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...

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...