Trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very different...

With their legal personhood, permanent capital with transferable shares, separation of ownership and management, and limited liability for both shareholders and managers, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and subsequently the English East India Company (EIC) are generally considered a major...

This paper reports on empirical investigations of the determinants of leverage and agency problems. Use is made of private data obtained through questionnaires, and a regression model is estimated in which leverage and four agency problems are explained, i.e. direct wealth transfer, asset...

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 Dutch East India Company or VOC in 1602 showed many characteristics of modern corporations, including limited liability, freely transferable shares, and well-defined managerial functions. However, we challenge the notion of the VOC as the precursor of modern corporations to argue that the...

Royal Ahold (Koninklijke Ahold NV) was one of the major success stories in the 1990s and is one of the major failures in corporate governance, suffering a complete meltdown in 2003. This clinical study analyzes Ahold’s growth strategy through acquisitions and isolates the cause of the...

In this paper we present the results of an international survey among 313 CFOs on capital budgeting, cost of capital, capital structure, and corporate governance. We extend previous results of Graham and Harvey (2001) by broadening their sample internationally, by including corporate governance,...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of self-regulation to promote investor interests. The Netherlands provides an excellent opportunity to gather such evidence for two reasons. First, characteristics of the Dutch corporate governance structure have made it the recent focus of attention by the...

We study annual general meetings of shareholders in the Netherlands. The Dutch corporate governance system is characterized by relatively concentrated shareholdings and large stakes owned by pension funds, banks and insurance companies. The legal protection of shareholders is poor due to...