Large shareholders are a potentially very important element of firms’ corporate governance system. Whereas analytical research is typically vague on who these large shareholders are, in practice there are important variations in the types of large owners (and the different types of large owners could play very different governance roles). After briefly reviewing the standard agency cost argumen...

This paper considers the role of ownership form for the financial performance of German acute care hospitals and its development over time. We measure financial performance by a hospital-specific yearly probability of default (PD). Using a panel of hospital data, our models allow for state dependence in the PD as well as unobserved individual heterogeneity. We find that private ownership is mor...

This paper studies the cycles of nationalization and privatization in resource-rich economies as a prime instance of unstable institutional reform. We discuss available evidence on the drivers and consequences of privatization and nationalization, reviewing the existing literature and presenting illustrative case studies. This leads to the main contribution of the paper: a static and dynamic mo...

This study aims to answer to three different questions. First, whether we could observe the short-term abnormal return anomaly or the long-term underperformance in the IPOs of a small economy. Second, if these anomalies exist, whether they are distinct when ownership categories (private versus state owned) are compared. And third, if these categories show different patterns, i. e., whether priv...

We investigate the dramatic transformation of ownership policies and ownership structure in Sweden during the postwar period. After WWII, Swedish ownership policies were guided by a socialist vision where the ultimate goal was abolition of private ownership. These policies came to an end in the early 1980s. Since then a large number of Swedish firms have been acquired by foreign owners or merge...

To understand the transformation of banking in the post-communist transition, this paper examines the cost efficiency of 289 banks in 15 east European countries. The findings showed that banking systems in which foreign-owned banks have a larger share of total assets record lower costs and that the association between a country’s progress in banking reform and cost efficiency is non-linear. Ear...

Private landowners increasingly are asked to cooperate with landscape-level management to protect or enhance ecological resources. We examine the willingness of nonindustrial private forest owners in the Pacific Northwest (USA) to forego harvesting within riparian areas to improve riparian habitat. An empirical model is developed describing owners’ willingness to accept an economic incentive to...

This paper examines the determinants of wage pressure in large companies, including ownership characteristics and the impact of regional labour markets. By using a panel of 329 Polish largest firms during the period 19972001, we find evidence of rent sharing activities, however there is also asymmetry in quasi rent elasticity of wages. The wage setting mechanism seems to differ between new priv...

I study the large premium (82 percent) attributed to voting shares on the Milan Stock Exchange. The premium varies according to the ownership structare and the concentration of the voting rights, and it can be rationalized in the presence of enormous private benefits of control. A case study seems to indicate that in Italy private benefits of control can easily be worth more than 60 percent of ...

We investigate the dramatic transformation of ownership policies and ownership structure in Sweden during the postwar period. After WWII, Swedish ownership policies were guided by a socialist vision where the ultimate goal was abolition of private ownership. These policies came to an end in the early 1980s. Since then a large number of Swedish firms have been acquired by foreign owners or merge...