The "law matters" thesis implies countries will not develop a robust stock market or diffuse corporate ownership structures unless laws are in place that curtail the extraction of private benefits of control by large shareholders and address information asymmetries from which outside investors...

Work done by Mark Roe has helped to foster a re-examination of the origins of the paradigm American corporation, with its strong managers and widely dispersed shareholders. Roe has argued that the system of ownership and control which prevails in the United States was politically and...

In the UK, in contrast to most other countries, a hallmark of corporate governance is a separation of ownership and control. There is evidence suggesting that this pattern may have been the norm in Britain as far back as the late 19th century. This paper investigates the extent to which law, in...

A great merger wave occurring in the United States between 1897 and 1903 was the single most important event in a process that yielded the pattern of managerial control and dispersed share ownership which currently distinguishes America's corporate economy from arrangements in most other...

The forthright brand of shareholder activism hedge funds deploy emerged by the mid-2000s as a major corporate governance phenomenon. This paper explains the rise of hedge fund activism and offers predictions about future developments. The paper begins by distinguishing the “offensive” form...

Many concerned about UK corporate governance have urged those who own equity in listed companies to forsake a traditional bias in favour of passivity and act as responsible, engaged ‘owners'. The recent financial crisis has given added impetus to such calls, with the notion of ‘stewardship'...

“Offensive shareholder activism” involves buying up sizeable stakes in underperforming companies and agitating for changes predicted to increase shareholder returns. Though hedge funds are currently highly publicized practitioners of this corporate governance tactic, there has been no...

An important tenet of a burgeoning 'law and finance' literature is that stock market development is contingent upon corporate law offering ample protection to shareholders. This paper addresses this claim, using as its departure point developments occurring in the United States between 1930 and...

Shareholder activism by hedge funds became a major corporate governance phenomenon in the United States in the 2000s. This paper puts the trend into context by introducing a heuristic device referred to as 'the market for corporate influence' to distinguish the ex ante-oriented 'offensive' brand...

We revisit debates on the regulation of IPOs by analyzing failure rates of IPOs carried out between 1900 and 1913 on the London and Berlin stock exchanges, two of the leading financial markets during the early 20th century. IPOs were regulated more heavily in Germany than in Britain and, as...