An intense academic debate has arisen recently concerning the crucial bedrock that underpins a corporate governance regime where widely-held public companies dominate. In the discourse, little has been said about the contribution of merger activity. The paper seeks to address this gap by...

We study the governance choices of firms in a voluntary regulatory regime where we can directly observe the impact of ownership on corporate governance practices pertaining to the composition of the board of directors. We find that firms with a dominant shareholder are more likely to deviate...

This short technical report provides an empirical analysis of the level of institutional block ownership overall, and of foreign block ownership, at a broad set of publicly traded corporations. Disclosed institutional blockholders of every company in the Standard & Poor's 500 index are analyzed,...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

Law and Finance theory stresses the importance of shareholder rights for the reliability and development of capital markets. Many European Parliaments picked up this corporate governance issue. We expand the analysis of Lele and Siems (2007) and show that the number of shareholder rights grew...