Globalisation and privatisation have created a demand for liquid stock markets in continental Europe. As a result, European companies, blockholders and governments are faced with a corporate governance dilemma. Liquidity requires dispersed share ownership. When control is relinquished in order...

Corporate governance is one of the most topical and controversial areas of business and finance. This article provides an overview of the questions that it raises and proposed policy responses. It points to the diversity in systems of corporate governance around the world, the apparently...

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...

This paper uses long-run real price and dividends series to investigate for the German stock market the questions asked of the U.S. market by Shiller (1989). It tries to determine in what periods and to what degree the German stock market has also possessed excess volatility' in the past...

This paper provides evidence on the incidence, characteristics, and performance of activist engagements across countries. We find that the incidence of activism is greatest with high institutional ownership, particularly for U.S. institutions. We use a sample of 1,740 activist engagements across...

The contractual theory of the firm predicts that companies adopt charters that maximise firm value, regardless of the default rule. We test this proposition around an exogenous switch of the default from one share-one vote to tenure voting following a law reform in France. In initial public...

We analyze the monitoring efforts of a large active asset manager that involve high-level private meetings with portfolio firms that are unobservable to outsiders. Our analysis reveals the inner workings of the asset management organization based on detailed records of contacts with executives...

Shareholders of U.S. corporations have lost billions of dollars in acquisitions they never approved. In the United Kingdom the listing rules give shareholders a binding say when targets are large relative to acquirers. A transatlantic comparison suggests that if U.S. shareholders had a say on...

This paper analyses the control of Belgian listed companies. The analysis reveals that control of listed companies in Belgium is highly concentrated. Business groups, holding companies, and voting pacts, play an important role in bringing about this concentration. The main characteristics of the...