Investor Protections and Concentrated Ownership: Assessing Corporate Control Mechanisms in the Netherlands

The Berle-Means problem - information and incentive asymmetries disrupting relations between knowledgeable managers and remote investors - has remained a durable issue engaging researchers since the 1930s. However, the Berle-Means paradigm - widely dispersed, helpless investors facing strong, entrenched managers - is under stress in the wake of the cross-country evidence presented by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny, and their legal approach to corporate control. Copyright Verein für Socialpolitik and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004.