Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain
利用手工收集的所有权数据集，发现维多利亚时代英国公司绩效的关键不在于所有权结构本身，而在于家族大股东是否发挥治理作用；积极的大股东能提升经营绩效，而独立董事则更可能增加股东价值。
Scholars have long debated whether ownership matters for firm performance. The standard view regarding Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on performance. In this article, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial expropriation. Contrastingly, we find that directors who were independent of large owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.