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...

We analyze a closely held corporation characterized by the absence of a resale market for shares and by potentially having several significant shareholders. The founder of the firm may optimally choose to distribute voting power to several large shareholders since this forces them to form...

Political involvement in the operation of an enterprise, whether it is private or state owned, creates opportunities for interest groups to influence the allocation of resources. Resource allocation transfers rent both between unions and private owners within the firm and between these organized...

I provide a short survey on recent research on the governance of closely held corporations. I focus on the strategic choice of ownership structure, the creation of family firms and the role of the board in the closely held corporation. Attention is payed to policyimplications of the research...

Recent policy initiatives within the harmonization of European company laws have promoted a so-called "principle of proportionality" through proposals that regulate mechanisms opposing a proportional distribution of ownership and control. We scrutinize the foundation for these initiatives by...

This paper investigates how the ownership and the procedure for the selection of firms operating in the local public transport sector affect their productivity. In order to compare different institutional regimes, we carry out a comparative analysis of 72 companies operating in large European...

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...