We investigate the value of stable ownership for a large sample of European firms from 2005 to 2010, using the global financial crisis as an exogenous shock and using pre-and post-crisis periods as benchmarks. Controlling for ownership concentration, we find that stable blockholder ownership...

Société Générale de Belgique was the world's first universal bank. It pioneered another innovation: investing in non-listed equity. We use hand-collected data to show that the bank earned significant positive risk-adjusted returns from 1850 to 1934. This offset its flat return on the listed...

We re-examine dividend growth and return predictability evidence using 165 years of data from the Brussels Stock Exchange. The conventional wisdom holds that time-varying dividend yield is predominately explained by changes in expected returns and that expected dividend growth is only weakly...