This paper analyses the German corporate law reform's effect on the publicly listed companies' ownership and performance. First, theoretically plausible implications of the most important laws that were issued 1990-2009 are provided, then an empirical analysis using 1997-2008 panel data...

The business corporation is one of the greatest organizational inventions. But it creates risks for both shareholders and third parties. To mitigate these risks, legislators, judges, and corporate lawyers have tried to learn from experiences in other jurisdictions and adapt their regulatory...

If a bidder launches a takeover offer for a listed company being part of a stock market index, then index funds and exchange traded funds (ETF) as shareholders of this company cannot easily tender their shares without losing track of the index. This paper analyzes the impact of index fund and...

The dialogue of the board and its chairman with investors is an established practice in many countries, such as the United Kingdom, the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and recently also Germany. In the UK this dialogue covers the whole range of relevant board topics, certainly including...

The role of shareholders in corporate governance is traditionally that of principals under agency theory, the directors being the agents. For a long time, their active role has mainly been restricted to rights which are exercised in the general assembly, though more recently institutional...

This paper examines minority squeeze-outs and their regulation in Germany, a country where majority shareholders have extensively used this tool since its introduction in 2002. Using unique data on court rulings and compensations, we analyze a sample of 324 squeeze-outs of publicly listed...

Corporate stewardship holds great promise for the improvement of shareholder engagement and the encouragement of more responsible and long-term oriented value creation. Many countries have now adopted a best practice code for the stewardship role of institutional investors and asset managers,...

The chapter continues and advances our earlier research on ‘Board Models in Europe’.** We explore ‘The Structure of the Board of Directors’ with a view to the basic governance structure as provided by a board model vis-à-vis techniques of structuring the decision-making body, which can...