This paper studies the short- and long-run announcement effects of declaring compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code (‘the Code’). We examine a unique, hand-collected data set of 317 German listed firms from 2002-2005. First, we present evidence from an analysis of firms’...

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...

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...