We analyze horizontal mergers when the acquirer holds a passive partial ownership stake (PPO) in the target firm prior to the merger. We show that a PPO reduces the minimal synergy level necessary to make a merger beneficial for consumers. It follows that an antitrust authority ignoring existing...

Using a sample of 49 countries, La Porta et al. show that countries whose legal rules originate in the common-law tradition tend to protect investors considerably more than the countries whose legal rules originate in the civil-law, and especially the French-civil-law tradition, with the...

We analyze the distributional properties of ownership concentration measures and find that measures come from different underlying statistical distributions. Consistent with theory, some measures that are classified to represent a monitoring dimension have a positive influence on firm performance;...

This paper examines the dynamics trade-off financial structure in presence of ownership dispersion of newly created firms. Our objective is to test empirically the relevance of trade-off theory regards the debt funding behavior of business start-up. We use a sample of 200 business start-ups and...