A panel of corporate ownership data, stretching back to 1902, shows that the Canadian corporate sector began the century with a predominance of large pyramidal corporate groups controlled by wealthy families or individuals. By mid-century, widely held firms predominated. But, from the 1970s on,...

Around the world, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Outside the U.S. and the U.K., pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding and super voting rights are common. Using these devices, a family can control corporations without making a...

The value of mandatory securities disclosure is intensely debated. Two big questions occupy much of the attention: Do more accurate share prices contribute to the efficient provision of goods and services in the economy? Even if they do, will mandatory disclosure effectively contribute to share...

Roll [1988] observes low R2 statistics for common asset pricing models due to vigorous firms-specific return variation not associated with public information. He concludes (p. 56) that this implies quot;either private information or else occasional frenzy unrelated to concrete information.quot;...

We document a robust cross-sectional positive association across industries between a measure of the economic efficiency of corporate investment and the magnitude of firm-specific variation in stock returns. This finding is interesting for two reasons, neither of which is a priori obvious....

We show that firms in industries in which firm-specific stock price variation is larger use more external financing and allocate capital with greater precision in the sense that their marginal q ratios are closer to one. According to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, greater firm-specific stock...

Countries in which billionaire heirs' wealth is large relative to G.D.P. grow more slowly, show signs of more political rent-seeking, and spend less on innovation than do other countries at similar levels of development. In contrast, countries in which self-made entrepreneur billionaire wealth...

We present empirical evidence that cross-industry diversification, geographic diversification, and firm size add value in the presence of intangibles related to Ramp;D or advertizing, but destroy value in their absence, presumably due to agency problems. This is consistent with synergy stemming...

Stock prices in emerging economies move in step much more than in advanced economies. Emerging markets' prices capitalize less firm specific information, and appear subject to more economy-wide fluctuations. Measures of this consonance of stock returns are positively correlated with indicators...

China is now the world's largest destination of foreign direct investment (FDI), despite assessments highlighting its institutional deficiencies. But this FDI inflow corresponds closely to predicted FDI flows into China from a model that predicts FDI inflow based on government quality indicators...