Twentieth century Japan provides a remarkable laboratory for examining how an externally imposed institutional and regulatory intervention affects the ownership of corporations. In the first half of the century, Japan had weak legal protection but strong institutional arrangements. The...

Asset management is a major industry playing an increasingly important role in economic activity around the world. Asset managers provide services to individuals, governments, public agencies, banks, pension funds, insurance companies, and charities, to name a few. Traditionally, asset...

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,...

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...