Corporate governance has time and again been the subject of extensive scrutiny and controversy. Much of the debate of the 1960s and 1970s focused on the managerial corporation in the USA and the UK, inspired by the seminal work of Berle and Means (1932). The separation of ownership from control...

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four...

This paper presents empirical evidence about the ability of event studies to capture mergers' ex-post profitability as measured by accounting data. We use a sample of large horizontal concentrations during the period 1990-2002 involving 482 firms either as merging firms or competitors, and...

Many studies of the determinants of investment use Tobin’s T to control for the investment opportunities of a firm. Tobin’s T roughly measures the average return on a firm’s capital anticipated by the market. More relevant for investment decisions, however, is the marginal return on...

Based on a database of 326 merger cases scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and 2007, we evaluate the economic impact of the change in Euro-pean merger legislation in 2004. We first propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness, which is based on standard...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the German corporate governance ratingrecently developed by Drobetz, Schillhofer, and Zimmermann (2004). We find anon- linear relationship between ownership concentration and the quality of firmlevelcorporate governance as measured by the rating. Firms...

We identify the ultimate ownership structures of the 20 largest firms in 12 transition countries in 1996, and the subsequent patterns of ownership change over 1996-2008. Of the state-controlled companies in 1996 more than half are still in state hands in 2008. Better quality of governmental...

This article investigates the determinants of subsidiaries’ profitability using a unique dataset of more than 23,000 listed and unlisted subsidiaries worldwide over the period 1994–2005. We find that profitable parent companies are able to transfer some of the intangible assets that make...