Family ownership was rapidly diluted in the twentieth century in Britain. The main cause was equity issued in the process of making acquisitions. In the first half of the century, it occurred in the absence of minority investor protection and relied on directors of target firms protecting the...

This paper examines means of payment in over 2,500 acquisitions in the UK and US over the period 1955 to 1985. Data on financing proportions, bid premia and postmerger performance are used to test the validity of tax and information hypotheses. It is difficult to explain many of the results in...

In a study of the ownership of German corporations, we find a strong relation between board turnover and corporate performance, little association of concentrations of ownership with managerial disciplining and only limited evidence that pyramid structures can be used for control purposes. The...

This article is the first study of long-run evolution of investor protection and corporate ownership in the United Kingdom over the twentieth century. Formal investor protection emerged only in the second half of the century. We assess the influence of investor protection on ownership by...

Anglo-American stock markets are much larger than their continental counterparts. Does investor protection and governance explain these differences? Using UK data, we examine four different forms of intervention which are suppose to promote good governance: takeovers, independent directors,...