Sixteen measures of legal protections for public market investors, including the Anti-Director Rights Index, the Anti-Self-Dealing Index, and legal origins, are all unrelated to ownership concentration in a large and representative sample of firms from 32 countries. Furthermore, when laws were...

Shareholder participation in domestic rights offerings averages only 64%, which is considerably lower than previously thought. This causes wealth transfers from nonparticipating to participating shareholders which average 7% of the value of the offering. Wealth transfers are larger in...

We document that ownership by officers and directors of publicly-traded firms is on average higher today than earlier in the century. Managerial ownership rises from 13 percent for the universe of exchange-listed corporations in 1935, the earliest year for which such data exist, to 21 percent in...