On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen's stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the...

In this study we analyze the evolution of ownership, control, and performance in German founding-family-owned firms over the last century. We employ a hand-collected matched sample of German stock companies founded before World War I and still in existence in 2003. Comparing family-owned and...

This paper examines the unification of non-voting preference shares into a one share-one vote structure using a sample of all German dual-class companies from 1987 until 2003. We test several hypotheses with regard to the reasons for the abolition of preference shares. First, as the separation...