This paper studies the advantages that a coalition of agents obtains by forming a voting bloc to pool their votes and cast them all together. We identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent to benefit from the formation of the voting bloc, both if the agent is a member of the...

Voting and non-voting shares of ten German companies are analyzed for fractional cointegration. It turns out that seven pairs of price series are fractionally cointegrated, which means that for each pair there is a linear combination of the two series that is a long-memory process. If two stocks...

The first striking feature is that ownership of the average UK company is diffuse: a coalition of at least eight shareholders is required to reach an absolute majority of voting rights. Even though the average firm has a dispersed ownership, the reader should bear in mind that there are about...

This paper analyses ownership and control structures of Dutch listed companies. Legislation effective since 1992 mandates all shareholders with holdings of 5 percent or more in Dutch companies to disclose their holdings. Our analysis shows that the average ownership stakes of the largest and the...

The paper analyses the ownership structure of a large sample of Spanish listed companies. The results are analysed in terms of governance implications under the agency theory context. The results show a picture with concentrated ownership where stock markets are relatively low important. Direct...

This paper provides an overview on ownership structure and voting power in France, both in terms of institutional and legal framework and of quantitative analysis. If cross share holdings in large groups were a characteristic of the French model, called «financial core», and had been extended...

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...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...

This paper provides a new explanation why several US states have implemented supermajority requirements for tax increases. We model a dynamic and stochastic OLG economy where individual preferences depend on age and change over time in a systematic way. In this setting, we show that the first...