The problem of managerial agency costs dominates debates in corporate law. Many leading scholars advocate reforms that would reduce agency costs by forcing firms to allocate more control to shareholders. Such proposals disregard the costs that shareholders avoid by delegating control to managers...

This paper is the first chapter of the third edition of The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach, by Reinier Kraakman, John Armour, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, Henry Hansmann, Gerard Hertig, Klaus Hopt, Hideki Kanda Mariana Pargendler, Georg Ringe, and Edward Rock...

We investigate the nature and extent of information asymmetry among traders in companies with government ownership. Consistent with a less transparent information environment, we find relatively less informed trading in the shares of firms with government presence, and specifically, fewer...

Corporate governance is concerned with the resolution of collective action problems among dispersed investors and the reconciliation of conflicts of interest between various corporate claimholders. In this survey we review the theoretical and empirical research on the main mechanisms of...

The rapid growth in index funds and significant consolidation in the asset-management industry over the past few decades has led to higher levels of common ownership and increased attention on the topic by academic researchers. A consensus has yet to emerge from the literature regarding 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;...

The ongoing controversy over Melrose’s purchase of engineering company GKN illustrates many common misunderstandings about how free markets can work to the benefit of all. Shareholders, not politicians, should decide how to run their businesses, including whether a new management team could do...

This paper demonstrates that the current literature on cross-ownership among firms underestimates the true degree of separation between cash flow rights and voting rights. We use accounting identities to define coefficients of control, such that any (direct or indirect) control of a firm may be...

We consider the allocation of corporate control in a company with two large and a continuum of small shareholders. Control is determined in a shareholders' meeting, where the large shareholders submit competing proposals in order to attract the vote of small shareholders. The presence of...

This paper studies the link between the agency costs of equity and the agency costs of debt. Using a unique sample of the ownership structure of single and dual class firms as well as hand-collected data on loan contracts, we find that the agency cost of debt – proxied by various loan...