Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

We review the governance role of private equity (PE) firms in companies that have experienced an LBO. We conjecture that PE firms may provide powerful remedies to agency conflicts associated with public and private firms, such as managerial entrenchment and opportunism

This paper examines the effect of ownership structure of a controlling shareholder on the financial constraints of non-financial firms in 22 economies for the 1982-2009 period. We find that the overinvestment propensity of a controlling shareholder becomes less severe with an increase in...

Using a comprehensive international sample of 18,932 firms across 40 countries, we find that cross-country variations in ownership concentration are attributable to differences in firm sizes. Ownership concentration in large firms differs strikingly between countries. For example, large U.S....

This chapter documents the evolution of ownership and control of firms around the world over a hundred year period from the beginning of the 20th century to today. It records the substantial changes that have taken place in the nature of stock markets and contrasts these with the persistent...

This chapter documents the evolution of ownership and control of firms around the world over a hundred year period from the beginning of the 20th century to today. It records the substantial changes that have taken place in the nature of stock markets and contrasts these with the persistent...

In this contribution, at first, we introduce a basic network framework to study pyramidal structures and wedges between ownership and control of companies. Then, we apply it to a dataset of 53.5 million of companies operating in 208 countries. Among others, we detect a strong concentration of...

We investigate the effect of insider ownership on corporate bond yield spreads from 2003 to 2014 using a sample of 10,470 bonds issued by 1,222 non-financial firms from 48 countries. We find that greater insider ownership is associated with higher yield spreads. This positive relationship holds...