that of official Chinese statistics. We classify China's largest companies by revenue since 2004 (based on Fortune Global 500 rankings), and...

The U.S. system of security law was designed more than 70 years ago to regain investors' trust after a major financial crisis. Today we face a similar problem. But while in the 1930s the prevailing perception was that investors had been defrauded by offerings of dubious quality securities, in...

We follow the evolution of ownership structure in a sample of 80 Israeli companies that unified their dual-class shares in the 1990s, and compare it with a control sample of firms that maintained their dual share structure at least until 2000. Our main findings are as follows. First, controlling...

This paper presents a simple model for dual-class stock shares, in which common shareholders receive both public and private cash flows (i.e. dividends and any private benefit of holding voting rights) and preferred shareholders only receive public cash flows (i.e. dividends). The dual-class...

The subprime crisis led to a wave of government interventions in the private sector that has been particularly strong in Europe and Latin America, where several governments are large shareholders in a variety of public firms. In a sense, the subprime crisis induced these governments to behave as...